Here is a short shelf of books that
explore in some way the history of mid-Illinois, as I promised in “Understanding our brave new world through the old one.” All are still in print or, if
not, still fairly easy to track down in good used shops such as Springfield’s Prairie Archives.
Among the anthologies aimed at the
popular audience is A Springfield Reader:
Historical Views of the Illinois Capital, 1818–1976, a collection of
excerpts from journalism, pamphlets, and memoirs by various authors that was
edited by James Krohe Jr. (Springfield, Ill.: Sangamon County Historical
Society, 1976).
While Angle never essayed a full-length narrative biography
of Lincoln, he did contrive to write a
biography of the city in which he lived for twenty-three years—Here I Have Lived: A History of Lincoln’s
Springfield, 1821–1865, published in Springfield 1935 by the Abraham
Lincoln Association and again in 1971 by Chicago’s Abraham Lincoln Bookshop.
Critic John Hallwas calls Thomas’ Lincoln’s New Salem (Springfield,
Ill.: Abraham Lincoln Association, 1934) a “superb achievement” and “a
stylistic gem.” Hallwas adds that this extended essay blends cultural
description and biography to produce a portrait in which the man and the place
are melded; just as Lincoln’s life shaped the later book about the village, the
village had shaped Lincoln’s life.
Another fine town biography is The Social Order of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois
1825–70 by Don Harrison Doyle (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1978), which is an academic but still readable history of that interesting
city. One review spoke for many others when he called the book “a welcome addition to the slowly growing
number of scholarly histories of smaller American cities.”
They Broke the
Prairie by Earnest Elmo Calkins earned a placed among the best books about
Illinois cities. This history of the Galesburg and of Knox College was first
published in 1937, on the occasion of Knox’s and Galesburg’s sesquicentennial,
and was reprinted in 1971. In 1989 the University of Illinois Press brought out
a new edition with an introduction by Rodney O. Davis. While it is dated and
marred by the prejudices of its era, it remains worth reading.
Juliet E. K. Walker investigates the rise and fall of New
Philadelphia in Pike County and the career of its remarkable promoter in Free
Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier (Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1983).
A good introduction to the episode for the neutral is Robert
Bruce Flanders, Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1965), which is less about God than about town-making and
politics in Illinois.
Peter Cartwright, Legendary Frontier Preacher by Robert Bray (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2005) is the first full-length biography of this most famous of the
early nineteenth-century Methodist circuit-riding preachers who also was a
politician and literary figure.
Christiana Holmes Tillson was a well-educated
Massachusettsan who in the 1820s joined her husband for their new life in Montgomery
County. Her A Woman’s Story of Pioneer Illinois was privately published
in the 1870s. A 1919 edition was reprinted in 1995 with a new introduction by Kay J. Carr (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1995). I reviewed it in Another
woman’s story.
Rebecca Burlend
arrived in the Military Tract in 1831 from Yorkshire with her husband and
children. They set about making a farm on eighty acres worth of Newburg
Township of Pike County. An account of her adventures appeared in
England in 1848 and later as A True Picture of Emigration, one of the
outstanding accounts of frontier life in Illinois. The edition that brought it
fame featured an introduction by Milo Milton Quaife (Chicago: Lakeside Press, R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co., 1936).
Eliza Farnham’s Life
in Prairie Land (New York: Arno Press, 1972) recalls how that
woman came west to Illinois in the spring of 1836 from upstate New York,
eventually to wed and begin a family in the Tazewell County village of Tremont.
That part of Illinois was just emerging from its frontier phase, and the life
Farnham describes—deaths of her sister and her own first-born, battles against
disease and wild animals, the daunting labor of building a homestead—reminds us
how inadequate is the word “settling” to describe the process of making homes
on a frontier.
Carl Sandburg’s memoirs of his boyhood in Galesburg, Always
the Young Strangers (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1953) and Ever
the Winds of Chance (Urbana
: University of Illinois Press, 1983) are affectionate and rich; they
were reprinted in 1991 by Harvest Books.
Historian John Mack Faragher examines the frontier era
through an early Sangamon County settlement south of Springfield in Sugar
Creek: Life On the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). Christopher N. Breiseth of Wilkes
College was not alone in finding it “an impressive social history.”
The Sangamo Frontier:
History and Archaeology in the Shadow of Lincoln by Robert Mazrim (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007) is an informal report of many years of
archeological excavations through which the author brings to life the frontier
era of the region.
Koster: Americans
in Search of Their Prehistoric Past by Stuart Struever and Felicia Antonelli Holton (Garden City, N.Y. :
Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979) recounts the discovery and exploration of that
important archeological site in Greene County. The book set a new standard for
popular works on anthropology.
French and
Indians of the Illinois River by Nehemiah
Matson (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2001) first appeared in 1874 and was reissued as one of the
publisher’s Shawnee Classics, with a foreword by
Rodney O. Davis. Davis
notes that Matson combined the
attributes of a scholar with the more dubious traits of a salesman and
promoter, but that his account based on his own interviews is invaluable. Many of the events he describes took places
in mid-Illinois.
Judith A. Franke’s French Peoria and the Illinois Country
1673–1846 (Springfield: Illinois State Museum, 1995) is the authoritative
account of that very interesting period. The French traders who came to
Illinois looking for pelts brought with them missionaries looking for soul.
Allen G. Bogue’s From Prairie to Corn Belt: Farming on
the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1963, reprinted in 1994 by the Iowa State
University Press in Ames) is justly respected as an essential work on its
subject. Making the Corn Belt: A Geographical History of Middle-Western
Agriculture by John C. Hudson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994)
persuasively explains how corn cultivation came to dominate mid-Illinois farming.
John Thompson’s
study, Wetlands Drainage, River
Modification, and Sectoral Conflict in the Lower Illinois Valley, 1890–1930 (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2002) has an unappetizing title, but it recounts an
important story not previously treated by scholars, namely the drainage of
wetlands along the lower Illinois River for farming that changed land and water
relationships, destroyed a major riverine fishing industry, and severely
damaged a renowned waterfowl hunting grounds.
Robert P. Sutton examined mid-Illinois’s nineteenth century utopian communities in the larger
Midwestern context in Heartland Utopias (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois
University Press, 2009).
Paul Elmen’s Wheat Flour Messiah: Eric Jansson of Bishop
Hill (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976) provides an
excellent account of the religious vision that gave birth to that colony.
The first volume of John Bartlow Martin’s The Life of
Adlai E. Stevenson, subtitled Adlai
Stevenson of Illinois (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.,
1976) is generally honored as the definitive biography covering the Illinois
years.
Mark A. Plummer’s
Lincoln’s Rail Splitter: Governor Richard J. Oglesby (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2001) introduces readers to the man who was Illinois
governor from 1865 to 1869 and again from 1885 to 1889 and who—no less
significantly in the mid of the larger public—came up with the rail-splitter image for Abraham Lincoln’s
successful presidential campaign of 1860.
Joan Gittens recounts
the pendulum swings between scandal and reform back to indifference and neglect
that characterize the State of Illinois’s fitful attempts to do right by
vulnerable children; her Poor Relations:
The Children of the State of Illinois 1818–1990 (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1994) spends much time discussing the important state
institutions in Normal, Lincoln, and Jacksonville.
Women, Work, and Worship
in Lincoln’s Country: The Dumville Family Letters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016) presents
the Dumvilles, mother and daughters, who lived in the Morgan and Macoupin
counties of the mid-1800s, and in the process teach us much about life in that
time and place. I reviewed it in Old letters.
This article appears in Dec 15-21, 2016.
