Lucius Read House

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.