Owen Lovejoy House

Owen Lovejoy's house has a hiding place, and Lovejoy never hid. The Princeton farmhouse — built 1835-38 on the Peru road — held a concealed compartment for the fugitives its owner sheltered, while the owner himself announced the sheltering from the floor of Congress. 'I aid every fugitive that comes to my door and asks it,' he declared in the 1859 speech that made national headlines. 'Proclaim it then from the housetops. Write it on every leaf that trembles in the forest.' He had been arrested for it in 1843; he kept doing it.

He was Elijah Lovejoy's brother — the younger Lovejoy who watched a proslavery mob murder his brother over an Alton printing press in 1837 and answered by spending the rest of his life finishing the work. He moved to Princeton, pastored a church whose members left over his abolitionism, organized the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society's work, helped found the Republican Party with Lincoln in 1854, and went to Congress as a Radical Republican — the archetype of the movement that won the war.

He lived just long enough — dying in 1864, a year after hearing the Emancipation Proclamation read in the Congress where he'd spent the decade fighting for it. His friend Lincoln freed the slaves; the brother of the martyr saw the martyrdom answered.

The Lovejoy House is the archive's housetops file — the Princeton farmhouse with the hidden compartment whose owner proclaimed his lawbreaking from Congress, the home of the abolitionist who turned his brother's murder into the Republican Party's founding cause.