Chicago’s new African American Heritage Water Trail
Chicago’s new African American Heritage Water Trail
Chicago’s new African American Heritage Water Trail
Standing before the Little Calumet River on Chicago’s South Side, a neighborhood teeming with black life, art and culture, a dose of weightiness overwhelms the body. Black people are intrinsically linked to the water, born into this earthly plane with a deeply spiritual reverence for her mystic power. She’s the Oshun: the river goddess draped in her yellow Yoruban garb, creating the very existence of humankind with her sweet and fertile waters. She’s the watchful mother of the diaspora, comforting the innumerable souls who chose freedom in her arms by jumping overboard from ships to avoid the unknowns of the transatlantic slave trade. She’s the glistening light of the night, reflecting heaven’s constellations to guide freedom seekers north on the Underground Railroad.
Here, standing on the shore of the placid waterway behind a housing project named Altgeld Gardens, there’s a piece of this lineage wrapped in the Little Calumet River.
This somewhat overlooked body of water is one of the reasons Chicago exists. Few people realize that Lake Michigan is connected to the Mississippi River by a series of waterways, including the Little Calumet River. Measuring 109 miles and passing through several South Side Chicago neighborhoods, the Little Calumet connected the East, West and South in ways that allowed for the flow of information, goods and people in the 1800s, spurring the city’s development. And, unknown even to most Chicagoans, it also helped funnel hundreds of black people north to freedom as part of the Underground Railroad.
Now, a new initiative from the Chicago-based nature conservancy Openlands called the African American Heritage Water Trail is hoping to highlight the river’s little-known past and its role in helping to shape 180 years of African American history.
On a hot August morning, Tiffany Watkins, her two daughters and about a dozen others buckled into lifejackets, lowered themselves into canoes and set off on the trail from the Beaubien Woods Boat Ramp. After paddling west along the Little Calumet for 15 minutes, everyone pulled over to gather around their first stop at Chicago’s Finest Marina. There, they listened to historian Larry McClellan explain part of the river’s history as a gateway for black freedom seekers prior to the Civil War.
“We are sitting right at the location of the Ton farm,” McClellan said, explaining that the farm’s owners, Jan and Aagje Ton, were two Dutch-born abolitionists who secretly housed freedom seekers in their home in the 1850s. “The National Park Service has now recognized this as a site of national significance for the Underground Railroad.”
Though slavery was abolished in Illinois in 1865, the state served as an important center for freedom seekers, newly freed black people and abolitionists well beforehand. By 1847, Chicago already had a community of black people who had organized Quinn Chapel, an African Methodist Episcopalian church located in what is now downtown Chicago that became an Underground Railroad stop and a center for abolition efforts for the area. In 1853, however, Illinois enacted one of the harshest and most discriminatory laws passed by a Northern state before the Civil War. Known as the Black Laws, it prohibited any out-of-state black person from staying in Illinois for more than 10 days, with violators subject to arrest or return to their former slave-holding state.
As McClellan explained, since the Little Calumet River flowed north from the Mississippi River Valley and its nearby roadways led to Detroit and eventually Canada, it served as an important highway along the Underground Railroad.
Watkins and her two daughters couldn’t believe it. They were raised on the South Side of Chicago, not too far away from where they sat in their canoes, and they’d never known that there was this piece of the Underground Railroad on their side of the city. Watkins’ husband even grew up in Altgeld Gardens, an affordable housing community built in the 1940s for returning black military veterans, and she’d never heard him talk about the historical significance of the waters in his own backyard.
As a mother and an educator for Chicago Public Schools, Watkins said she was always looking for ways to teach new things to her kids. While paddling through the Little Calumet River, she said she felt honored to be in the same place where distant black ancestors from the diaspora had traveled and risked their lives for freedom.
“I love that term, ‘freedom seekers’, because it gives a different connotation to the people who came before us,” she said. “Had they not sought freedom, who knows where we would have been to this day. So, I’m grateful for them.”
One of Watkins’ daughters, Tia, felt the same way. “It was just a surreal moment,” she said. “I think I just started imagining what they went through and how they felt. Because, in our eyes, we’re just on a canoeing trip, but this is real for them.”
Chicago’s new African American Heritage Water Trail
The Watkins’ newfound connection to the Little Calumet River is the type of reaction that Openlands is hoping to elicit with the new trail. The 29-stop, seven-mile route leads participants through several South Side communities and suburbs along the river. At each stop, paddlers learn about an important moment in black Chicago history.
According to Laura Barghusen, Openlands’ aquatic ecologist, the idea for the trail started back in the 1990s. Barghusen co-authored a plan offering public access for canoeing and kayaking to 10 different waterways in the Chicago region. The Northeast Illinois Planning Commission adopted the plan in 1999, and Openlands began exploring the Calumet River region, which seemed underused.
“We started thinking about how to offer guided trips or cleanups, events that people could join without having a boat,” Barghusen said. “We also started thinking about other ways to attract people to the waterways.”
This led to planning sessions with area historians and community members in 2018. Organizers soon realized that the Little Calumet not only served as an unsung part of the Underground Railroad, but also provided the backdrop for many significant African American historical achievements years afterward.
Barghusen acknowledges that many black people in the area may not have access to boats, canoes and kayaks, but with time and funding, she envisions having a nearby boat-rental source for the neighborhood, and training opportunities so people in the community could lead their own guided tours, too.
“The idea is that it would actually be something that would be of benefit to the communities, both in terms of getting out on the water and also for themselves economically,” she said.
Chicago’s new African American Heritage Water Trail
The Watkins’ newfound connection to the Little Calumet River is the type of reaction that Openlands is hoping to elicit with the new trail. The 29-stop, seven-mile route leads participants through several South Side communities and suburbs along the river. At each stop, paddlers learn about an important moment in black Chicago history.
According to Laura Barghusen, Openlands’ aquatic ecologist, the idea for the trail started back in the 1990s. Barghusen co-authored a plan offering public access for canoeing and kayaking to 10 different waterways in the Chicago region. The Northeast Illinois Planning Commission adopted the plan in 1999, and Openlands began exploring the Calumet River region, which seemed underused.
“We started thinking about how to offer guided trips or cleanups, events that people could join without having a boat,” Barghusen said. “We also started thinking about other ways to attract people to the waterways.”
This led to planning sessions with area historians and community members in 2018. Organizers soon realized that the Little Calumet not only served as an unsung part of the Underground Railroad, but also provided the backdrop for many significant African American historical achievements years afterward.
Barghusen acknowledges that many black people in the area may not have access to boats, canoes and kayaks, but with time and funding, she envisions having a nearby boat-rental source for the neighborhood, and training opportunities so people in the community could lead their own guided tours, too.
“The idea is that it would actually be something that would be of benefit to the communities, both in terms of getting out on the water and also for themselves economically,” she said.
