This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
To your list of fearless and feisty women—if you keep such a list—please add Kate Perry of Covington, Kentucky. During the Civil War, Miss Kate was the owner, operator, and conductor of her own highly illegal railroad.
Miss Perry made several trips to Rock Island to visit her cousin, Mrs. Boyle, in 1863-64. Her visits were welcome, especially among the many ex-Southerners living in the city who were sympathetic to the Southern cause.
Noticing the plight of Confederate prisoners at the Rock Island Barracks on Rock Island, who were underfed and poorly clothed against a Northern winter, Perry set up an underground to obtain supplies for these prisoners. She wrote to friends back in Kentucky for clothing, shoes, and tobacco. Friends wrote to friends, and soon box after box of goods came north to Rock Island and were taken to the prison by such prominent citizens as Judge Grant and Mrs. Charles Buford.
"Miss Kate Perry of Kentucky has been here as a ministering angel," wrote a prisoner in his diary, "God bless all such and send more."
But for Kate Perry, donations were not enough. Before long, she was smuggling notes into the camp, using whomever she could recruit, including a Union Army sergeant, a post surgeon, the driver of a milk wagon, and a Catholic priest.
Even that was not enough. The spunky Miss Perry took to aiding prisoners who had escaped from the camp. In one instance, a Kentucky prisoner, George Bern, escaped by clinging to the bottom of the chief surgeon's buggy as it left the camp. He showed up at Perry's house at 30th Street and Fifth Avenue in Rock Island. She hid him for several days, then helped him escape back south by dressing him as a girl in a hoop skirt and a scoop bonnet.
Local military authorities knew what she was doing, and often searched her house, but Kate Perry was never arrested. That is how Rock Island came to have a reverse underground railroad, heading south even as the more famous one ran north.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
