The Blodgett House

Israel Porter Blodgett was born at Amherst, Massachusetts on 4 March 1797, the fifth blacksmith in a direct line. He was apprenticed at sixteen to Israel Scott of Hadley, then worked at the United States Armory at Springfield, where he became foreman of the welding room, and was sent on to the new armory at Harpers Ferry in Virginia. By his son's later account he shared his room there with a young man who was enslaved and hired out to the superintendent for a hundred and fifty dollars a year, told him that following the North Star would bring him to Canada, and was summarily discharged after the man went. Blodgett came west in the spring of 1831 to the forks of the DuPage, and in the winter of 1836 moved his family to Downers Grove. He and his wife Avis were open abolitionists, and the National Park Service records the property as an Underground Railroad station from 1840 until Israel's death in 1861, with freedom seekers moved north at night to the house of Philo Carpenter in Chicago. The family lived first in a log cabin; the surviving house was built in 1846 and is one of the oldest in the village. Evidence is unusually good for work that had to leave no records: first hand accounts survive from three of the Blodgett children and a daughter in law, and a restoration found abolitionist newspapers stuffed into the walls. The eldest son, Henry Williams Blodgett, helped organise the Republican Party in Illinois and sat as a federal district judge from 1870. The Park Service admitted the house to its Network to Freedom in 2023.