When Danielle Wukitsch and her family moved into their house in Campton Township in Kane County about eight years ago, they got to work making some repairs.
One room in particular — the kitchen — needed significant work. The beams holding up the room were rotten, and had to be replaced or the room was eventually going to give way underneath.
“We’re really lucky we found out in time,” Wukitsch, 48, said. “Or it wouldn’t be around right now.”
Later, the family learned why their kitchen needed so much work: The room that is now their kitchen dates back to around the 1840s, and those beams were the structure’s original beams.
More than that, that portion of their home was once the home of Joseph Bartlett, who is believed to have allowed numerous freedom seekers to take refuge there during the time of the Underground Railroad.
Now, Wukitsch’s home is the first site in Kane County to be verified as a designated safe house through a National Park Service initiative, the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, a program created in 1998 to show the history of resistance to enslavement. The Network to Freedom features a verified, ongoing list of Underground Railroad sites, facilities and programs in the United States.
Wukitsch told The Beacon-News recently that her family had “no idea” about the house’s history when they first moved in.
“We just thought, ‘What a charming, old house,’” she recalled.
But its full story has now come to light through efforts by Eric Krupa, the St. Charles History Museum’s collections manager, who began researching the site in 2024 and led efforts to get it officially verified.
It’s believed that the farm — when it was occupied by Joseph Bartlett and Julia “Ann” Bartlett — helped numerous freedom seekers, Krupa said. But one particularly well-documented story from history has been a central point in the home’s claim to fame as a safe house.
The story starts when two freedom seekers, Eliza and Celia Grayson, learned that they were going to be taken to St. Louis to be sold by their enslaver in Nebraska, Krupa told The Beacon-News recently. The two women then left in the middle of the night, and were ferried across the half-frozen Missouri River by a free Black man.
The women’s enslaver then brought together a mob of people, who crossed into Iowa in search of the two women, but didn’t find them, according to Krupa. The women ultimately moved onward, farther away from the state border, and eventually reached Illinois.
Krupa said it’s presumed that Celia Grayson ultimately made it to freedom in Canada, but Eliza Grayson stuck around in Chicago to work as a housekeeper.
Eliza Grayson was eventually turned over to a bounty hunter, who, along with her original enslaver, went to Chicago and captured her, apparently dragging her down Adams Street, Krupa said. A mob of abolitionists attempted to help her, and the police stepped in and came up with a plan to jail the enslaver and Eliza Grayson and then release her, according to Krupa’s historical research. The plan worked, and she was ultimately sent off to freedom in Canada.
But there was a missing link in the story, Krupa explained: How did the two women get all the way across Illinois to Chicago?
That’s where Bartlett comes in.
Krupa explained that Bartlett described in a local newspaper how the two women came to his home in 1859, and he housed them and ultimately took them on to another home in St. Charles, which then helped them get to Chicago.
Bartlett had been affiliated with the abolitionist movement during his time attending Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, Krupa explained. He became a teacher and farmer, and eventually settled in Kane County, where he was a local township supervisor and served in other local government roles. Bartlett also helped to establish the name Campton Township, according to Krupa.
The Graysons’ history is fairly well-known as far as freedom seekers’ stories, according to Krupa, but stories like theirs can now come together to be verified more easily in recent years, due to greater access with digital materials.
“Now, it’s just like trying to pick up these crumbs and piece it together,” he said.
Krupa knew about the site for some time, and ultimately learned of the federal program and decided to “(dive) into the rabbit hole” of researching the property in 2024.
The process for nominating a site for the National Park Service initiative is sort of like writing a research paper on its significance, he explained, which then has to go through a peer-review process. The site was formally accepted by the National Park Service in December, according to Barry Jurgensen, the Midwest regional manager for the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.
Now, it’s the county’s first safe house to be verified as part of the initiative, and only the second site in Kane County on the list — Newsome Park in Elgin was also designated by the National Park Service because it commemorates a community of freedom seekers dating back to 1862 who arrived by train in Elgin from Alabama.
That the structure is still standing also makes the Bartlett Farm site a “rarity” for historical resources dating back to the 1850s, Jurgensen said in an emailed response provided to The Beacon-News.
Krupa has since gotten involved with others around the state involved in similar efforts, and ultimately the Illinois Network to Freedom Collective took shape. The group — for which Krupa is a member of the steering committee — is a statewide collaboration of historians, experts, educators and community members.
The collective seeks to contribute to a statewide effort to get more sites in Illinois formally recognized for the roles they played in the Underground Railroad.
Last year, state lawmakers passed legislation creating the Illinois Freedom Trails Commission, meant to increase educational opportunities related to a portion of American history largely unknown to many and perhaps boost tourism centered on the journeys of freedom seekers through Illinois.
Krupa noted that getting sites designated could be quicker on the state level, but that those applications could then be turned into national ones over time.
“We’re on the cutting edge of something here,” Krupa said.
Krupa said he has other sites in the works to be submitted as part of the federal initiative, and said that the area is “very lucky” that so many historic homes in portions of Kane County remain standing.
In Wukitsch’s case, her family’s historic home, with the portion of it dating back to the time of the Underground Railroad, was “rough around the edges” when they first encountered it.
The family had lived in the area prior to taking up residence on the farm, but they weren’t seriously considering a move when they initially stumbled upon the property.
Wukitsch and her husband are the “type of couple who goes on realtor.com for fun,” she explained, and one day they saw the Bartlett Farm property and decided to go to an open house.
“I said to my husband, ‘Boy, what an ugly house. Let’s go look at it for fun,’” she recalled.
But after looking at it, they were sold.
She described the main building as “very quirky,” as it’s been added onto “like it’s a snake that just keeps going.” The kitchen is the portion that was the original farmhouse, and the rest was built later.
Wukitsch got involved in the designation process when Krupa reached out to her last summer, saying he had documentation proving that her house had been part of the Underground Railroad. Krupa handled the application, but Wukitsch provided some photos and gave permission to have the house become part of the initiative.
For Krupa, ironing out the details of this story is the sort of thing he dreamed of when he set out to work as a researcher in museums.
His interest in the Underground Railroad — and in Kane County’s part in it — started at an early age.
He said his grandmother was invested in the Civil Rights Movement, so he had long been interested in issues of equality. In third grade, Krupa’s teacher, while teaching about the Underground Railroad, said that the nearby Wheeler Farm in St. Charles was known for its role in the Underground Railroad.
“Growing up in this region, you always hear about, ‘This spot was allegedly a spot, this was another one,’” he said.
Krupa ultimately became interested in researching Underground Railroad sites in the area.
“I was just curious to, ever since I was a kid, to just see what the truth is behind that,” he said.
The house fulfilled a different dream for Wukitsch, who grew up on a corn and soybean farm in Iowa, taking care of hogs and horses.
“It kind of always hurt my soul that my kids were growing up in this suburban life, but they’d never done chores like I did growing up,” Wukitsch said.
But their move to the site of the old Bartlett Farm around eight years ago changed that. The family now has four goats, 25 chickens, several cats and dogs and guinea pigs, she explained.
Her daughter, 17, is even going to college to study animal science. Her son, 15, is “more of an urban person at heart.”
Even before they knew about the house’s past, Wukitsch said she and her husband thought about their place in its story as “one of a long string of people who were families that have lived here and kept it up and loved it and looked after it.”
And now, knowing what it once was, Wukitsch said those costly renovations feel more worthwhile.
“There’s been times we’ve wondered, like, ‘What are we doing?’” Wukitsch said of the renovations her house underwent. “And now, to know that we were helping keep something going that has historical significance makes us feel a little better about what we’ve done here.”
She hopes that, now, when the family one day sells the home and moves, this designation will mean that it “doesn’t get torn down, obliterated, swallowed up by the construction that is slowly creeping across our back field.”
Learning about her house’s backstory has taught her more about the nation’s history, too.
“I didn’t even understand before … that … men or women could be hunted, basically, across state lines,” she said. “I sort of had this naive belief that once you got out of a state that endorsed slavery, that you were free. But no. Whoever decided they owned you could send someone after you. I didn’t know that.”
She called it a “conflicting sort of feeling,” to live in a place that’s part of this history.
“It’s really cool, and also … heart-wrenching,” she said.
Wukitsch thinks about its history more now. She had originally thought the historic portion of the home was the middle portion of the house, until Krupa ultimately determined it was the kitchen, which had an impact on her, too.
“That’s where everyone gathers,” she said. “That’s where everyone makes dinner and talks about the day. So, it’s kind of cool that that place that was a protective spot for someone is also still the heart of a home for all these different families throughout the years.”
