 The Y block in downtown Springfield lies along the now-buried course of the Town Branch of Spring Creek. That has implications for the redevelopment of that block, as I noted in Wet Dream.Â
In our paper of Dec. 24-Jan. 6, 1977, I published a feature article in which the old Town Branch was described and its intersections with modern Springfield pointed out. That piece, “Touring
Springfield as it was 150 years ago,” is not available from any other online source, but reappears from the past below.Â
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There’s a place in Springfield that few people who
live here have seen, although most of them have visited it hundreds, maybe
thousands of times. The place is the valley of the Town Branch of Spring Creek,
whose charms seduced a lone hunter named Elisha Kelly into settling there in
1819 and thus founding the city of Springfield.
There’s no mystery in
the valley’s invisibility, unless civilization may be considered a mystery.
People who live in cities navigate by manmade landmarks —
“peoplemarks,” as it were. They lose touch with topography and their
sense of terrain. Buildings and paved streets tend to disguise the natural face
of a landscape and to confuse unpracticed eyes. It is still possible, though,
to see this part of Springfield not as it is but as it was, 150 years ago, when
Kelly and those who followed him began settling along the banks of the Town
Branch. Retracing the path of that long-forgotten stream doesn’t cover much
ground — it’s a three-mile walk at most — but it covers a long, long way in
time.
Paul Angle tells this
tale in Here I Have Lived: Â “[In 1818] a bachelor named
Elisha Kelly left North Carolina to settle in Illinois. He built a small cabin
in Macoupin County, but since he was very fond of hunting he ranged the country
for many miles in all directions. One day he wandered into a ravine in which a
small, clear stream ran northward to empty into Spring Creek. Large numbers of
deer passed up and down, and Kelly thought it a hunter’s paradise.”
Kelly came back a year
later with his family and built a cabin on a hill overlooking this stream,
planting the seed that quickly sprouted into the town of Springfield.
Pioneering and poetizing rarely went together in the early nineteenth century,
so the stream itself was plainly named the Town Branch. It formed to the
southeast of Kelly’s homesite, near what is now Ninth and Cook, the child of a
dozen unnamed rivulets which drained the grassland there. The branch then
flowed in a generally northwesterly direction toward its meeting with Spring
Creek, a mile or so north of Jefferson at Bruns Lane.
The exact size of
Kelly’s “ravine” varied with the describer. An early settler named
Zimri Enos, reconstructing the site as an old man, recalled it as ‘”a mile
in length east and west and a half mile north and south”; John T. Stuart,
a law partner of Abraham Lincoln, defined it more generously in an 1881 memoir
as being two miles wide. Modern topographical maps support Enos’ more modest
description, though the Town Branch valley spreads out at its westernmost end
until it covers nearly a mile and a half from one side to another. But it
wasn’t its size which attracted that first generation of Springfieldians; what
Enos called a “handsome undulating prairie nook” was an almost ideal
habitation for humans.
The valley of the Town
Branch was, with due respect to Angle, more than a ravine. It was (and is)
flatter, for one thing, and more subtle in its shape. Its rolling flanks were
etched by tiny feeder streams that dribbled into it every three or four hundred
yards. These feeder streams, described by Enos as “never-failing spring
branches,” drained perhaps three-quarters of the future site of
Springfield. One of them sliced across the ground later set aside for the town
square, running from the square’s northeast corner southwest until it emptied
into the Town Branch near where the statehouse now stands. Others acquired
names in the usual pioneer fashion — from whose property or what landmark they
passed. Kelly’s Branch, which ran west out of the high ground around Gehrmann
Park, and the Mill Branch were named that way.
You can’t see the Town
Branch anymore, at least not the part-of it that runs through the city. The stream
was filled in when the city converted it to a sewer years ago. It is still
possible, however, to trace its course and, to a degree, even to reconstruct
the shape of its valley. The job requires imagination though — an ability to
mentally strip the city of its asphalt-and-brick mask; to see cougar and bobcat
where only their Detroit-made namesakes roam today; to, in effect, walk
backwards in time 150 years.
The trek starts at
Ninth and Cook. The ground is fairly level here, approximately 590 feet above
sea level in the lowest spots and rising so gradually that a five- or six-block
walk north or south will leave you standing no higher than the 600 foot level.
This is where the Town Branch was born and began its three-mile journey to
Spring Creek. •
The stream bed ran west
for a block (to Eighth) before veering northwest, cutting diagonally across the
sidewalks and parking lots that civilization later put in its way. The low spot
at Sixth and Edwards is one clue that the stream used to pass there. The area
is still a natural watercourse, as Illinois Bell found out a couple of years
ago when heavy rains collected there and flooded out their new electronic
switching facility. The valley rims run parallel to the stream bed along this
stretch, standing twenty to thirty feet above it. The rise is not abrupt. The
highest ground on the southern rim is no closer than Second and Lawrence and
the northern side doesn’t crest until Ninth and Adams.
The Town Branch
continued northwestward, again cutting diagonally across city blocks. It passed
the Governor’s Mansion on the north along Jackson between Fourth and Fifth;
springs that once bubbled up from the woods where the mansion now stands
emptied into the stream here. The shape of the old valley is confirmed by a
quick glance north and south along Fourth Street from Jackson. The site lies at
the bottom of two long, low hills, one climbing roughly twenty vertical feet
toward Reynolds, the other rising just as gently toward Canedy.
The grounds of the
present statehouse border another stretch of the Town Branch’s ancient route,
near Second and Monroe. (“Ancient” is used here in an historical
sense. Judged by geological time the life of the Town Branch is almost
indescribably recent — a second or two on the geological clock.) Elisha Kelly’s
brother John used to look down upon this spot from his cabin, which was perched
on the crest 6T the bluff upon which
Jefferson Street now runs.
From the statehouse the
stream continued moving steadily northwest, except for a brief northerly job as
it passed Adams Street. There it skirted on its eastern side the eminence where
now sit the Internal Revenue Service headquarters and the present Springfield
High School.
As the stream
approached its terminus west of town its valley grew more rugged. The greater
volume of water washing down through its lower reaches was stronger, more
irresistible in its relentless chewing away of the bluffs through which it
flowed. MacArthur Boulevard north of Jefferson, for instance, sinks more than
fifty vertical feet in the space of two or three blocks. This is “Soap Box
Derby Hill,” the Town Branch’s gift to the children of Springfield.
The land near Douglas
Park is more clearly shaped than any since the stream’s beginning, in part
because, being aÂ
park, it  hasÂ
not yet been
“civilized.” The old stream bed here is easy to spot. The
still-wooded hills of the park form its eastern flank; on the other side the
steeply-banked valley wall is covered with yards, parking lots, buildings.
The filled-in stream
bed itself carries the tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad. The B&O,
seeking an easy entry into the city from the west, took advantage of the gentle
grades along the stream-cut gulleys and laid its tracks there. The B&O runs
along the Town Branch from Douglas Park west all the way to SpringÂ
Creek — one Â
more favor Springfieldians owe the Town Branch.
When Elisha Kelly
pulled his weary bones over the crest of the Town Branch valley in 1819, much
of the landscape was under timber. Like most such streams in the new state, the
Town Branch was bordered on both slopes by trees. Zimri Enos wrote:
“[Springfield was) bordered on the north and west by heavy timber and on
the south by a number of beautiful groves of young forest trees, of pin oak,
elm, cherry, and hackberry, which were festooned with grape vines and fringed
with plum and haw bushes, crabapples, hazel nuts, elders, and blackÂberries,
and encircled by millions of strawberry vines.” This was as close as Kelly
and his like would ever get to Eden on Earth, and only they got even that
close, because within a generation it was gone.
The forests extended
“as high as Sixth Street” according to Stuart, and were “the
harbor of deer and wolves.” It’s hard to imagine that time, when oaks grew
thicker than parking meters in downtown Springfield. The neighborhood around
Washington Street between Lewis and Pasfield, where the village’s first log
cabin schoolhouse was built in the 1820s, was heavily wooded; the schoolhouse
was set in a clearing and children fed its stove with wood collected nearby.
And, on what are now the grounds of the statehouse, there rose the
“luxuriant” woods of Mather’s Grove, a spot which as late as 1865 was
described as having “a growth of natural forest trees [which] gives it an
air of rural beauty nowhere surpassed.”
On the valley’s
northern wall the timber ended near where Klein Street is today. The first
settlement of Springfield took root along the high ground overlooking the creek
bottom here. The settlers built along the edges of the timber, where they had
easy access to the grassy flatlands for grazing and (some) cultivation without
putting too long a walk between them and the woods. This proximity to the trees
was essential. Trees offered shelter for animals from storms and summer heat.
They provided wood for fires and fences, barrel staves and cabins. They
provided food — nuts mostly from hickory arid walnut trees. And they provided
game; this was a crucial consideration for men like Kelly, who were
unenthusiastic farmers at t best. Elijah lies remembered that
“deer were very plenty. They trailed through the town and up the Town
Branch, halting in a grove where now stands the Governor’s Mansion; and if we
wanted fresh venison for breakfast, the Kelly boys would go to the grove early and
kill a deer.”
A few fragments of
these forests survived into the 1880s in a handful of places — like the lawns
of the Governor’s Mansion — that were immune from the relentless cutting that
characterized nineteenth-century Springfield builders. But even those
eventually came down. Today the only place left where one can see any part of
the Town Branch’s original forest cover is in Douglas Park. There stand the few
survivors of what was once an army of oaks, maples and cottonwoods, the
vanishing guard of a vanished stream. Like the Town Branch itself, these trees
are only shadows of what this “handsome undulating prairie nook” once
was.
The stream snakes
northwest from MacArthur having passed Douglas Park on the north. In the
vicinity of Lincoln Avenue it resumes its nineteenth-century form for the first
time since its beginning at Ninth and Cook. The Town Branch here still runs on
the surface, though it has been partially paved as part of its conversion to a
storm sewer. The terrain here actually is a ravine, with steep, sharply-incised
sides. The Town Branch turns north, then west, then north again as it passes
Addams School and finally joins Spring Creek.
Its water isn’t very clear anymore, and its channel,
where it hasn’t been bricked over and buried, is clogged with junk. But the
Town Branch is still there after 150 years. There aren’t many manmade
structures that old left standing in the city. The old Town Branch may not be
pretty anymore, but it’s persistent.Â
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This article appears in Sep 4-10, 2014.
