Safe House on the Underground Railroad

(Rev. George B. Hitchcock House is built in the Federal Style. This means that the house has no formal front porch, however, the house has a wooden slab in front of the front door to make it easier for visitors to get into the house. The house is built with locally sourced sandstone, limestone, walnut and oak. It is a two-story home. There are five windows at the front of the house. Three on the second floor and two on either side of the front door. You can also see four windows, two on the second floor and two on the ground floor on the west side of the home. The windows are known as six-on-six windows since they have six squares of glass on the top part of the window and six squares of glass on the bottom part of the window. The house sits on a slight hill overlooking the property.)

[Abby Brown] Iowa was part of the Underground Railroad. Only a handful of locations still exist to demonstrate this history, including this one in Lewis, Iowa.

(Map marking Cass County in southwestern Iowa.)

Reverend George Hitchcock was a preacher who settled in Lewis, Iowa to start a church. He was also an abolitionist and a stonemason. He used his building skills and his creativity to help freedom seekers. Even though Iowa was always a free state, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made it illegal to help freedom seekers. So it was too risky for people like George Hitchcock to keep documentation on their efforts. But it's thought that Hitchcock built this secret room in the basement specifically to hide freedom seekers.

(To the left there is a white limestone fireplace. At the far corner, there’s a staircase. Straight ahead is a doorway leading into the second half of the basement.)

Bounty hunters were common and they could make a lot of money by capturing freedom seekers and returning them to slavery. It's important to remember that the Underground Railroad wasn't really a railroad and it wasn't underground either. The railroad was being built during this time in history and it fascinated people. So using the word railroad made talking about secret routes less suspicious.

For freedom seekers and those who helped them, the Underground Railroad was a network of stops, kind of like train stations. Since assisting the escape of freedom seekers was illegal, the stops were not talked about openly. So underground meant secret. Underground railroad.

The Hitchcock House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and has also been named a National Historic Landmark.

Every county in Iowa has mysteries to discover, even though we'll never know all the secrets of the Hitchcock House in Cass County.

Funding for FIND Iowa has been provided by The Coons Foundation, Pella and the Gilchrist Foundation.