The wealthy Presbyterians who founded Lake Forest—college and town—in the 1850s were staunch abolitionists. Legend has it that these lumber and merchant barons were important links in the Underground Railroad, moving escaped slaves through Illinois on their way to Canada. Sylvester Lind, for example, told a reporter long after the fact that he had smuggled runaways on his lumber-bearing lake steamers. When the steamers stopped at a Door County island to take on wood, the refugees would transfer to another boat, one that took them near enough to the Canadian border to jump to safety. There were black families living in Lake Forest at the time of the Civil War. They worked in the great houses and their children attended the public school, where their teacher was Roxanna Beecher, a niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Some of them lived on the estates; others began to develop their own neighborhoods on what were then the fringes of the town–especially the area west of the railroad tracks.
