By Claudia Loucks
Correspondent

Geneseo High School freshman and sophomore choir students were better able to relate to the words they were singing after a recent trip to the Geneseo Historical Museum.

The trip took the 47 choir students to the site of the Underground Railroad (hole) in the museum with an explanation from Angie Snook, curator, who said that sharing the “Flight to Freedom” story and information about Geneseo’s abolitionist founders to the choir students “was a pleasure.”

“Showing them the hiding hole in the basement of the museum and telling the slaves’ stories of the Underground Railroad and their longing to be free gave the students a historic insight of our town,” Snook said.

Some of Snook’s information included that the basement of the 1855 (now museum) home of George and Ann Richards was just one of the many places in Geneseo that the slaves were given refuge until they could be safely taken to Lyndon, Princeton or north to the Rock River.

“The students asked many questions and one of the questions that is almost always asked is how many slaves came through Geneseo,” Snook said. “It is impossible to know because of the Underground Railroad’s secrecy and very few records survived. Abolitionists were present here from the founding of Geneseo in 1836 until 1865 when Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery.”

The choir students were preparing to sing the African-American spiritual “Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit” when they visited the museum.

Spirituals often included hidden meanings because a songwriter could not say “escape today” in his or her song, the writer may write of “traveling to the promised land,” implying heaven, but actually referring to freedom up North…The hidden meanings were inserted to protect one another from the overseer, and it bound the slaves together in a secret language.

While almost anyone can “sing” the words of a spiritual, it is an entirely different experience to see and hear about the process of “escaping” was all about.

Some of the students commented that the visit to the museum and hearing Snook’s presentation helped them relate the Spiritual song to the actual escape.