~by Chuck Offenburger for the Greene County Historical Society
The popular historian, researcher and writer David Connon returns to Jefferson this Sunday, Sept. 18, to present a program about “Josiah Bushnell Grinnell and the Iowa Underground Railroad,” at 2 pm at the Greene County Historical Museum.
“J.B.” Grinnell, one of the more prominent figures in Iowa history, lived from 1821 to 1891. He was founder in 1854 of the town in east central Iowa that has his last name; was an ordained Congregational minister, businessman and was also a major benefactor of Grinnell College. And he served as an Iowa state senator and then two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.
An avowed abolitionist, he was also a major leader — or “conductor” — of the Iowa Underground Railroad, which helped shuttle liberated and escaped slaves across Iowa in the 1859s and ’60s. In February, 1859, he welcomed and provided housing for the radical abolition leader John Brown, after Brown’s militia had conducted raids to free slaves in Kansas and elsewhere.
Grinnell was by then a town of about 520 people with strong opinions on the slavery issue. At one point, there was a riot by some locals objecting to younger freed slaves being allowed to attend the new Grinnell public school.
David Connon, the presenter, lives in the central Iowa town of Earlham and works part-time at the West Des Moines public library.
But for years, he’s been doing independent research on several topics, many related to Civil War history. Two of his great-great-grandfathers fought in the Union Army in that war. In the fall of 2021, he presented a program at the museum in Jefferson on “Iowa Confederates in the Civil War.”
He posts regularly in an online blog, “Confederates from Iowa: Not to Defend but to Understand,” and you can learn more about all his research there.
Connon had originally been scheduled in Greene County last April to do his program on J.B. Grinnell and the Underground Railroad, but an illness in his family forced postponement until now.
The program this Sunday is being co-sponsored by the Greene County Historical Society and the Jefferson Public Library, with support from Humanities Iowa.
Both the program and refreshments at the museum are free to the public.
