My name is Elena Gonzalez, and I am a senior here at Cornell College. My major is Creative Writing, with a minor in Studio Art. I am the President of the Craft Fair and involved in the Leads Program at Cornell College. I am the Secretary of Alliance, the LGBTQ group on campus. I am a work-study student for General Athletics as well as a student worker in the cafeteria. I am a general member of PAAC, the Performing Arts and Activities Council.
The event that I went to was the Local Underground Railroad. Peggy is from West Branch and is the presenter for the event. She went to give a talk about the Traveler’s Rest museum at the Methodist Church in Mount Vernon. She lives in the Traveler’s Rest house. She moved into the house back when her father fought in World War two. The Traveler’s Rest was one of the biggest safehouses for the Underground Railroad. She is one of the protectors of the house. It was bought by her grandfather, then her father inherited it and Peggy inherited the house from him. It was built in 1851. She is one of the protectors of the underground railroad. Peggy said that John Brown was a conductor and abolitionist of the Underground Railroad, and he helped with freeing the enslaved people to get to the promised land and live free and not enslaved by other people. It is called Traveler’s Rest Museum, and the caretaker is Peggy Harman, who moved here when her father fought in WWII. Underground Railroad museum.
In 1850, Iowa was a free state, so it was legal to free a slave in Iowa. Traveler’s Rest was a station that freed slaves using trains, the underground railroad, regular railroads, and wagons, driven by horses, and they had to cover the enslaved people with potato sacks to keep them from being spotted. The fugitive enslaved people had to obtain tickets to get onto trains for the Underground Railroad. The enslaved people wanted to go to the promised land, which was actually Canada at the time. There were safe houses located for people to stop and stay, and eat raw field corn. Fugitive enslaved people would stay here for hours up to a day at most at a time. There was a woman who owned one of the safe houses, and she would make sandwiches for the people who were enslaved. She would let them take the sandwiches with them to eat them as they traveled on the Underground Railroad. This was important for the enslaved people because they would not be able to survive on cold corn that was picked from the fields. They would need actual food to survive and be healthy, or else they would die from improper nutrition.
I thought the event was super cool. The thing that I liked most about it was that Peggy knew so much history about the Underground Railroad, and how she knew that the house was in the middle of Iowa, and Iowa is now considered the halfway point of the Underground Railroad’s travel path. I did learn a lot more about the Underground Railroad after this talk. I did not know anything about the Underground Railroad. I was supposed to learn about it in school, but we were never taught about the Underground Railroad because of COVID shutting down schools. Going to this talk connects with my plans for the future. When I graduate from college, I plan on becoming a journalist as well as a children’s author. I like to write about events that I go to and tell people about the things that I learned while I was at the event. Attending this event helped me practice and prepare for what I will experience in my future career as a journalist.
The event that I went to next was the Black Out Poetry with Lyrically Inclined. I learned new information from both events. For example, the information about the Underground Railroad. I didn’t initially know how intricate of a system it was to free enslaved people and how long it would be of a journey to get them to the “promise land”. As for the blackout poetry night, I didn’t know about the rules of poetry before I went to this event. At one point at the event, I started clapping, and some of the audience members I was with corrected me and said that it’s more polite to snap, but I didn’t know how to snap. I also learned that people saw I was more interested in their poems by snapping my fingers in the middle of them reading their poems.
Websites for the Underground Railroad:
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