Underground Railroad in Fayette

By Editor | September 12, 2018 |

On Aug. 26, representatives of Illinois Humanities produced a radio podcast program from the House of Representatives chamber at the Vandalia Statehouse in celebration of Illinois’ 200th birthday.

Paul Durica, producer of the program, selected the topics for the Vandalia program and asked three people with knowledge of each to participate.
In addition to musical interludes and readings, Paul provided the commentary for the broadcast.
Mary Truitt was asked to talk about the National Road, Dale Timmermann to discuss the versions of the name of Vandalia, and this writer was asked to talk about local activity of the Underground Railroad.
The known history of the Underground Railroad in Vandalia centers around one man, Jonathan Ward, a man of color.
Proof of his activity came from charges brought against him for harboring two fugitives, Peter and Cherry. When the complainant did not show up, the charges were dropped.
A second man known to be involved in the Underground Railroad was John Roye, who started the first school for former slaves in Terre Haute, Ind.
Roye died in Vandalia in 1829, leaving land in the Military District to a former slave, Phoebe Hudley. His other property was left to his only son, Edward Roye, later on the Supreme Court of Liberia and the seventh president of that nation.
The Underground Railroad was shrouded in secrecy, and to whom Ward or Roye delivered their “cargo” is unknown. Jonathan Ward was an active conductor from 1824 through the time of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
This past week, a phone call from Milton, Wis., brought completely new evidence of the Underground Railroad in Fayette County.
In 2017, a discovery was made that would connect Milton, in Rock County, Wis. to Farina in LaClede Township. That discovery was a scrap of paper on which Andrew Pratt, a former slave, told of his escape to Milton with the aid of William Anson Goodrich.
Pratt, who described himself as “self-emancipated,” was born in Arkansas and gives May 1861 as the month and year he left bondage. How and where he met William Anson Goodrich is not known.
What is known is that Goodrich, a native of Berkshire County, Mass., and connected with the Seventh Day Baptist Church, purchased 40 acres of land in Fayette County in 1861.
This land, located in section 30 of LaClede, was entered on Jan. 18, 1861, and was purchased from the railroad. William’s wife, Rebecca (nee Crandall) and their daughters followed him in October of that year.
Prior to this he had been living in Milton, near his brother, Joseph, a known abolitionist. Joseph had settled in Milton in 1837 and built the Milton Inn at the intersection of two main trade routes.
Andrew Pratt, who was born in about 1838, in a paper written for him, told that he was brought to Milton by William Goodrich.
It has been found that a 40-foot tunnel led from the Milton Inn to the cabin of Joseph.
Now the home of the Milton Historical Society and on the National Register of Historic Places, the Milton Inn is a poured grout structure, believed to be one of the first, if not the first, built in the United States.
In 1863, Andrew had someone write for him a letter to the governor asking to join the ranks of Wisconsin volunteers.
In his letter, he said that even though he had been raised in bondage, he still counted as a man. No record has been found that he served.
Andrew Pratt lived in Milton for several years before moving with members of a Seventh Day Baptist congregation to Alden in Freeborn County, Minn. He is living there in 1870, and two years later was married to Christina Anderson, a native of Denmark.
By 1880, Andrew and his wife had moved to Wells, Faribault, Minn., where Andrew tells that his father was born in France and his mother in Arkansas.
He was employed as a barber, and two daughters, Mary and Laura, had been born to the couple. A son, Charles A., would follow.
At some point in time, Joseph Goodrich’s son, Ezra, wrote an essay that included a story about Andrew Pratt. Ezra had sponsored Andrew to join a local Milton lodge, and he wrote that where the lodge members did not believe in slavery, they did not believe in equality either.
He also mentioned a time that Andrew was arrested and William Anson Goodrich paid the fine.
When and where this happened was one of the reasons for the telephone call.
Could this have happened in Fayette County?
Are there other hints that William Goodrich and other members of the Seventh Day Baptist Church assisted locally in the Underground Railroad?
William is said to have kept a diary or daybook, and members of the Milton Historical Society are in search of this valuable keepsake.
William Goodrich died in Farina on Sept. 2,1866, from a wound he received after falling from his horse. His stone is in Farina Cemetery.
Andrew Pratt died in 1893 in Minnesota, and if not for the scrap of paper, we would not know of this activity of the Underground Railroad in Fayette County.