LUCIUS READ HOUSE
Historic Site — 101 W. Blackhawk, Alton, Ogle County, Illinois
Status: Operating · Access: Open to public
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/lucius-read-house-illinois/

NPS-listed historic site associated with the Underground Railroad.

A historic site in Alton, Illinois, a National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom listing, Lucius Read House is filed here for what the record attaches to it. NPS-listed historic site associated with the Underground Railroad. HauntHunt files it with dark history, Underground Railroad history and the Underground Railroad. The dossier holds 3 documented facts — a documented spine with no haunting reports attached. The site is open to visitors.

The Lucius Read House is the last of Byron's three stations. Lucius Read came from Vermont to the Illinois frontier in 1836, and his brother-in-law Pardon Kimball built the brick house about 1843 — one of the oldest in the town then called Bloomingville. The Reads were Congregationalists in a congregation where the pastor and most members were abolitionists; in a strongly antislavery town, the house became one of three safe houses, alongside the Dresser and Tanner barns, that hid freedom seekers moving north.
The house's details survive in the family account — Lucius's daughter Lydia Read Artz, later publisher of the Byron Express, wrote in 1900 of the hidden stairwells and secret doors, the basement where fugitives were given food and fresh clothes, the wagons with false bottoms that carried them to the next station. She remembered the last wagon: a dark night in 1862 when the final load of hidden passengers reached their door — the year the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, the traffic ending with the war that ended the law.
The other two stations are gone — the Read House is the only one standing, now the Byron Museum of History, where the Underground Railroad exhibit includes the replica of the lamp set in a safe-house window and the box children can climb into to understand Henry 'Box' Brown's escape.
The Read House is the archive's last-station file — the brick house with hidden stairwells and a documented last wagon, the sole survivor of the three safe houses that made Byron a stop on the routes to Wisconsin and Chicago.

WHY THIS FILE MATTERS
The Lucius Read House is the archive's sole-survivor file — the Byron safe house whose own daughter documented its secret doors and false-bottomed wagons, the last of three stations standing in a town that hid fugitives through 1862.
A station remembered by its owner's daughter keeps its doors — the file's suggestion being that the Read House's hold is Lydia's account: the hidden stairwells described by the newspaper publisher who grew up in the house, in the town where the last wagon came on a dark night in 1862.

HISTORY — 3 documented facts
· NPS includes this site in the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. A documented site gives the file real substance; this entry is part of that record. The fact is historically verified — the part of the file that doesn't need hedging. 'Public NPS Network to Freedom listings, row 2, ID 01GA01' documents the entry. The detail belongs to the verified spine of the entry.
· Lucius Read House is documented on the National Park Service Network to Freedom for its role in the Underground Railroad. The site's documented history is the record the rest of the file stands on. It's verified history: the dossier's load-bearing detail. The record appears in 'NPS Network to Freedom listing'. The detail belongs to the verified spine of the entry.
· The house’s UGRR role is documented. Lucius Read House's past is on record — the entry belongs to the verified layer the museum itself interprets. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. The detail is preserved in 'NPS Network to Freedom listing'. It's the sort of fact that gives the haunting reports their context.

SOURCES — 3 cited
· Public NPS Network to Freedom listings, row 2, ID 01GA01 — National Park Service
  https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/sortable_dataset/undergroundrailroad/F0E29766-00A1-12E5-C3D062151C3F7E26/nri-NTFListings6426NOPIItable.csv?t=1784017173223
· NPS Network to Freedom listing — National Park Service
  https://www.nps.gov/subjects/ugrr/index.htm
· Underground Railroad — Wikipedia
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad

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