This is a collaborative
digital history project.
Knox College was founded in 1837 by abolitionists, many of whom hoped to establish Galesburg as a stop on the Underground Railroad. The men and women who ran the college and lived in Galesburg were almost entirely from upstate New York.
We asked: How was it possible for migrants from the eastern part of the United States to move west into Native territory and found a college?
We discovered that the founders of Knox College benefited from the U.S. policy of removing Native nations from their lands east of the Mississippi in the early nineteenth century. Nationally, this policy was driven by the demands of Southern enslavers for the federal government to open up land to be cultivated by enslaved men, women, and children. While the founders of Knox College were anti-slavery, they had a mutual interest with enslavers in seeing Native land forcibly turned into American territory.
This website represents, we hope, a first step in reckoning with Knox College's earliest history in what is currently western Illinois, and exploring the long history of Native nations in this place.
Course Icon Key
Our work is categorized into four different subcategories to help organize our research in multiple contexts.
MATERIAL
CULTURE
NATIVE
HISTORY
U.S.
CONTEXT
THE
FOUNDERS
LIBRARY
Material Culture
Native Nations
The United States Context
The Founders
This map - from native-land.ca - is a project of a Canadian non-profit organization that “strives to create and foster conversations about the history of colonialism, Indigenous ways of knowing, and settler-Indigenous relations, through educational resources such as our map and Territory Acknowledgement Guide.” The project is a work in progress. It offers a way for individuals not familiar with the deep past of the places where they live to begin to understand the histories of the Native people for whom those places are home. You can learn more about the team behind Native Lands here.
