Site’s link to history recognized
Early settlers in the region that became the Southland played an important role in helping blacks escape slavery in the years before the Civil War.
“So few people know that history,” local activist and historian Tom Shepherd said. “Folks that live right there don’t know the history in their own backyard.”
The area’s role as a link in the Underground Railroad is about to get a major boost, however. Community members on Sunday will celebrate the addition of the Jan and Aagje Ton Farm site to the Network to Freedom registry maintained by the National Park Service.
“The National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom commemorates the stories of the men and women who risked everything for freedom and those who helped them,” according to the National Park Service.
Congress acted to create the Network to Freedom in 1998. As of July, the network consisted of 626 sites, programs and facilities in 40 states, Washington, D.C. and the U.S. Virgin Islands, according to the park service.
“Historic places, educational or interpretive programs and research facilities associated with the Underground Railroad will become part of a network, eligible to use or display a uniform network logo, receive technical assistance and participate in program workshops,” according to the park service.
The Ton Farm site is the 25th addition to the Network to Freedom registry in Illinois, and only the second in Chicago. The network includes Quinn Chapel AME Church — Chicago’s oldest black congregation — Crete Congregational Church and the Illinois & Michigan Canal Headquarters in Lockport.
As the issue of slavery divided the nation, abolitionists aided blacks who fled plantations in southern states. Often, bounty hunters tracked escaped slaves north to Chicago as many blacks secretly crossed into Canada near Detroit.
About 4,000 freedomseekers traveled through the Southland en route to Canada in the middle of the 19th century, according to local historians.
Ton Farm was located on the north bank of the Little Calumet River, near present-day Indiana Avenue and 134th Street in Chicago’s Riverdale neighborhood. Today, the site is a privately owned marina.
Jan Ton and his wife, Aagje, were Dutch settlers who arrived in the area from Holland in 1849 and settled on their 40-acre farm in 1853. They helped establish the First Reformed Church of South Holland, a congregation located about 2 miles south of their farm.
Larry McClellan, a historian and founding professor at Governors State University, has researched and written extensively about the Ton family and other area Underground Railroad supporters.
“He did a lot of work on the application” to add the Ton Farm site to the national registry, Shepherd said.
McClellan led a group in July that visited the Ton Farm site and other historic points of interest in the Calumet region. He described how some freedomseekers arrived at Ton Farm by train, having been hidden by a Pullman porter sympathetic to their cause.
Others arrived by horsedrawn wagon, hidden under hay or sacks of corn. Some walked to freedom for hundreds of miles. Jan Ton would take them by wagon about halfway across northern Indiana, to the next stop along the Underground Railroad.
McClellan is scheduled to be one of the speakers when the registry listing is celebrated at 4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 29, at the Historic Pullman Visitor Center, 11141 S. Cottage Grove Ave., Chicago. The public is invited.
The event celebrating the addition of the Ton Farm site is co-hosted by The Little Calumet River Underground Railroad Project, National Park Service and the Historic Pullman Foundation and is supported by Calumet Heritage Partnership.
U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Chicago, is scheduled to deliver a keynote address.
“Ton Farm ... is a place that tells the story of an important but dark chapter in American history,” Kelly said in a statement in response to an inquiry. “In choosing to risk it all to assist those escaping to freedom, the Ton family showed remarkable courage that speaks to us across time.
“In preserving and celebrating this place, we remind ourselves how far we’ve come but also how far we still have to go to ensure a truly equal, fair and just society and nation,” Kelly said.
Others scheduled to speak are Diane Banta, who recently retired from the National Park Service; “Underground Railroad in Illinois” author Glennette Tilly Turner; and retired police officer Ronald Gaines, owner of Chicago’s Finest Marina and landowner of the site where Ton Farm was located.
There is barely a trace of the Ton Farm left on the site of the marina. When a group visited in July, Gaines unlocked a gate and allowed McClellan and Shepherd to show people where a Victorian farmhouse, barn and other buildings once stood.
They pointed to a large piece of steel half-buried in a field at the marina and said it may have been a barn door at the Ton Farm.
The Ton family has been recognized and memorialized in other ways. In 2011, the Jan and Aagje Ton Memorial Garden was dedicated at the First Reformed Church of South Holland. The garden features a granite monument and plaque about the Ton family.
LeRone Branch led the effort to create the garden as an Eagle Scout project. The South Holland Historical Society and Boy Scouts of America Troop 408 erected the historical marker at the site.
“We honor all those who demonstrated the spirit and courage to take a stand against the injustice of slavery,” the inscription on the Ton memorial marker states, in part.