Despite fugitive slave laws that prohibited harboring runaway slaves, fugitives found refuge in the Quaker village of Chesterfield, now Chesterhill, where legend held that none were ever captured although many were hidden and helped on their way to freedom in Canada. A well-organized branch of the Underground Railroad ran through Morgan County, with Elias Bundy as a principal conductor, and he sometimes concealed fugitives in the woods east of Chester Hill. Historian W.H. Siebert identified Bundy, Jesse Hiatt, Nathan Morris, Abel W. Bye, Joseph Doudna, Arnold Patterson, and Thomas Smith as part of an inner circle of old and reliable Friends upon whom dependence could always be placed. The first Monthly Meeting was held on October 21, 1839, at the location of the present Meeting House, which was built in 1834.