The Ten Mile Freedom House
Near Chicago Lake Michigan, Illinois
In the decades before the Civil War, enslaved people fleeing the South traveled a secret network of routes and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. A station called the Ten Mile Freedom House once stood near this site, providing shelter to freedom seekers moving through the Chicago region toward Canada and permanent liberty. The name is said to refer to its distance from the city, an intermediate stop on a journey measured in painful increments.
Illinois abolitionists ran considerable risk in maintaining such stations. The Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty made sheltering freedom seekers a federal crime punishable by heavy fines and imprisonment. The community that maintained this house chose conscience over legal safety.
This memorial marks where that courage stood.
