The Rev. Billious Pond (1781-1874) was the spiritual leader of a band of abolitionists who traveled from Vermont to western Sangamon County in 1833.
Local historian Richard Hart compiled their history in his pamphlet Lincoln’s Springfield: the Underground Railroad, published in 2006.
Hart’s research identified 13 of the immigrants, including Pond, as participants in the struggle to overturn the U.S. system of legal slavery. Several of the group, also including Pond, went further, acting as conductors on the Underground Railroad, which helped formerly enslaved persons escape to free states and Canada.
Hart described the group’s arrival in Sangamon County in a followup study, The Abolitionists, published in 2021. Profiling one of the group’s younger members, Abel Estabrook (1815-1904), Hart wrote:
Sometime before August 22, 1833, he moved with his family from Vermont to Potsdam, St. Lawrence County, New York. It was on that date that Abel, then 18 years old, and his parents joined a group of 52 New Englanders on a migration from Potsdam to the American frontier – Sangamon County, Illinois. The group traveled in 15 large wagons on a journey that lasted almost 10 weeks.
The Estabrook family’s migration to central Illinois grew out of an 1832 exploration by two middle-aged brothers, Azel and John R. Lyman. The brothers traveled from their homes in Potsdam … to scout out a possible new place of settlement. … Such trips of exploration to the west from the settled east were common. Typically, the explorers would survey the possible site of new settlement and, if they found the site suitable, they would return home and gather family and friends for the journey of immigration to the new land.
The Lyman brothers found the prairie west of Springfield to be most suitable for settlement. They returned to Potsdam and gathered 52 of their friends, neighbors and family members who wished to move to the prairie site on the western edge of the American frontier. The group became known as the Lyman Colony. Among the members of the Lyman Colony were men who would become early, active Illinois abolitionists. Abel W. Estabrook was one of those men.
Rev. Billious Pond, undated (Findagrave.com/Jacob Lowney)
Billious Pond was the pastor for the Lyman Colony during the journey west. When the group arrived, one of their first actions was to create the Farmington Presbyterian Church, although the first pastor here was the Rev. Thomas Galt (1805-57). (The church was renamed Farmingdale Presbyterian about 1905.)
Galt remained pastor until 1842, when the church split over the question of how aggressive a position it should take on the question of slavery. Galt was part of the “New School” on the issue, arguing for immediate abolition, Hart wrote. The “Old School” kept control of the church, however, and Pond – apparently an Old School adherent – became pastor, serving until 1844. Galt and other “New School” supporters set up their own church, Center Presbyterian. Sangamon County’s first anti-slavery convention was held at Center Church, Hart reported.
Despite his Old School beliefs, Billious Pond is known to have been a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and his sons, several of whom moved to Menard County, were even more active. Marvin Pond (1807-69), was tried in Menard County in 1845 for harboring a slave; Pond, represented at least at his indictment by lawyer Abraham Lincoln, ultimately was found not guilty.
Another son, Samuel Sweezy Pond (1816-1904), was so fervent he was nicknamed “Abolitionist Pond.” He reportedly would pick up escaped African-Americans by wagon in Farmingdale and take them to his home near Greenview. Pond then would hide the fugitives in a barn until it was safe to take them on to the Forrest City area of today’s Mason County.
The graves of three abolitionists, denoted by Underground Railroad markers, line up in Farmington Cemetery. Foreground, Thomas Galt; middle, Billious Pond; farthest, Jay Slater. (Cemetery photos by SCHS)
Most of the Lyman Colony members identified in The Abolitionists are buried at the Farmington Cemetery, just east of Farmingdale Presbyterian Church. In addition to Billious Pond and Thomas Galt, several of the most notable included:
- John R. Lyman (1780-1865), one of the namesakes of the Lyman Colony. The Abolitionists includes this description of a refuge Lyman provided for refugees from slavery. it is attributed to “a neighbor” with no other source given.
Down the hill near the road and near the branch, he (Lyman) had a little shanty, and a family of darkies living in it. It had the name of Dr. Lyman’s Under-ground Depot. He was accused of secreting run-away slaves, on their way to Canada. It was said that the southern slave holders offered a thousand dollars for the Dr.’s scalp.”
- Stephen Child (1802-75), a son-in-law of John Lyman. John Carroll Power interviewed Child for his History of the Early Settlers of Sangamon County (1876). “(A)s an agent of the underground railroad, he assisted hundreds of colored people in their flight from bondage,” Power wrote of Child.
He conducted a company of twenty-one at one time. It was his custom to go as far as he could travel in one night and return, but on some occasions he has gone as far sixty miles, and then left them in the hands of friends who would conduct them onward. The last time the writer of this conversed with Mr. Child, he expressed special satisfaction that he had assisted so many human beings on their way to freedom, and gratitude that he had lived to see the day that there was not a slave in the United States of America.
- Luther Ransom (1799-1872). Ransom came to Sangamon County with the Lyman party but moved eight miles south a couple of years later to build the first log house at the site of today’s Chatham. He moved again in 1840 to Springfield, where, according to Hart, Ransom operated an underground railroad station in his boarding house near the Globe Tavern, 315 E. Adams St. Ransom, originally a Presbyterian, later dabbled in a number of other belief systems, including Fourierism and the Shaker community. When he died in Kansas in 1872, Power wrote, he was “a spiritualist, and an open disbeliever of the Bible.”
He was an original abolitionist, an uncompromising temperance man, scrupulously honest in his dealings, and it was believed by those who knew him well, that he was honest and conscientious in all he did. His erratic course was regarded more as the manifestations of an unsettled mind than of a depraved disposition.
Others on Hart’s list of Farmingdale-area abolitionists: Joel Buckman (1790-1872); Hareldus Estabrook (1785-1846), father of Abel Estabrook; Alvan Lyman (1787-1865); Azel Lyman (1784-1873); Asahel Stone (1780-1871): Ossian Stone (1807-50), Asahel’s son; and Jay Slater (1795-1860). Slater lived near the Farmington church, but he actually moved to Sangamon County in 1826, seven years before the Lyman party. Slater’s home, generally thought to have been an Underground Railroad station, was still standing in 2025.
Hat tip: To the late Richard Hart, local history researcher extraordinaire.
Note: This entry originated with the Sangamon County Historical Society’s program on Underground Railroad conductors connected to Farmington; the program was presented at Farmingdale Presbyterian Church on May 21, 2025.
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