NEAR SOUTH SIDE — At 180 years old, Quinn Chapel A.M.E. has been around for nearly all of Chicago’s modern history.
It formed as a seven-person prayer band in 1844, worshiping inside the homes of its members and an old schoolhouse in the Loop. They organized under the African Methodist Episcopal Church a few years later and began meeting at what is now the Monadnock Building on Jackson Boulevard.
Damaged in the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 and rebuilt in Near South Side, the church has hosted luminaries from Frederick Douglass to Dr. Martin Luther King and Barack Obama, and served as the filming site for several television shows and movies.
Quinn Chapel also led to the founding of Bethel A.M.E., another prominent church for Black Chicagoans with a storied past, as well local institutions Provident Hospital, the Elam House and the Wabash Avenue YMCA.
But one of the church’s most important contributions to history is also one of its first: serving as a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Not long after its founding, Quinn’s small group of congregants, many of whom were former slaves and abolitionists, rallied to help enslaved people traveling to Northern cities or Canada via an Underground Railroad route from Chicago to Detroit, according to the Chicago Public Library.
They stepped up their efforts after Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which said those believed to be escaping enslavement would be returned to their “owners” if arrested, even if they were found in a free state with papers confirming they were free people.
“We will stand by our liberty at the expense of our lives, and will not consent to be taken into slavery or permit our brethren to be taken,” congregants declared, according to the National Register of Historic Places.
Nearly two centuries later, now operating from its longtime home at 2401 S. Wabash Ave., leaders and congregants are still working to preserve the church’s rich history.
The church is collaborating with preservationists and historians to get the National Park Service to recognize the Chicago To Detroit Freedom Trail, a recreation of the Underground Railroad route.
The modern-day trail would spotlight Quinn Chapel and Olivet Baptist Church in Douglas, another historic Black church that also served as a stop.
“It runs through our blood,” said Pastor Troy K. Venning, who has served in his role since 2019. “It kind of is who we are. There is no Quinn Chapel without the conversation about the Underground Railroad, because at our roots, our founders were settled on making sure that Black and Brown people were OK, making sure the folks who sought freedom were able to.”
Church leaders also are working to restore the aging building, with plans to build a museum in the basement for an onsite archive of its history and contributions to the Underground Railroad.
“Even to this day, we still have migrants who show up and ask for resources and where to go, and how to connect to their next stop or next opportunity,” said church steward and chief layperson Will Miller. “So, this is a physical place, a welcoming space where we help those who may not have resources connect with those who do, feel safe, secure, fed, housed. All of that.”
The Big Four
Like many Black churches across the country, Quinn Chapel was part of the secret network of locations where enslaved people, or freedom seekers, could safely travel as they headed north from southern slave states.
Free Blacks and white abolitionists often provided food, clothing, shelter in hidden locations and sometimes small amounts of money to those seeking freedom in the North.
In Illinois, freedom seekers traveled north along several routes, sometimes called freedom trails, many of which originated in towns bordering the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. There were routes with stops in Princeton, Quincy, Jacksonville, Alton, Oakland, and Chicago and its western suburbs.
Around 3,000 to 4,500 freedom seekers came to and through the Chicago area prior to the Civil War, said Larry McClellan, a historian and retired professor who has researched the Underground Railroad for decades. Nearly all continued on toward Detroit and Canada, he said.
Those routes were necessary even in Illinois, which was a free state.
Freedom seekers coming from states like Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee often could build successful lives in cities like Chicago by opening businesses or offering their professional services to those willing to pay, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago.
But laws still heavily restricted Black people’s movement and denied them basic freedoms, according to the Enjoy Illinois website.
There is no Quinn Chapel without the conversation about the Underground Railroad.”
Pastor Troy K. Venning
The Fugitive Slave Act made it increasingly unsafe for those fleeing slavery to stay in the United States, McClellan said. Most freedom seekers who made it to Chicago would continue to Canada, where they were less likely to be targeted by slave catchers, McClellan said.
The work Quinn Chapel members did to help freedom seekers dates back to the church’s earliest years, when the congregation met in the heart of the Loop.
“The Daughters of Zion,” a group of churchwomen dedicated to social reform, was one of the first church groups formed to address the needs of freedom seekers looking for safe passage, according to a nearly 100-page document created for a church anniversary celebration in 1967.
“Through the tireless work of [the Daughters of Zion], Quinn became one of the most effective welfare stations in the underground movement,” the document details. In addition to providing food and clean clothing, the group prayed for freedom seekers who temporarily came to be in their care and addressed any sickness or injuries.
Later, a group of four women known as “The Big Four” served as the conductors on the church’s Underground Railroad stop, according to Chicago Public Library archives. “The Big Four” provided shelter, food, clothing and safe modes of transportation such as walking routes, buggies or freight wagons, McClellan said.
They were assisted by white abolitionists in the neighborhood who were also members of the church, he said.
“What’s really important to understand is that in the late 1840s, and certainly the 1850s, these Black families were really providing the leadership to respond to freedom seekers,” McClellan said. “From the very beginning, Christian congregations have been very important in Black communities, and that was certainly the case in Chicago.”
The identities of the “Big Four” aren’t known with certainty. In McClellan’s 2023 book “Onward to Chicago: Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad in Northeastern Illinois,” he theorizes that three of the four could have been Emma Atkinson, Joanna Hall and Mary Jones, Quinn Chapel members who were all active in the church’s community, McClellan said.
The historian pinpointed those three as the conductors because Atkinson and her husband were very active in the church community at the time, Hall was married to one of the church’s pastors, and Jones and her husband were said to have been de facto leaders in the area’s Black community in the 1850s, he said.
A fourth member of the “Big Four” has come up in records as someone called “Aunt Charlotte,” though not much is known about her, McClellan said.
“In the 1830s, and ‘40s, [Chicago] was seen as a sanctuary city, and we know that there were a number of folks who escaped their enslavement and came and decided to live in Chicago,” McClellan said. “Even though their past might catch up with them, they decided as people that had seized the freedom that they would stay in Chicago because Chicago was a pretty exciting, good place to live.”
Quinn Chapel continued to help freedom seekers via the Underground Railroad through the start of the Civil War in spring 1861, McClellan said. The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 brought anti-slavery organizing to the forefront of the war before the 13th Amendment abolished most forms of involuntary servitude in 1865.
‘We Endeavor To Live In Our Ancestors’ Footsteps’
Quinn and Olivet are part of a burgeoning effort launched in 2023 to establish a trail route replicating the journeys freedom seekers would have taken.
The Chicago To Detroit Freedom Trail, spearheaded by McClellan and volunteer Tom Shepherd, would partner with the National Park Service to feature programs at both churches.
The trail would start at the two churches, head south on Michigan Avenue through Bronzeville, across the Little Calumet River and around the bottom of Lake Michigan, according to a concept paper. It would include walking and bike tours, historical markers and other educational tourist spots through neighborhoods such as Washington Heights, Morgan Park, Roseland and Pullman, McClellan and Shepherd said.
The project stemmed from McClellan wanting to document exactly how freedom seekers made it from Chicago to Detroit and Canada, he said.
“We started talking to people along the route and realized that we could really identify a trail that follows the general route of the movement of people and that along that trail, there were many places we could identify where freedom seekers receive some kind of assistance,” McClellan said.
“So really, it was both to commemorate the journeys of freedom seekers from Chicago to freedom and also to commemorate the varieties of places along the way where they found help, what we traditionally call the Underground Railroad sites.”
McClellan is looking for people interested in contributing time and research to the project, he said. He hopes to have preliminary online programs available this fall and have the trail itself established over the next two years, McClellan said.
Quinn Chapel’s age is evident in the way its stairs creak and groan as Venning and Miller walk up them to reach the historic sanctuary where hundreds worship each Sunday.
“The stairwells are 131 years old,” Venning said on a recent tour. “They’re sturdy, but they lean a little bit. You would lean, too, if you were 131 years old.”
Beyond the striking Victorian Gothic exterior, the Wabash Avenue building still boasts its original stained glass, wood fixtures and pews. One pew was donated to the Smithsonian Institute National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2007. The building is a city landmark, it’s included on the National Register of Historic Places and has been given a Save America’s Treasures Designation from the National Park Service.
Quinn Chapel received $5 million in state funding for its restoration. Venning expects construction to begin soon and wrap up within three to four years, he said.
Church leaders will visit Mother Bethel A.M.E. in Philadelphia, the country’s oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church, to get inspiration from its museum on how to create an engaging experience for visitors, Venning said.
“We have to begin to craft a story and make sure what that looks like and how we tell the story and what the space will actually be like,” Venning said. “We’ll start to do our due diligence there and make sure that the nuts and bolts are where they need to be.”
Venning said it’s vital for church leaders to help bring Quinn Chapel A.M.E.’s story to a wider audience through McClellan’s Underground Railroad trail project.
“We endeavor to live in our ancestors’ footsteps. We want to be and continue to connect the haves and have-nots, and we want to be a place where liberation thrives,” Venning said.
“So we want to continue to do those kinds of things that will say we’re a lighthouse, that we continue to be a beacon of light for our people, that we have this multigenerational space that inspires people to live and to have joy and to be themselves.”
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