“Variations in Black”: Eureka’s Stories – February 8, 2008

Those who ascend the steep stairs in Burrus Dickinson Hall up to the third floor level might notice that an additional, but smaller, set of stairs goes up to the attic of the building. If one climbs those steps, immediately to the right of the smaller stair set, a locked door hides an even smaller passage with another set of steps that goes up to the roof of the building—the place where an ornate cupola once adorned the building in its original architectural form. The cupola, which then housed the college bell, was removed sometime around 1907 after the structure had been damaged by a lightning strike. When the repair work on the building had been completed, the artisan who had directed the renovations to the building signed his name to his work. The scribbled pencil signature of Robert Moody is silent testimony to his craft, but his extraordinary life was one that was truly remarkable and one that you will be unlikely to forget.

Robert Moody was born in Dyersburg, Tennessee, in 1828, the son of a free black woman and an enslaved father. Following the legal custom of the times in which the status of the child followed the status of the mother, Robert Moody was born free, but he grew up amidst the constraints of a slave society and always knew that his father's liberty was nonexistent in antebellum Tennessee. As a free black in Tennessee, Moody was able to earn an income—an alternative reality to anything that his father had ever known.

When Robert Moody accumulated enough income from his labors, he decided to use his wealth as much as was practical to strike a blow against slavery. He attended a public slave auction in Dyersburg sometime in the late-1840s and purchased his own father with the plan of setting him free. Realizing that such an action was risky for both men, Robert Moody financed his father's travel to Upper Canada (modern Ontario) where he was able to settle as a farmer in one of the black townships that had been established there by expatriate "fugitives" from the United States. Once resettled in Canada, the self-emancipation that Robert Moody had provided for his father was secured.

Having relocated his father in Canada, Robert Moody resettled in Illinois where he lived in several communities and worked as a laborer during the 1850s. When the U.S. Civil War began in 1861, Robert Moody realized that the war presented another opportunity to strike a blow against slavery in the southern confederacy. He signed on to be a laborer in support of Union army forces who went southward into Tennessee. This was a very dangerous decision for a free black man to make, and it reflects a tremendous amount of courage on Robert Moody's part. Had he been captured by Confederate forces during the war, he likely would have been enslaved in spite of his legal status as a free man.

During his work in Tennessee during the war, Robert Moody met and fell in love with a woman named Sarah who was enslaved on a cotton plantation. In spite of all the risks that were associated with his efforts, Robert Moody found a way to help Sarah run away from her plantation to the security of Union lines. In helping Sarah "to steal herself away from slavery," Robert Moody was striking again against the South's "peculiar institution."

Robert and Sarah Moody eventually married and settled in the community of Eureka, Illinois, where they raised a large family of nine children. Robert found work in doing construction and he eventually opened his own business as a brick maker. Many of the buildings and homes that were constructed in this town in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries used Moody bricks. Robert Moody was a respected businessman within the community of Eureka, and his wife and children enjoyed a status that would have been unimaginable had they lived in Tennessee or other parts of the Deep South.

From the family home, located at what is now 202 Moody Street, the Moody family could see Eureka College when they looked northward beyond the open fields of Olio Cemetery. At least one of Robert and Sarah Moody's children – a daughter named Hattie – would attend Eureka College in the 1890s. In an era when higher education was seldom provided to African American women (even at northern colleges and universities), the abolitionist-founded Eureka College found it appropriate to educate the daughter of a formerly enslaved woman.

Robert Moody's life was not typical—not by any stretch of the imagination. Eureka College professor (and former president) Benjamin J. Radford befriended Robert Moody, and in 1896, he published a biography of his friend's singularly remarkable life. The number of biographies written on African American figures in the 1890s was relatively sparse, so Radford's efforts suggest that Robert Moody was recognized as having lived a unique life.

When Robert Moody died in 1916, the local newspaper carried the story of his life as front-page news as the community had lost a leading citizen. When Sarah Moody died a decade later, her death went unreported in the local newspaper, but she was interred beside her husband in Eureka's Olio Cemetery.

Faded pencil marks that some might consider historical graffiti do not tell the whole story. The Moody family's story was writ large upon this community in ways that we now can only begin to comprehend.