Editor's Note: Students enrolled in Western Illinois University Professor Greg Hall's Illinois history seminar during the Fall 2025 semester each wrote 700-word summaries of their research papers about McDonough County history, and Dr.
Hall generously provided these summaries to The Community News Brief. We will be publishing these over the next few months as part of McDonough County's Bicentennial celebration coverage. We greatly appreciate Dr. Hall and his students for contributing to our historical retrospectives.
In 1818, Illinois was admitted to the Union as a free state, but freedom was not promised to all who lived there.
Before the Civil War, Illinois enforced restrictive laws that were known as the Black Codes. These laws restricted Black people’s ownership of land, their movements, testimony, employment, and even residency. Somewhere within this complicated legal and moral environment, the Underground Railroad was developed as a secret system of resistance.
My research argues that the Underground Railroad in McDonough County shows how local morals would clash with the state law. Through a combination of moral conviction, religious influence, community trust, and geographic circumstances, the ordinary people in McDonough County helped enslaved people find their way to freedom.
Having an understanding of McDonough County’s role in the Underground Railroad requires knowing the broader contradictions of Illinois. Although Illinois was officially free, the state made laws that were very restrictive toward African Americans. These laws also made it very dangerous in assisting runaway slaves, but they exposed the moral hypocrisy of a free state that enforced systems of racial control. When McDonough County was officially organized and established in 1830, these laws were intensified.
McDonough County may not be the first place many people think of when they hear “Underground Railroad,' it is small in comparison to other population hubs, but its location made it an important route in the larger escape network. The county is located in west-central Illinois, and it is situated right between Missouri, which at the time was pro-slavery, and the northern parts of the state. The county became a quiet and convenient passageway for enslaved people fleeing slavery.
Despite the dangers of assisting runaway slaves, McDonough County had established quite the meaningful Underground Railroad system. The secrecy of this system was also very meaningful, much of what is known about it comes from oral accounts collected by D.N. Blazer in 1922.
These stories were told by Sarah Allison, who described how her family and the Blazer family were involved in the Underground Railroad. These families sheltered runaway slaves, they fed them, gave them clothing, and escorted them to the next safe house. Both of these families were everyday hard working people who felt that the injustices and suffering of enslaved people was morally wrong. These two families put their own lives and reputations on the line to help others in need. Their involvement shows just how ordinary people had become the most important piece in the Underground Railroad.
Compared to other major hubs like Chicago, McDonough County’s operations were small and effective. The Underground Railroad network within Chicago and surrounding areas was way more public, more organized, and more connected to the national abolitionist movements, there was also easy access to Lake Michigan to transport runaways to Canada. These were better advantages than what McDonough County had, but McDonough played just as much of a role by providing safe routes through the state.
The county’s involvement is just as significant because of the political climate of western Illinois at the time. Many of the settlers came from slaveholding states and brought along their slavery ideologies with them. The people of the county that chose to support runaway slaves in this context were seen as challenging not just the law, but also their neighbors.
McDonough County’s citizens made these personal risks to make their involvement much more meaningful.
In the end, the Underground Railroad in McDonough County highlights an important truth that the resistance to slavery was widespread across western Illinois, especially in the most rural areas. McDonough is an excellent example of the quieter kind of courage it took to take a stand against slavery. The history of the Underground Railroad in McDonough County shows that freedom was not granted, it was created through human action. Being able to research the underground railroad in this rural county, we understand how ordinary Americans shaped the history of abolition, not from the center of political power but from the edges.
