Underground Railroad exhibit opens at History Museum on the Square

Published 4:00 pm Monday, June 1, 2026

QUINCY — A new exhibit at the History Museum on the Square highlights the Underground Railroad in Illinois.

The Looking for Lincoln traveling exhibit, Journey to Freedom: Illinois’ Underground Railroad, opens Tuesday and remains on display through Aug 1 during the museum’s operating hours, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

“We find the Underground Railroad so fascinating, but a lot of history out here on the frontier I’m sure wasn’t written down,” Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County Program Chairman Tim Jacobs said. “It’s a really good display.”

The exhibit sheds light on the Underground Railroad, which was designed to operate in secret.

“It was all word of mouth,” Jacobs said. “Fortunately after the Civil War, some recollections and memoirs were written.”

Visitors to the exhibit will learn more about the Illinois communities that were stops on the Underground Railroad and the freedom seekers like John and Eliza Little, who traveled barefoot from Tennessee through the state to Canada to gain their freedom, or conductors like Henry Brown and Mary Ann King Brown, who helped slaves to freedom in the Springfield, Quincy and Galena areas.

In conjunction with the exhibit, HSQAC will offer three free programs in June and July.

The first, slated for 2 p.m. Saturday in the museum’s main gallery, features award-winning folk musician Chris Vallillo.

Eleven of the gospel songs which drove the searching for freedom movement will be featured in Vallillo’s Songs of the Illinois Freedom Road concert along with first-person stories of freedom seekers who traveled the Underground Railroad.

Vallillo’s research for the program, which is partially funded by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, involved primary source documents such as the 1857 Slave Narratives of Canada and the Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives as well as recent scholarship.

Additional programs will take place June 28 with Culver-Stockton College Professor Emeritus Patrick Hotle discussing the Underground Railroad and the Eells House and July 19 with Sam Wheeler, the historian and director of history programs at the Illinois Supreme Court Historic Preservation Commission, discussing “The Presumption of Freedom, the Illinois Supreme Court and the Fate of Slavery in the Prairie State.”

“We have three very interesting programs coming up,” said HSQAC Museum and Collections Manager Nancy Benz, who had only seen photos of the exhibit ahead of its arrival. “I’m pretty excited to see what the whole scope of it is.”