WHEATON, Ill. — An entry buried in a 120-year-old manuscript has confirmed what local historians long have believed: Wheaton College was a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Officials said they knew the college was founded and led by abolitionists. But it was difficult to substantiate the claim that the school, called Illinois Institute at the time, was directly involved with the network of stops and routes that aided escaping slaves.
“We never had the hard evidence that strict historians want to see,” said David Malone, the college’s head of archives and special collections.
That changed earlier this year when Wheaton College history professor David Maas was doing research for a book.
Following a tip from a friend, Maas found an entry in an 1889 book about the 39th Regiment of the Illinois Volunteer Veteran Infantry that refers to Wheaton College as “an Abolition school in an Abolition town.”
That one-page entry was written by Ezra Cook, a Wheaton College student who eventually married one of the daughters of college founder Jonathan Blanchard.
In the book, a regimental history that includes remembrances from soldiers, Cook writes about attending Wheaton College at the outbreak of the war in 1861. At the time, Cook notes that runaway slaves were “perfectly safe” in the “College building.”
