Celebrating 250 years of America

Essays on history from the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society

Robert D. Sampson, Ph.D., editor of the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, shared the following essays that fall under the umbrella of an “America 250, celebrating 250 years of the United States” theme. These essays had been published in the journal earlier in the year and are an opportunity to read about brief bits of Illinois history that hold interesting and vital facts about Illinois history.

Rivers, Rails, and Rich Soil: Agricultural Innovations in Illinois

By Jenny Barker-Devine

In October 1819, one year after Illinois was admitted to the Union, a “farmer of Madison County” published a call in the Edwardsville Spectator to establish an agricultural society. The organization would collect scientific books, demonstrate agricultural implements, and maintain specimens of plants and livestock. Above all, the society would help new emigrants from the forested eastern states adapt to prairie farming, where “there is no need for the grubbing hoe, the ax, or the coulter, to prepare the soil — the bar share plough alone does the work.” The farmer’s vision for advancing agriculture through knowledge, technology, and adaptation reflects Illinois’s larger agricultural history, as a state where innovative people shaped the development of American food systems, educational institutions, and technologies.

For thousands of years, the region’s rich biodiversity has supported diverse peoples. Corn is the crop most synonymous with Illinois agriculture past and present, but Native American farmers have long pursued diversified farming systems grounded in centuries of experimentation and ecological knowledge. They domesticated crops, including beans, squash, chenopod, erect knotweed, sunflower and bottle gourd. They also employed land-management practices to encourage the growth of so-called wild foods, such as persimmons, hickory nuts, and amaranth. Agricultural abundance supported America’s largest pre-Columbian city, Cahokia, located near modern-day St. Louis and characterized by its earthen mounds. At its height between 1050 and 1250 CE, farmers supported a dense urban population, smaller communities throughout the region, and trade networks that reached across the continent.

By the late seventeenth century, French colonists were drawn to the area by the fur trade, but they soon turned to farming. Settlements at Kaskaskia and Cahokia (distinct from the Indigenous city) produced wheat, corn, and vegetables for export to New Orleans, relying heavily on enslaved Native American and African labor. During the American Revolution, the region sat at the crossroads of shifting empires, and by the time British and then American authorities asserted control, the region was already engaged in commercial agriculture.

After the American Revolution, the Northwest Ordinances imposed a grid system, still visible from the air today, that divided land into neat townships and ranges. While maps with clean lines tell a story of orderly expansion, the process was far more complicated. The US government forcibly removed Native nations from their homelands, and settlers plowed under the prairie for intensive farming and livestock operations. To those accustomed to forests and rocky soils in eastern states, the rich soil of the Prairie State offered opportunities for unencumbered development. Three major rivers, the Illinois, Mississippi, and Ohio, provided vital routes for moving crops, livestock, and people. Infrastructure projects like the Illinois & Michigan Canal, and later, the railroads, linked rural farms to distant markets.

Illinois quickly became a center for commercial and scientific innovation. In 1837, blacksmith John Deere developed the steel plow in Grand Detour. Unlike cast-iron plows, Deere’s version sliced prairie sod without clogging. During the 1840s and 1850s, manufacturers across the state built reapers designed by competing inventors Cyrus Hall McCormick and Obed Hussey. The mechanization of agriculture not only allowed farm families to increase grain production but also encouraged the development of manufacturing and infrastructure. In 1848, a group of investors established the Chicago Board of Trade to manage growing volumes of agricultural output from Illinois and beyond. Similarly, in 1865, the Union Stock Yards opened in Chicago as a hub for meat processing.

Equally important was the rise of agricultural education. During the mid-nineteenth century, Jonathan Baldwin Turner, an Illinois College professor, advocated for publicly funded universities focused on agriculture and the mechanical arts. Turner believed that farmers and working-class Americans deserved access to higher education. The University of Illinois, founded in 1867 as the Illinois Industrial University, was made possible by the Morrill Land- Grant Act of 1862, which established the land-grant university system. Today, the university remains a national leader in agricultural research, training generations of scientists, business leaders, and policymakers.

By the twentieth century, Illinois-based companies like John Deere, International Harvester, and Caterpillar led global developments in heavy equipment. After the Second World War, farmers adopted hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides, and they replaced horsepower with gasoline engines. They increased yields while raising important questions about environmental sustainability, labor, and rural depopulation. The cost of doing business rose dramatically while fewer people were needed to work the land. In 1959, Illinois had 164,000 farm operators. Today, only 75,087 Illinois residents make their living directly from the land.

Throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, rural Illinois underwent significant transformation, as population decline and economic instability reshaped the social and economic foundations of farming communities.

Nevertheless, agriculture remains central to the state’s economy. Illinois even plays a key role in helping Americans across the nation celebrate the coming of autumn by leading the nation in pumpkin production. In 2022, Illinois farmers harvested more than 634 million pounds of pumpkin, with the majority of canned pumpkin sold in the US processed by Nestle Libby in Morton and Seneca Foods in Princeville. Agribusinesses headquartered in Illinois, like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), process and ship corn, soybeans, and other crops around the world. Illinois’s soils remain among the most productive in the world, but the long-term viability of such intensive production is now a matter of national concern. Women farmers, who now own most of the farm land in the United States, are at the heart of this debate. In 2003, Illinois Extension educator Ruth Hambleton launched Annie’s Project, an organization dedicated to supporting women in agriculture and highlighting their voices.

Illinois has not only driven innovation in agriculture but also led the way in preserving Midwestern agricultural history. Museums, steam shows, and historic sites throughout the state continue to teach the stories of Illinois agriculture. Institutions like the Museum of the Grand Prairie in Mahomet document rural life, while the Illinois State Museum’s Audio-Video Barn, part of its Oral History of Illinois Agriculture project, makes hundreds of interviews with farmers accessible online. Similarly, the Farm, Field, and Fireside Collection at the University of Illinois digitizes historical farm newspapers and magazines, such as Prairie Farmer. These resources safeguard the voices and stories of the past and help us understand the enduring significance of agriculture in shaping the region’s identity and the nation’s development.

**Jenny Barker-Devine is a professor of history at Illinois College in Jacksonville. She is the author of “On Behalf of the Family Farm: Iowa Farm Women’s Activism Since 1945.” She is also the current vice president of the Illinois State Historical Society.

Journeys of Freedom Seekers in Illinois

By Caroline M. Kisiel

Journeys of the Underground Railroad (UGRR) — where escaping enslaved individuals traveled precarious routes out of bondage toward freedom — are not ones we typically associate with the state of Illinois. Harriet Tubman, the UGRR’s celebrated champion, is a story to commemorate as the nation celebrates 250 years. But this is also an appropriate time to recognize underrepresented journeys of the variety of freedom seekers who traveled to and through and lived lives within the state of Illinois.

While established as a free state in 1818, Illinois was largely hostile toward the enslaved who sought to change their circumstances, as well as to indentured servants and free African Americans. This is due to the legacy of slavery in the Illinois Country under the French inherited by those living in the Illinois Territory (1809-1818) and carried on by Americans into the early years of statehood. Although Illinois passed its constitution as a free state, many early Illinois leaders were proslavery and sought to expand slavery in the state, believing this would support land development and economic growth. The harsh Illinois Black Codes in effect from 1819 to 1865 restricted the rights and movement of enslaved, indentured, and free African Americans who lived in or sought residence or passage through Illinois. This context complicates the twenty-first-century narrative of Illinois as a beacon of freedom — the first state to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment that fully abolished slavery after the Civil War, and the home of Abraham Lincoln and other champions of freedom. Yet this complex history means that the stories of individual African Americans and communities who persevered despite the hostile environment in Illinois are even more crucial to elevate.

Thanks in large part to the historical research of Glennette Tilley Turner and Larry McClellan, we know that there were many ways individuals in bondage sought freedom via Illinois. Some saw Illinois as a destination for settlement, others were in bondage in Illinois prior to statehood, some were free and struggled to maintain their freedom in Illinois, and others traveled through on their way to Canada. Although scholarship about freedom seekers in Illinois has blossomed, because of the illegality of escaping slavery and UGRR activity — both for those seeking freedom and anyone assisting them — records of activities of freedom seekers are challenging to find. Yet the stories we know concerning Illinois are worthy of note.

Fleeing from bondage occurred since the dawn of slavery across the nation, but activity increased in nineteenth-century Illinois as abolition sentiment grew, particularly in the wake of the murder of Alton abolitionist and newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy in 1837. The examples chosen here center on the early statehood period, illuminating a variety of journeys taken by freedom seekers. These stories are not exhaustive but illustrative, and readers will be directed to sources for further discovery.

Many towns across the state became known as safe harbors — Alton, Africa in Williamson County, Brooklyn, Cairo, Chester, Jacksonville, Miller Grove and Rocky Fork, to name a few. Some were towns founded by free Black people, others were predominantly white, with residents who developed antipathy toward slavery and provided shelter, and yet others were biracial communities. Black churches were established across the state and served as safe spaces for those fleeing bondage. Chicago became a hub for abolitionists. Free Black John Jones and his wife, Mary Richardson Jones, were known to harbor freedom seekers in their Chicago home, and Jones was instrumental in getting the Illinois Black Codes repealed in 1865. Near the city, Jan and Aagje Ton’s farm in the Calumet region in south Chicago, Avis and Israel Blodgett’s home in Downers Grove, Sheldon Peck’s home in Lombard, and Wheaton College were all known havens. The presence of these towns and locales across the state and the activity we know of illuminates not only the magnitude of freedom seekers who journeyed to and through all parts of the state but also those who lived their lives in these places and took considerable risks to assist them. The geography of Illinois also played a role, with river borders near slave states and Indian trails and internal rivers serving as routes traveled by freedom seekers.

The community at New Philadelphia, Illinois, illustrates many facets of the quest for freedom. “Free” Frank McWorter, as he was known, an enslaved man from Kentucky, industriously used his earnings in the saltpeter business to purchase freedom for his wife, Lucy, in 1817, ensuring his children would be born free. Purchasing his own freedom in 1819 and his son’s in 1829, they moved to Illinois in 1830 and began purchasing land in 1835. “In total, Free Frank freed sixteen of his relatives (including himself), at a combined cost of $14,000 (about $500,000 in 2023 dollars). After his death in 1854, Free Frank’s sons continued this effort.” An early biracial town on the Illinois frontier where white and Black residents worked together, New Philadelphia was a haven for freedom seekers, and an example of Black entrepreneurialism and generational wealth-building in Illinois.

Nance Legins-Costley was an indentured servant originally from Kaskaskia who, at age thirteen, took the bold step of suing her indenturer, indicating she had not agreed to the contract. Following multiple appeals over thirteen years, she eventually won her suit when the Illinois supreme court declared her cause just in 1841. Defended by Abraham Lincoln, this ruling meant the three children she then had, now all living in Pekin, also became free. Nance’s long legal journey set a precedent for others, ending indentured servitude in Illinois.

Gilbert Burres of Albion illustrates how free Black people sought to assert and maintain their freedom, and help others. Free African Americans were required to carry Certificates of Freedom at all times and register themselves at their local courthouse. Burres complied with these restrictions, registering himself and his family members regularly over the course of thirty-six years. Albion was in southeastern Illinois, where proslavery sentiment and kidnappings were a constant threat. In a rare, published example from 1824 demonstrating Burres’s character and actions, we have documentation that he defended another African American in the community from kidnappers, reportedly declaring he would not give up Sally, “never while I have a drop of blood to defend her.”

Caroline Quarlls, a sixteen-year-old enslaved girl from St. Louis, embarked on a remarkable solo journey via the Mississippi River northward to Milwaukee, through Will and McHenry counties and Chicago, aided by local families, abolitionists, and free African Americans. Eventually reaching Canada via Detroit, she settled in freedom. Documentation of her journey exemplifies her courage and persistence, and the support of white and Black abolitionists and sympathizers.

Free African Americans building and defending communities and aiding those journeying toward freedom, indentured servants using the law to secure freedom, and enslaved individuals finding help and guidance in their quests for freedom — these stories are representative of many others in Illinois and show agency and tenacity among African Americans. Despite hostility in Illinois, Black and biracial communities were established and grew, and actively supported the cause of countless freedom seekers.

While Illinois does have a complicated past connected to slavery and hostility toward African Americans, as the United States celebrates 250 years, the stories of Illinois freedom seekers add to the rich tapestry of resilience worthy of celebration in our state.

**Caroline Kisiel is an associate professor in the School of Continuing and Professional Studies at DePaul University and an Illinois Humanities Road Scholar. She writes and teaches about slavery and abolition in early Illinois, is completing a book on the antislavery efforts of early Albion, Illinois, and recently published “On the Brink of Slavery and Freedom: Two Hundred Years After the 1823-1824 Illinois Constitutional Convention Controversy” in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (Winter 2024).

Lincoln in the Middle of the American Experiment

By James M. Cornelius

The year 2025 marked eight score and seven years since Lincoln and Douglas debated the meaning of a republic and who shall be sovereign. It is always time to think it through again, right here from the middle.

Evoking the connections between Abraham Lincoln and the nation’s founding, 250 years ago, is not difficult, because he spoke so forcefully about his belief in the principles of that founding. “I have never had a thought which did not stem from the principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence,” he told an audience in Philadelphia, at Independence Hall, on Washington’s Birthday, 1861. To picture him as part of a generation in which Anglo-American ideals vaulted ahead takes a little more casting about. His profile helps fill a cultural silhouette with birth-year contemporaries such as Darwin, Emerson, Gladstone, Holmes Sr., and Tennyson, yet Lincoln may have been the one to tip the scales in favor of the American national reputation around the world as a beacon of civilization.

Closer in, he shares a region — Central Illinois — which as others have also pointed out, produced so many key figures for the state’s and the Union’s preservation and improvement during the 1860s. Some went east: Orville Browning (from Quincy), Lyman Trumbull (Alton), David Davis (Bloomington), Stephen A. Douglas (ever-itinerant); some stayed home: Richard Oglesby (Decatur), Richard Yates (Jacksonville); some went west: Edward D. Baker (to Oregon) and lesser-known neighbors or Todd relatives whom Lincoln appointed to key posts, to perpetuate their shared Illinois-grown certitude that farm, factory, commerce, railroad and republican spine would stabilize even the roughest ground.

Lincoln’s individual skills and outlook do not tower over all other factors around him, yet he solidified the American experiment’s somewhat gelid early pronouncements by his skill with words. His workshop was politics and his tool was the law, some of it made explicit in the Founding Fathers’ drafts, some of it only implicit and growing by interpretation under new circumstance. Central Illinois was a seedbed for that growth, where judicial precedents from New York or Massachusetts had to be adapted for the greater distances, the seasons, especially the vast waterways of the nation’s middle. Where Lincoln lived among neighbors from the Deep South, the Upper South, the mid-Atlantic, New England, and a half-dozen European nations, as well as a small number of long free or recently free Blacks, disputation was bound to arise. Perhaps Jefferson foresaw this mixture, in the 1780s when he calculated what were apparently the million square miles of land drained by the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers, having first sculpted with his quill “all men are created equal” and “the consent of the governed” as elements of natural law.

“The governed” move about, including the Lincolns. The committee who drafted the Declaration came from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia; Abraham’s direct ancestors hailed from three of those five states, and to the extent that Jefferson represented both the Deep South and the Upland South on that committee, Abraham took the baton from him. (Favoring Ann Rutledge, offspring of South Carolinians, he nearly formed a new union with that furthest section.) We ought not forget that Lincoln was a) born during Jefferson’s presidency, and b) the direct product of a region which both Washington and Jefferson had eyed as future America. No section, at any rate, could go governed or hemmed in by another section. That is where we stand today, so that fealty to one’s state and to one’s nation seem still to be in balance.

Indeed, in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, another piece of Jefferson’s work, “the policy of prohibiting slavery in new territory originated,” as Lincoln averred in his seminal 1854 speech at Peoria. This point he made in order to counter the charge that the Founders held a hands-off approach on the topic. By 1848, thanks to that legal seed, in “five states, and five millions of free, enterprising people, we have before us the rich fruits of this policy.” Let us then, Lincoln exhorted his crowd, “re-adopt the Declaration of Independence.” On this basis between 1861 and 1872 Lincoln and his followers forced the issue, first freeing formerly enslaved men and then giving them the vote, in the fastest shift from helot to citizen in world history.

The western states, Illinois most of all, also grew astonishingly fast because people like Lincoln held true to the original conception of the nation. The period when Blacks were legally barred from entering the state spanned less than a decade in practice. Human nature had left this and other tree stumps in the midst of the national road, but Lincoln was pulling them out, by close attention to the law, so that others might pass. Oligarchy and its spawn, aristocracy, ceased to be a permanent feature of society in the South. As he said in Peoria, “Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it.”

**James M. Cornelius, who earned his PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was visiting assistant professor in the Illinois History and Lincoln Collections at the University of Illinois Library, Urbana, 2001-2005, and curator of the Lincoln Collection at the Presidential Library, Springfield, 2007-2018.

Geology of Illinois

By Elizabeth I. Kershisnik

Many people think of Illinois as one flat expanse of corn and soybean fields, and they are mostly correct. In a 2014 study, the Geographical Review found Illinois to be the second-flattest state in the contiguous United States, right behind Florida. How did Illinois end up so flat? In this article, I will discuss the geological record of Illinois, highlight some of the key structural features, and explain how glaciation played a major role in shaping the landscape of Illinois. The oldest rocks in Illinois come from the Precambrian basement complex. Not a great deal is known about these rocks because they are buried so deep, and there is very little economic incentive to drill to that depth. What is known comes from a small amount of extremely deep drill holes and remote sensing data. These rocks consist primarily of granite plutons (large igneous rocks that form when magma cools and crystallizes underneath the Earth surface), granodiorite (igneous rock composed of feldspar, quartz, and mafic minerals), and rhyolite (high content of silica, some sodium, aluminum, and potassium). The presence of granite and rhyolite indicate signs of volcanic activity roughly 1.5 billion years ago.

In the Paleozoic Era, 570 to 245 million years ago, most of Illinois’s landscape started to sink and fill with a shallow tropical ocean. Two key elements were formed from this event. The Illinois Basin located in the state’s southeastern quarter is an accumulation of Paleozoic sediment. Over a period of 300 million years, layers and layers of marine sediment settled on the gradually sinking ocean floor creating a perfect environment for raw petroleum. The second element was the formation of St. Peter sandstone which was deposited around the coastline during the Ordovician period. These deposits are found in the northwestern and north-central counties of the state, with the largest mining operation near Ottawa. St. Peter sandstone is prized for its purity of silica oxide (99.85%), grain size that allows for easy separation, and thickness of over one hundred feet. Due to these attributes, the Ottawa mine has historically served as a major silica source in the United States.

The Cenozoic Era, 66 million to the present, was dominated by glaciations. Three major glacial stages mark the Pleistocene epoch: the Pre-Illinoian stage, the Illinoian and the Wisconsinan. Very little physical remains exist of the Pre-Illinoian because later glaciers and erosion from wind and water have destroyed most of the evidence. The existence of the Illinoian stage, on the other hand, is much more evident. During this phase, the ice sheet advanced to its southernmost point in America near Carbondale. These Pleistocene glaciers radically changed the lands they covered. As the glaciers advanced, they filled and leveled the landscape. As the ice melted, rock debris was dropped at the points of melting. When the glaciers were stagnant, these rocks accumulated into a pile called a ground or an end moraine. The relatively flat and rolling terrain that ripples out from Lake Michigan are indication of these moraines.

Only approximately 15 percent of Illinois was not covered by glacial ice: the northwestern most part of the state (most of Jo Daviess County and the northwest quadrant of Carroll County), named the Wisconsin Driftless Section, and the southernmost part of the state, just a few miles north of the Shawnee Hills. Geologists were able to identify these areas due to the lack of glacial erratic rocks. (An erratic is a rock that differs from the type of native rocks present in the area.) Because glaciation missed these areas, they are comprised of very diverse physical landscapes from bluffs, canyons, palisades and ravines to rolling hills. The Wisconsin Driftless Section has the highest elevation point in Illinois named Charles Mound, which sits at 1,257 feet above sea level.

In the southernmost part of the state, the physical landscape is radically different from the flat rolling farmland to the north. Glaciers missed this area, but geological upheavals did not. Between 1 billion and 570 million years ago, the southern part of Illinois experienced a continental rift, which created long narrow, continental troughs but failed in ripping apart the continent. The southern part of the Illinois Basin contains grabens (a graben is a trough generated from the displacement of a block of land downward in relation to its sides): the Dixon Springs Graben in Pope County and the Rock Creek Graben in Hardin County. The geological upheavals that created the rocky topography in Southern Illinois provide visitors views of ravines, cliffs and waterfalls.

As one can see, Illinois is not just corn and soybean fields. Crossing this great state one may encounter a very diverse physical landscape. For Americans seeking a diverse and unique natural environment, the Prairie State offers a montage of canyons and palisades in the northwest corner, the rolling moraines in central Illinois, and finally the rocky cliffs and outcroppings in the south.

**Elizabeth Kershisnik is a distinguished professor of chemistry at Oakton College. She has coauthored numerous articles in Illinois Heritage as well as presented on aspects of state geology, flora, and fauna at the Conference on Illinois History, the Northern Illinois Regional History Conference, and the Midwest History Association Annual Conference.

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