Hitchcock House

Rev. George Hitchcock built his station out of stone he quarried himself — the two-story sandstone house on the hill above the East Nishnabotna in Lewis, Iowa, raised in 1856 on twenty-one-inch walls. The Congregational missionary had come west in 1853 with Caroline and their children, lived three years in a log cabin that served as church and station both, then built the stone house between two major trails and their river crossings — sited, as the landmark nomination notes, in an ideal position for travelers to find it and for its occupants to work the Underground Railroad.

The record of its use comes from the conductors themselves — Deacon Adams's 1903 account describes making the way 'stealthily' northeast and taking breakfast with the Hitchcocks on July 6, 1854, on the route that ran through Mills and Cass counties. Hitchcock preached abolition from the pulpit of the church he'd founded and practiced it in the basement of the house he'd built — the minister whose great work, as he wrote, was fighting slavery.

The house is a National Historic Landmark and Network to Freedom site — the sandstone house on the hill in the conservation board's park, restored to the 1856–65 period when the Hitchcocks lived and harbored there. The walls are thick enough to keep secrets; the documentation says they did.

The Hitchcock House is the archive's circuit-rider file — the minister who quarried his own sandstone and built his station between the trails, the house where a conductor's diary confirms fugitives were fed and hidden on the road north.