St. Charles home may have been a refuge for slaves seeking freedom

A treasure hunter by nature, Faith Tripp-Peloso has uncovered enough artifacts in her backyard over the last 13 years to fill Mason jars with old buttons, clay marbles and other tiny pieces of history. Turns out, though, her biggest find might have been buried in her basement all along.

Several months ago, Tripp-Peloso was cleaning out the cellar in her 171-year-old limestone cottage on Cedar Street in St. Charles when curiosity led her to a crawlspace in a corner under the staircase. The rectangular incision -- brimming with decades of dirt and debris -- had caught her eye before because of its unusual location directly in the foundation, she said. "So I started digging around."

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It wasn't long before Tripp-Peloso realized she might be onto something. Emerging from the debris were several long planks of wood mounted on both sides of the hole and running front to back -- what historians now suspect may have been sleeping bunks for freedom-seeking slaves on the Underground Railroad.

"All the evidence looks to us like it could have possibly been used for human activity. It makes sense to us and we have looked at it very closely," said forensic scientist Jihad Muhammad, president and chief executive officer of the University of Illinois at Chicago's African Scientific Research Institute.

The organization is planning an archaeological investigation at the house in St. Charles as part of a broader study on the Underground Railroad "from an African-American point of view," Muhammad said.

The investigation, expected to begin later this spring, will use state-of-the-art surveying equipment to sense soil disturbances. Depending on what's found, Muhammad said, visits could last up to a year, with post-analytical work to follow before presenting the official findings.

"Our mission is to do what we are calling a holistic study of the Underground Railroad," he said. "What it appears to me and my staff is, when you talk about the Underground Railroad, you get two different versions of it from white and black. What we're trying to do is clarify that and make it as illustrative as possible."

In St. Charles, Muhammad said, the Tripp-Peloso house is "very promising ... which is why we're proposing to do the kind of work we're going to do there."

The attention is being welcomed and encouraged by local historians who have long held strong suspicions that at least four other old houses in St. Charles were once stops on the Underground Railroad.

City documents and ownership records trace many of the buildings, including Tripp-Peloso's, to known Kane County anti-slavery activists, said Kim Malay, the city's historic preservation coordinator. One has a tiny staircase leading to a secret passage, which connects to a well on the property.

Len Chandler, who sits on the city's plan commission and lives in the city's oldest house, said he hopes some fresh scientific work will not only confirm the railroad's life on Cedar Street but open up the possibility of investigations elsewhere around town. He's sure the local tourism industry wouldn't mind.

"I don't think most people really grasp what this could do for the town itself," he said.

In February, Marian Boveri, a local real-estate consultant who specializes in older homes, helped Tripp-Peloso and her husband John Peloso gain city landmark status for the two-story, corner-lot house they had bought 13 years ago and began restoring in 2006. Such designations can boost a property's value in some cases, but Tripp-Peloso was more interested in preserving the historical integrity of the house. She's held a deep fascination with nature and artifacts since she was a little girl, breaking open rocks and collecting snake skins.

After the basement discovery led the couple to look up property records that would link the house to Gideon Young, who was a documented member of the Kane County Anti-Slavery Society and is believed to have built the house in 1837, Boveri urged them to solicit research.

Boveri said their case was supported even further by additional documents that linked several other known abolitionists to the house and artifacts such as a Civil War-era marble found in the crawlspace.

Boveri said she's read in historical accounts that many slaves traveled through northern Illinois en route to Chicago. Stops along the way commonly consisted of cramped sleeping quarters under abolitionists' homes and passages between cellars and water wells, which might be the case with Tripp-Peloso's home.

"I knew we had to get someone from a university in here," she said. She came across Muhammad a short time later. After seeing the space for himself, Muhammad agreed to add the Tripp-Peloso home to the research institute's list of ongoing investigations, which includes a study of Jean Baptiste Point de Sable, who is credited as a founder of Chicago.

While the Tripp-Peloso house was folded into the institute's ongoing project, the researchers also swept Young, the abolitionist, into the mix of subjects. The investigation also will examine oral and written histories from white and black congregations in Chicago and Kane County, Muhammad said.

If it turns out hard evidence supports what scientists believe about Tripp-Peloso's house, the structure will be eligible for national landmark designation, Boveri said. From a property-value perspective, such designations either "sustain or increase" a home's worth.

"But it would also become a national treasure and, I think, almost priceless," she said. "How can you put a price on a national treasure?"

Tripp-Peloso, whose hobbies include digging for artifacts in her garden and studying family history, said she envisions opening up the house to children. That way, maybe they, too, can experience the awe and wonder she felt in stumbling upon perhaps her greatest discovery.

"All these years of looking for treasures, and here I am living in one," she said.