Returning for its 15th season, History Comes Alive transports you back to the 19th Century Springfield.  Immerse yourself in Lincoln's hometown while meeting our largest cast of historical reenactors yet.  Live performances, a varity of demonstrattions, as well special presentations of some of Lincoln's most famous speeches.  Springfield is truly a city where History Comes Alive!  Free downtown trolley service to historic sites Wed.-Sat.!

Looking for Lincoln will present the premiere performance of award winning folk musician Chris Vallillo’s powerful new show, Songs of the Illinois Freedom Road in Theater 1 at the Lincoln Home National Historic Site Visitor Center.  Vallillo’s performance brings the music and stories of the Underground Railroad in Illinois to life in this engaging and powerful show. Vallillo extensively researched the subject using primary source documents such as the 1857 Slave Narratives of Canada and the WPA Slave Narratives as well as the most recent scholarship on the subject. 

The show features rare first-person accounts of freedom seekers who passed through Illinois such as John and Mary Little who traveled one hundred and forty miles to get to the Ohio River, crossed the river on a log, and walked barefooted through Illinois up to Chicago.

Then there was George Burroughs, a free black man from Canada, who traveled to Illinois and got a job on the Illinois Central Railroad where he helped smuggle escapees to freedom.

Vallillo combines these powerful stories with the historic songs that were sung by the enslaved to inspire and share knowledge among themselves. The Gospel music that told of the Israelites escape from Egypt resonated powerfully with the Freedom Seekers and inspired many to seek their own emancipation. Songs like Go Down Moses and Steal Away were universally known and sung by the enslaved. Vallillo performs eleven of these songs as he weaves in the stories of the lives and struggles of these heroic men and women.

Chris Vallillo is a singer/songwriter and roots musician who makes the people and places of “unmetropolitan” America come to life in song. Having spent the last 30 years in the rural Midwest, he has a natural affinity for American roots music. Vallillo weaves original, contemporary, and traditional songs and narratives into a compelling and entertaining portrait of the history and lifestyles of the Midwest. Dirty Linen magazine described the music as, “vivid, original story songs”delivered with an “eye for detail and a sense of history”.  In the 1980’s he was involved documenting the last of the pre-radio generation of musicians in rural Illinois.

Always a project oriented artist, in the early 2000’s Vallillo began creating one man shows using music as the vehicle to explore a subject or theme. His 2008 project, titled Abraham Lincoln in Song, received the endorsement of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and the CD reached #10 on Billboard’s Bluegrass Album Chart. In 2016, his recording, Oh Freedom! Songs of the Civil Rights Movement charted at # 6 on the folk charts and the show was staged with a band and full choir at Western IL University. That show was video taped and syndicated on Illinois Public Television.

In 2024 Chris returned to his songwriter roots with a new recording and stage performance, Forgottonia, featuring original songs and instrumentals written about about rural Illinois.

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.  

Illinois has a rich Underground Railroad History.  Join us for a look state-wide at the journeys of Freedom Seekers and the responding networks of the Underground Railroad in the decades before the Civil War.   Connecting the dots in this powerful part of Illinois history.  In addition, details about the work of the Illinois Underground Railroad Task Force.

Larry McClellan's  consulting, research and writing focus is on freedom seekers and the Underground Railroad, and on African American and regional history south of Chicago.  Major publications include 25 articles in the Encyclopedia of Chicago [2005]; The Underground Railroad South of Chicago [2019], co-author of To the River, The Remarkable Journey of Caroline Quarlls, a Freedom Seeker on the Underground Railroad [2019].   Onward to Chicago:  Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad in Northeastern Illinois was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2023.  This received the national 2023 Memorial Prize for the Advancement of Knowledge from the Underground Railroad Free Press. In 2022 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Illinois State Historical Society for his contributions to Illinois history and, in 2024, they gave his latest book their Award for Superior Achievement.