Undergoroud Railroad Memorial
South Holland, Cook County, Illinois
Marker Inscription
This site is dedicated to Jan Ton family and his wife Aagje, Dutch immigrants who settled on a farm two miles north of this site on the Little Calumet River. They were among the early leaders of this First Reformed Church and of the Dutch settlements tha… transcription continues on the marker
This transcription may be incomplete
Our source stores marker text in a field capped at 255 characters, and this inscription appears to have been cut off. We won’t guess at the missing words — the inscription is the primary source, and inventing it would be worse than leaving it short.
Have you stood in front of this marker? Send us the full text or a photo of the sign and we’ll complete the record.
The Story
This memorial honors Jan Ton and his wife Aagje, Dutch immigrants who farmed near the Little Calumet River and helped found the area's First Reformed Church and Dutch settlements. Their farm became a station on the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom seekers escaping slavery on their way toward Canada. Faith and conscience led this immigrant community to risk much for others' liberty.
Why it matters
It links the immigrant settlement of the Midwest to the Underground Railroad, showing how newcomers to America joined the fight against slavery.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the decades before the Civil War, the flat, marshy country south of Chicago along the Little Calumet River was being turned into farmland by newcomers from across the Atlantic. Among them were Dutch families who had crossed the ocean seeking farmland and the freedom to worship as they chose, planting tidy farms and Reformed churches on the Illinois prairie.
Those same years were the tensest in the nation's history over slavery. Illinois was a free state, but it sat just across from slaveholding Missouri and Kentucky, and men and women escaping bondage often moved north through its countryside toward the Great Lakes and, beyond them, Canada. The stretch of low ground and river crossings here lay along one of those northbound paths.
The people who settled this corner did so as a community bound together by faith. Their church was not only a place of Sunday worship but the center of their shared life — and, for some, the moral compass that told them what to do when a stranger came to the door in need.
People & events
This site honors Jan Ton and his wife Aagje, Dutch immigrants who took up a farm a couple of miles north along the Little Calumet River. They were among the early leaders of the First Reformed Church and of the Dutch settlements that grew up in this area, the kind of founding family whose name gets attached to a neighborhood's beginnings.
What sets their story apart is that their farm became a refuge. According to the memory this marker preserves, freedom seekers fleeing slavery found shelter on the Ton place as they made their way north. For a farming family, that was no small thing: hiding and feeding people who were being hunted, and helping them onward, carried real risk under the laws of the day.
The marker binds the two halves of their lives together — the immigrant farmers building churches and community, and the same people quietly acting on conscience. It is a reminder that the Underground Railroad was not a single organization but a scattering of ordinary households like this one, each deciding, at some hour, to open the door.
Its place in the American story
The Underground Railroad has become one of the most cherished chapters in the American story, and part of its power is that it ran on private courage rather than public policy. It worked because thousands of individuals — Black and white, native-born and immigrant — chose to help.
This marker adds an immigrant thread to that national picture. Newcomers who had themselves crossed an ocean in search of freedom recognized something familiar in the people passing through, and joined a fight that was not, strictly speaking, theirs to join. It complicates the easy idea that antislavery work belonged only to old New England families; here it belonged to Dutch farmers on the Calumet.
It also anchors a piece of that vast, secretive network to a specific place and a specific family. Because so much of this history was deliberately unrecorded, sites that keep even a partial memory alive are precious — they let a national legend touch actual ground.
If you visit
Come here understanding that you are standing at a place of memory rather than at a preserved farmstead — the Ton farm itself lay a couple of miles north along the river. Let the marker do its work of pointing you toward that low, watery landscape and the river that shaped everyone's route through it.
Take a moment with the pairing the memorial makes: an immigrant family, a frontier church, and a stop on the road to freedom, all in one small dedication. It rewards a slow read and a bit of imagination about what a knock at the door once meant here.
The Calumet region around South Holland has other layers of Dutch-settlement and Underground Railroad history to trace, so this stop fits naturally into a themed afternoon of driving the old settled corners south of Chicago, letting one modest memorial open onto a much larger story.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Jan Ton
- · Aagje Ton
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Norway Building
Chicago, IL
This marker recalls the Norway Building, a wooden stave-church replica showcasing Norwegian craftsmanship at Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. When the great fair closed, Chicago millionaire C.K. Billings bought the structure and moved it to his estate at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, sparing it the demolition that met most of the fairgrounds. The building survives as a rare physical relic of that landmark exposition.
1919 Race Riot Plaque
Chicago, IL
This plaque marks the origin of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, which erupted after a Black teenager rafting on Lake Michigan drifted across an unspoken racial boundary at a segregated beach and was struck by rocks and drowned. The violence that followed left dozens dead and hundreds injured over nearly a week, part of the nationwide 'Red Summer' of racial unrest. The Martin Luther King Jr. quotation frames the tragedy within the longer struggle for racial justice.
Pulaski Woods
Palos Township, IL
This woodland preserve southwest of Chicago is dedicated to Brigadier General Casimir Pulaski, the Polish nobleman who joined the American cause and became a hero of the Revolutionary War. Known as the 'Father of the American Cavalry,' Pulaski reorganized mounted troops for Washington's army and was mortally wounded at the Siege of Savannah in 1779. His name endures across the Chicago region, home to a large Polish-American community that claims him proudly.
Vincentian Bicentennial Memorial
Chicago, IL
The Congregation of the Mission — the Vincentians, founded in 17th-century France by St. Vincent de Paul — reached the United States in 1816, part of the wave of Catholic religious orders that built parishes, seminaries, and schools across a young and rapidly growing nation. This memorial marks their bicentennial and honors the priests and brothers who staffed DePaul Academy from 1898 to 1968, a Chicago institution tied to the founding of DePaul University.