While the exhibit is hosted at the Old Lincoln Courtroom and Museum, there are numerous programs to expand the city’s Underground Railroad story in the community. Take advantage of the wonderful opportunities noted below.

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Exhibit Introduction

Friday, May 2, 2025, 7 PM
Old Lincoln Courtroom and Museum

Join us to visit the exhibit and hear about the Underground Railroad in Illinois. Heather Feezor, Program Manager for Looking for Lincoln, will share about the creation of the exhibit and more information about some of the individuals featured in the exhibit. Light refreshments will be served.

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Songs of the Illinois Freedom Road

Saturday, May 10, 2025, 7 PM
Grand Opera House 121 S State Street, Beardstown, IL 62618

Award winning folk musician and folklorist Chris Vallillo brings the music and the stories of the Underground Railroad in Illinois to life in this engaging and powerful show featuring first person accounts of Freedom Seekers as well as performances and insights into the music that drove this historic movement. “While traditional accounts of the underground railroad generally dismiss Illinois, our state had more miles bordering slave states than any other” said Vallillo “and those borders were rivers which made for excellent escape routes.

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The Early Underground Railroad in Western Illinois

Saturday, May 17, 2025, 7 PM
Old Lincoln Courtroom and Museum

This program is based on research done for the Quincy Underground Railroad Museum. The development of the Underground Railroad in Quincy serves as a case study in why and how the network developed in Illinois. The presentation will include a background on slavery and abolitionism in the area and how the anti-slavery movement radicalized. Through a PowerPoint presentation I will narrate the events and describe the key personalities from the 1830s to the mid 1840’s.

Patrick Hotle graduated from the University of Iowa. He then went to Cambridge University in England where he received an M.Phil and PhD in History. For the last thirty years Patrick has been the John Sperry Jr. Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Culver-Stockton College in Canton, Missouri. Here he taught courses in European and Middle Eastern history. Patrick retired and became an Emeritus Professor in May of 2023. Since then he has collaborated with Terrell Dempsey on a book about abolitionism and the Underground Railroad in western Illinois. The book will be published by the University of Missouri Press.

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A Son of Western Illinois’ Underground Railroad Conductor recalls his family history

Wednesday, May 21, 2025, 7 PM
Old Lincoln Courtroom and Museum

In this program the presenter offers a monologue in the person of David Blazer, the son of James Blazer, an Underground Railroad conductor in McDonough County. The monologue is adapted from an actual lecture that David Blazer gave to the McDonough County Historical Society in 1922. The adapted monologue omits some racist language that Blazer used in his lecture and provides some historical context that Blazer did not. In the monologue the presenter shares Blazer’s first-person anecdotes about the working of the Underground Railroad in Western Illinois, involving the Blazer family, another locally active UGRR family, the Allisons, and other individuals in the region, both white conductors and African American fugitives. Once the monologue concludes, the presenter will conduct a Q&A, with support of PowerPoint images, with the audience about the Underground Railroad’s national and local history. The topic is timely partly because in 2024 the Allison Family Homesite has been registered on the National Park Service’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom program.

Tim Roberts is a history professor at Western Illinois University in Macomb. He is a frequent lecturer on the Underground Railroad for Western Illinois University and adults in Western Illinois University’s continuing education programs. He holds a doctoral degree in American history from the University of Oxford. In 2023 Roberts provided historical research for the City of Macomb’s application to the National Park Service to register the Allison Family Homesite on the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. He has developed a website on his research, Traces of Western Illinois’ Underground Railroad, https://timroberts.org/wiugrr/