No one who’s seen it is likely to forget it. I refer to the ending to Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind when the aliens’ mothership dropped from the sky to land on an isolated Wyoming butte. Imagine something that unexpected, that wondrous, landing in Sangamon County.
Lots of people thought that wondrous did happen, when CyrusOne, a big data center developer, announced that it wanted to build a hyperscale facility in southwest Sangamon County. Some locals were terrified, others curious, all were awed by its scale. The CyrusOne data factory would occupy some 240 acres, keep 500 very happy union craftsmen busy for five years building it, and at full build-out would consume enough electricity to power several hundred thousand homes, which puts it in a different class from every other data factory now operating in the state.
Sangamon has never seen the like. Except it has. Twice. And within living memory.
In the 1960s Chicago’s electric utility, Commonwealth Edison, needed another power plant. Power plants in those days needed coal, so why not build one on top of a coal mine, specifically Peabody Coal’s No. 10 mine on the Sangamon-Christian County line.
Looking back, the Kincaid power generating station makes the proposed CyrusOne facility look like a garden shed. Its $100 million construction cost in 1967 is the equivalent of $734 million in today’s money; the construction of CyrusOne’s Springfield data center will require about $500 million. The spaceship Kincaid required 12,000 acres of land, which is about 50 times the planned footprint of the CyrusOne project.
“Nickels and dimes,” thought many a Sangamonian in 1967. Thirty years or so earlier, deliverance from the Great Depression came unexpectedly from the sky in the form of a radio flash about Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The government needed bombs and artillery shells in a hurry. Of all the plant sites in all the counties in all the world, government planners settled on one in eastern Sangamon County on Route 36 just on the Springfield side of Illiopolis.
CyrusOne chose Talkington Township for its plant because of the presence there of a high-voltage line sufficient to deliver power in utility-scale gulps. The infrastructure that made the U.S. 36 site appealing also had a line – the Interurban Railroad track that ran parallel to the highway between the Springfield and Decatur that could carry commuting workers to and from both.
The two plants, later consolidated under the Sangamon Ordnance Plant, spread across about 20,000 acres. (A standard township in Illinois covers 23,040 acres.) They employed 12,000 people, of whom maybe half lived in Sangamon County. In a county that was then home to only 118,000, that was huge. Economically the Kincaid project also was like a dropped bomb, only instead of shrapnel, it threw money in all direction for miles across Sangamon and Christian counties. At its peak, the mine and power plant together employed roughly 1,300 people.
That paid for a lot of nice pickups, but it did not transform Sangamon County or even come close. Now outmoded, Kincaid will be shut down in 2027 and its land reused as a solar farm. Out at Illiopolis, the War Department closed the ordnance plants when the war ended and its workers were absorbed by a booming postwar economy. Most of the land eventually was farmed again as if it had never been there.
Except. A key component of the Kincaid infrastructure was extra-high voltage (345 kV) power lines strung across southern Sangamon to deliver its output to the wider world. No one could have imagined that in 60 years those humming wires would become the basis of a regional 345-kV network that CyrusOne could someday tap to power robot brains for our AI overlords. That network is also the reason Illinois’s largest solar farm – the Double Black Diamond – was sited in that neck of the woods, a project of poetic engineering that will carry Sangamon from its old future energy to its future one, from burning ancient swamp forests to make electricity to stealing it from the sun.
Spaceship projects don’t change the world. High-voltage lines can. So can sharp steel plows. The steel moldboard plow that turned the prairie grass into cornfields started a process that took farming from feeding one’s family to feeding markets that then drove the farmhand off the farms and into the factories making the machines that put him out of business and, in the process, turned Illinois from a rural to a urban society. That is the one thing the past teaches us – you never know.
James Krohe’s book, Corn Kings & One-Horse Thieves, won the Illinois State Historical Society’s 2018 Annual Award for a Scholarly Publication.
This article appears in August 6-12, 2026.
