Iowa assumed an important place in America’s Underground Railroad history when Missourians closed off the Missouri River to Kansas-bound settlers, making the state a leading transit route to Kansas and an important route for people escaping slavery. Helping runaways in Iowa was dangerous and illegal, and although most residents wanted to avoid the slavery issue and keep black settlement out of the state, a dedicated minority viewed Iowa as a beacon of anti-slavery hope. During the Kansas-Nebraska struggle that began in 1854 over whether those territories would become slave or free states, western Iowa became an important staging area for free-state forces and for those aiding fugitives from enslavement, with antislavery and Underground Railroad activity led especially by Congregationalists in southwest Iowa, including Rev. George B. Hitchcock. People fleeing enslavement from western Missouri often reached Civil Bend, then were directed to Tabor, and with help from people in the Malvern and Hastings areas reached the homes of Hitchcock or Oliver Mills near Lewis before continuing east toward Chicago and Canada. On February 13, 1859, John Brown arrived near here with twelve men, women, and children escaping slavery from Missouri, along with his own men, and stopped at the farm of his cousin Oliver Mills, a frequent Underground Railroad stop one-half mile north of Lewis; after resting overnight, the party went on to David A. Barnett’s at Grove City as part of a three-month journey toward Detroit and ferry passage to freedom in Windsor, Canada. Ten months later Brown was captured and hanged after his October 16, 1859, failed assault on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, an action that ignited great controversy and became a catalyst leading to the Civil War. The larger Kansas conflict spread tensions in the border states, enraged the North, killed the Whig Party, made the Republican Party, split the Democratic Party, and guaranteed Lincoln’s election.