SOUTH BEND ? After retiring from a three-decade tenure at a university, Larry McLellan spent years gathering the stories of thousands of enslaved African Americans who, from the 1830s up to the Civil War, passed through the Chicagoland area on their way to freedom in Canada.
Those stories about the area’s ties to the Underground Railroad became a book, published this September, called “Onward to Chicago: Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad in Northeastern Illinois.”
Then McLellan and others began to ask: Where exactly did they go from Chicago?
That question brought him on Wednesday night to the St. Joseph County Public Library in downtown South Bend to discuss the city’s inclusion in a proposed Chicago to Detroit Freedom Trail, which McLellan hopes will one day be recognized as a National Historic Trail by the parks service.
But he expects the effort to take years and require the help of many volunteer researchers willing to excavate stories around local sites with potential links to the Underground Railroad — a network of enslaved African Americans and abolitionists who helped them to flee north.
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The Freedom Trail would begin with two historic African American churches in Chicago and run parallel to other documented roads freedom seekers took to Detroit, including the Chicago Road and the Sauk Trail. The route would pass through Gary, Michigan City and LaPorte before heading north to Cassopolis and Kalamazoo, then east to Detroit.