The following history was written by
local resident and retired school teacher Gene Hall in 1984. Several of
the things mentioned in this history are "out of date", but they are
being included because they tell us how much things can change in even 15
years. The Illiopolis Business Association wishes to thank Gene for his
contribution.
MORE
THAN YOU PROBABLY WANT TO KNOW ABOUT ILLIOPOLIS ILLINOIS
Written in 1984 By Gene Hall
Illiopolis supposedly meant “City of Illinois” when someone in the early
days tried to have the state capital moved to this spot on the prairie because
it is the geographical center. Over at Indianapolis, Indiana, someone had a
similar idea and it worked out, but here it did not. The only things that remain
of the original scheme are the name and the exact center point of the state,
which is said to be about a mile south of town near the westbound exit from
Interstate 72. The first log buildings were there until a prairie fire erased
everything, after which the wild tall grassland remained untouched for nearly
twenty more years until the railroad was built across it in 1853-54. That
railroad came twenty-five miles east from Springfield, which had grown rapidly
after the capital was moved there instead of here, and it went on fifteen more
miles to Decatur, which was the seat of Macon County.
At about that same time, two more improvements in technology began to make it
possible for farmers to raise good crops in the flat black prairie soil.
John Deere had moved out of his blacksmith shop one hundred fifty miles
north of here and into a factory on the Mississippi River where he was producing
lots of his polished steel plows which were the only ones that worked in the
sticky black dirt that Illiopolis sits on.
In the 1850's also an English landlord named Mr. Scully bought eleven
thousand acres of flat wet prairie, some of it about ten mile west of here and
began making field tiles to drain it. He paid from $1.50to about $5.00 an acre
for the land and people thought he was crazy for spending so much money for
ground that they thought would grow only grass. Soon others were laying tile
lines under the ground and plowing it, and growing the greatest corn crops in
the world where the tall grass had been. Now Illiopolis sits in the midst of
very rich lands which produce huge crops of soy beans besides crops of
corn. This land now costs as
much as $4,000 and acre, and the Mr. Scully who lives ten miles down the road
near Buffalo owns the same eleven thousand acres that were his grandfather’s
and is a very rich man. Illiopolis in 1900 was a country village straddling the
railroad and strung beside it, one-half mile long and two to four blocks wide.
It centered around the railroad depot, grain elevators, stockyard, post office,
general stores, a hardware store and mortuary combination, a lumber yard,
blacksmith shops, livery stables, two small hotels, three churches, and a
school, with a tile yard just outside of town.
A “calaboose, kept half hidden like a bad secret, was also considered
necessity. Even after the concrete highway (US 36) was built through it
in the 1920’s bringing filling stations and two automobile dealerships, the
village only stretched longer but remained little changed until 1942.
Three months after the United
States suddenly found itself at war with Japan and Germany, as the whole country
plunged into all out war effort, Illiopolis was deluged by an economic and
social upheaval that brought quick changes and reshaped the community.
About twenty-thousand acres of farmland, an area four miles wide and
about eight miles long which touched the west end of the village, suddenly
became US government land on which the Sangamon Ordnance Plant was built to load
explosive charges into ammunition. Without
any warning, all people living on that land, most of whom were farmers, were
given the months of March and April to move everything they owned off it while
construction crew over-ran everything. By October, the “war plant” was operating and Illiopolis
was a boomtown where every spot to park a trailer on a lawn or lot was filled,
garages had become bedrooms, and every spare bedroom was rented, sometimes in
shifts. There were really two
ordnance plants, employing many hundreds of civilians, and each was managed by a
staff of army people. Two “staff
areas”, with twenty identical houses in each, were built for them about a mile
on each side of the village.
After the war, the dismantling of “the plant” was also quite an operation as
all of that land and everything on it was sold back either to original owners or
to war veterans. Most “war plant
people” departed, but new businesses and more new people arrived.
The government had built a huge water supply and the many war plant
buildings left attracted chemical companies and the DeKalb Agricultural
Association with its large seed corn and chicken businesses.
Illiopolis has had a water system in the village since the WPA laid mains in
1936, but the only water came from a single well nearby.
The ordnance plant dug several large wells to tap the unlimited water of
the sand aquifer that underlies the Sangamon River Valley.
Not even the extremely hot dry summer of 1983 caused any concern here
about having enough water for everyone but farmers. However the cost of water
was raised in 1982 to pay for the sanitary sewer system and disposal plant that
was built in the two years before it. The
well with its hand pump and the little privy house by the alley were seen in
almost every backyard in town in 1936. Now
there is not one.
Illiopolis today involves many more people than the 1100 on the road sign.
The corporation limits have expanded to include new housing areas so that
the village is now one and one half miles long, but still four blocks wide.
However the nearby staff areas (still called that) now contain about
thirty houses each, but are unincorporated.
As in other country towns, some people commute to cities to work, but
probably as many people drive from cities and towns to near Illiopolis.
An unusually large percent of the local population is employed close to
home. The Permastarch plant, home
of the first nationally known product made here, was eventually swallowed by
Borden Chemical Co. whose big plant can be seen for many miles across the flat
land. Borden makes formulas that
may be bases for products, put out by other factories, and whatever they ship
from here is in bulk. One
nationally known item that has left here in large tanks to be packaged elsewhere
is Elmer’s Glue.
The railroad line through here extends from Toledo to Kansas City, acting as a
bypass around Chicago for at lot of coast-to-coast freight.
For a long time it was the Wabash line, and we still have Wabash Park
where trains used to stop, but the Norfolk and Western took over in the 1960’s.
It tore down the depot, closed half the street crossings, is interested
mainly in the fast noisy freight trains it sends screaming through here,
sometimes only fifteen minutes apart. Many
of the autos and trucks make in Michigan come rocking through Illiopolis,
stacked high, on their way to California and other western states.
Lately it seems that nearly as many autos come from the west going
eastward. Farm machinery goes
mostly westward but heavy machinery goes both ways, as there is a Caterpillar
factory in Decatur and a Fiat-Allis factory in Springfield.
And there are covered hopper cars of grain, a few of which get loaded in
Illiopolis, though much local grain is trucked to Decatur, which with its big
Staley and A.D.M. plants calls itself the “soybean capital of the world”.
Chemical tank cars for the Borden plant and cars of fertilizer for two
dealers down the road are about the only other railroad businesses here now. An electric interurban line, which gave good passenger and
mail service for fifty years had disappeared and this village which once
depended heavily upon the railroad now wishes that it was somewhere else, and
the railroad wishes the same about Illiopolis.
The blacksmith shops, livery stables, and stockyards are but memories now,
fading fast or nearly gone. Most
farms have no livestock and few fences. A
pond marks the site of the tile yard. The
coal yard is a busy car wash. Few
know where the calaboose stood. A
new post office replaced one hotel and the other recently reopened as a
refurbished antique hotel and is getting a surprising amount of business. The
old post office under the Legion Hall houses an auto parts store.
The lumber-yard remains, along with two old hardware stores, but the funeral
home has long been a separate business. The
bank’s new drive up branch shares a building with a busy Laundromat.
Two large stores (one uptown and one on the old highway) furnish
groceries, clothing, varieties, and a pharmacy.
An old drugstore burned, taking the lodge hall with it, and now the
rebuilt Masonic Hall only occupies what was once the heart of the business
district. Some old store buildings
and the movie theater of the 1950’s, all remodeled, stand mostly empty nearby,
presently containing only a doctor’s office, a law office (both open
intermittently), a TV repair shop, and the township hall.
Saloons and taverns have come and gone many times in the life of Illiopolis and
were limited after 1933 to three licensed establishments, which were usually
uptown. One is the packaged liquor
department in a store, one is the bar in the old bowling alley, one a place
striving for respectability through live country music, but really the oldest
roadhouse dating back to the bootleg days of the Prohibition Era, and the fourth
is a nicely furnished restaurant which in 1983 at last provided the community
with a place where it is pleasant to take guests and enjoy conversation over
good food. For those who wish to
get out of town and away from it all, Smitty’s Pub and the Red Dog can be
found three miles down the blacktop road in the corner of a cornfield.
The town also offers one ice cream and hamburger drive-in during warm weather,
and a small motel which may not admit strangers on Saturday nights because the
lady who runs it thinks that people who come there then are probably not
respectable.
The three original churches remain, with the ninety year old Catholic spire the
tallest thing in town, still higher by a few feet than the two lighted loading
legs of the tall round concrete grain bins.
The Christian Church was one hundred years old in 1966.
In 1970 the Methodists moved into a very modern new church.
The turn-of the century Methodist building was used by and Apostolic
group for a few years and then sold to private owners who only preserved it
until the latest owners have recently reopened the building to house a bustling
aerobics dance business. If “cleanliness
is next to Godliness”, then physical fitness under stately stained glass
windows and great Gothic beams should follow the same philosophy.
Physical fitness was manifested here first by the local joggers who started the
annual Clover Classic race as part of the annual Summer Celebration, which grew
out of the nation’s Bicentennial of 1976.
Unlike Springfield where some people got so fed up, that one wag
suggested in print that all they needed was one more bunch of “horsemen in
funny clothes galloping out of town shouting, “ The Bicentennial is over!”,
Illiopolis enjoyed their celebration so much that they have repeated it each
June since ’76. Whether they
realize it or not, they are carrying on the tradition established here by the
Modern Woodsmen in the 19th century with the combination of carnival
spirit, feasting, reunion, racing, home talent show, housing visitors, and fund
raising. It is an exercise in
community fitness.
In 1965 the Illiopolis Public Library opened a new building that has been
described as a “gem” among small town libraries. It cost $60,000 that was raised in 1963 entirely from gifts
and pledges within the community with no government help.
The schools were gathered together in 1969 with the opening of new grade school
building that was connected to all of the rest by a new gym. The five hundred-fifty student enrollment of that year has
declined to the four hundred ten figure last year, with a small increase this
year.
The building of the school and library say a lot about community spirit in
Illiopolis, as also do the support given the volunteer fire department (started
with “surplus” from the war plant), the community supported Illiopolis
ambulance that is operated by EMT volunteers, and the arrival of a doctor with
scheduled hours here. This sense of
community owes much to the Illiopolis Sentinel which has emerged from its
basement printing shop every Thursday for as long as most citizens can remember,
reporting local news as can be printed, charting and recording the course of
events.
Until 1942 history passed on by Illiopolis although this was the land of Lincoln
even before the village’s name was contrived.
Tom Lincoln’s family spent the terrible winter of 1930-31 in a cabin on
the Sangamon River about ten miles upstream form where it looped past the future
site of the first Illiopolis. As
soon as the “Big Snow” melted, Abe paddled down the river with two men and
entered Sangamon County for the first time just two miles southeast of here.
The built and loaded a flatboat near Springfield, then floated that craft
on down the Sangamon, Illinois, and Mississippi Rivers.
It was Lincoln’s second trip to New Orleans.
On the second day of that trip he got acquainted with New Salem, which
was still in Sangamon Co., where he would return to live.
Since Lincoln traveled around the middle of Illinois often in the following
thirty years, he must have passed by and through Illiopolis many times, but
there is no recorded history of his having stopped here. However a big brick house still stands by the railroad five
miles west of town, where he sometimes visited an old friend.
That point, Lanesville now, is exactly halfway between Decatur and
Springfield and for eighty years, steam locomotives often stopped there to take
on water. It was a Lincoln could
stop over for a good meal and discuss politics, religious philosophy, and farm
news with his friend, Mr. Pickrell, who was a Whig-Republican, a religious
agnostic, and a progressive livestock breeder.
Lincoln is not remembered for the places where he slept, but for the
places where he ate and told stories.
We do know that Lincoln passed through Illiopolis at 8:49 a.m. on February 11,
1861 on a special train that was chugging against a cold rainy east wind.
He was on his way to Washington, D.C. to become the President and
probably people stood in the shelter of the old depot (which still stands in
town as part of a house) to wave at him. At
8:00 o’clock the train had pulled away from the Springfield depot leaving a
crowd of friends with faces wet with tears and rain.
In a short, emotional speech, Lincoln had thanked them for the good years
of his life there, had asked them to pray for him and the country, and had said,
“I go now, not knowing when or whether ever, I may return”.
Lincoln’s train rolled through Illiopolis and disappeared into the
driving mist as it rumbled over the wooden trestle across the slough and carried
him out of Sangamon County for the last time.
The name Sangamon is said to have been formed from an Indian term meaning “place
with plenty to eat”, but there were very few of them around when the earliest
settlers came to this river in 1819, and those few were peaceful, so we have no
Indian lore in this county. “Arrowhead”
which are found along the river nearby were probably all spear points dating
back thousands of years to time before any Americans had bows and arrows.
However and whenever they were used, they must have been made at least a
hundred miles from here, for Indians could have found very few stones of any
kind in this area, and none for making pints.
The few stones naturally visible were mostly round pieces of very hard granite
that have been dragged out of Canada or Lake Michigan by the great glaciers.
The last glacier stopped about ten miles before it got to Illiopolis, but
the one before that covered much of Illinois, and the only hills we have around
at all were formed by those glaciers. The
skeleton of a Mastodon that was found in a slough a mile from Illiopolis is a
clue that the climate was once colder and that there were spruce forests here.
And of course the coal that is under the town means that there were
tropical swamps here a very long time but never one here – yet.
Likewise there are several oil wells pumping within ten miles of town,
but none nearby.
Riverton, seventeen miles west of Illiopolis, had one the first deep (210 ft.)
shaft mines in Illinois after someone in 1858 discovered coal under Springfield
while trying to drill an artesian well for water.
Riverton had been named Jamestown after James Reed and adventurous
merchant of Springfield, who had also built a sawmill and cabinet making
business on the Sangamon River there.
In 1846, Reed was joined by two farmers, George and Jacob Donner, who lived
along the road to “Jimtown”, in getting their names into history books, but
in a very tragic way. The
adventurous Reed sold all of his businesses and built probably the biggest
(double decked) covered wagon that ever traveled the trail toward California. Being one of the very early wagon trains to head that
direction, they followed bad advice about the route and Reed abandoned his great
wagon in the Salt Lake Desert in late summer.
Reed’s luck held and he did get to California with his family, but the
Donner brothers left their name on Donner Pass high in the Sierra Nevada
Mountains where they starved to death with most of the wagon train in snow
twenty feet deep.
Back on the Sangamon River in 1861 in 1861 some Jacob Donner’s old farm became
part of a Civil War army camp where many thousands of Illinois troops received
their basic training and were loaded onto trains that carried many of them
through Illinois to Indianapolis and then south to the Ohio River.
Today Camp Butler National Cemetery remains there, covering dead from all
of our wars since 1862. The first to buried there were about eight hundred
Confederate prisoners of war who died of disease in that camp.
Illiopolis had a local cultural history remembered nostalgically by generations
now gone, people who grew up here in the 1870’s and the first World War.
It probably was a more interesting place for your people than some
country towns were. The Opera House
attracted traveling entertainers and some early moving pictures, while the town
had a tradition of home talent shows, which still persists.
There were ladies’ societies aplenty, church and lodge affairs, but the
things best remembered were the community horse shows with races on the horse
track south of town, and the annual Woodsmen’s Picnics each autumn in the
park. Crowds came from other towns.
There ere games and carnival rides and the a band concert and other
entertainment in the evening. The
Merchants’ Band was a regular part of the community for many years.
A really good Woodsmen’s Picnic ended late at night with a brawl,
perhaps a knifing (there was at least one genuine shooting), and with the
calaboose full until the next day.
Typically though, the big names in entertainment did not stop at Illiopolis, but
were drawn to Mechanicsburg instead, ten miles away. There for ten days in August “ the better families” of
Illiopolis camped at the “Assembly Ground” which predated the Chautauqua
many years, but in 1897, became a part of that circuit. People had cottages
there or put up big tents to live in. Families
were drawn from the whole area between Springfield and Decatur, people hungry
for culture and a chance to mingle with other people.
For many in Illiopolis and elsewhere, that was the high point of the
year. Illiopolis shared in the
management of the event and sent its Merchants’ band, its baseball team, and
sometimes its “cavalry troop” to escort popular politicos the tree miles
from the train in Buffalo. Since
the Assembly was sponsored and overseen by the Methodists, there were no drunks
and no fights. Indeed, when Carrie
Nation was the featured speaker there better not have been! It was just as well that she didn’t get any closer to
Illiopolis with her hatchet.
Assembly speakers varied from prominent churchmen (including an occasional
Catholic and one “converted Jewess”) and temperance leaders to important
political figures, to “orators”, to humorists, chalk-talkers, and magicians.
There was a song leader and there were musical groups – white ones,
black ones, Mexicans, even “South Sea Islanders”.
Nationally known personalities came to Mechanicsburg, such as Sam Jones,
the reformed drunk from the southern Bible belt who today would surely have his
own TV pulpit and would be a big noise in the allegedly “moral majority”.
He frowned loudly upon many things and was well received at
Mechanicsburg, except by teenagers who dreaded his returns.
William Jennings Bryan spoke there three times.
“Fighting Bob” LaFollette of Wisconsin and several other governors
and U.S. Senators each had their day at “the Burg” as did ex-Confederate
Civil War Generals Fitzhugh Lee and John B. Gordon, along with Gen. Pickett’s
widow. Along with all this live talent a new form of entertainment flicked onto
the scene: even before the grounds were lighted electrically the Vitagraph and
then the Edison Projecting Kinetoscope somehow brought moving pictures to
Mechanicsburg and ladies were asked to remove their huge hats during
performances.
On August 14, 1908, many blocks of houses of Negroes were burned in Springfield
on the second day of the race riots (that precipitated the founding of the
NAACP), and black families fled on foot as far as Buffalo where a sign warned
them to keep going, but they found local black folks who helped them anyway.
(Illiopolis had some Blacks then, but not many.)
That day at Mechanicsburg, a Rev. Marsden spoke from between his flowing
sideburns upon “The Philosophy of Happiness”, and a Rev. Clearwater then
held forth on “Methods of Sunday-School Teaching”.
The Illiopolis Merchants’ Band gave a concert while the sun dipped into
the woods, after which there was the clattering quiet of moving pictures under
the trees, broken by bursts of laughter.
That
was one of the last of the great years of the Assemblies from which folks
returned to Illiopolis with souls uplifted, intellects revitalized, and things
to talk about even after the Woodsmen’s Picnic. Gasoline and electricity were changing the horse and buggy
world and bringing other entertainments.
Like the tornado of 1963 that lifted right over the village while damaging both
ends of it and killing a farmer nearby, history has narrowly missed out town at
times and has brought it neither great fame nor notoriety.
However we feel that we justify our place on the road map and in the Zip
Code directory. A quiet but ongoing
objective of our grade school, along with other fundamentals, is to teach each
child to exceed the national average of Americans in spelling Illiopolis.
Return
to Main Page