JACKSONVILLE AND MORGAN COUNTY

AN HISTORICAL REVIEW

BY FRANK J. HEINL

The first settlers came to Morgan county, of which Jacksonville is the county seat, in the autumn of 1819, just a few months after the Kickapoo Indians ceded their claims to lands in central Illinois to the United States.

While the first settlers, Colonel Seymour Kellogg, his brother, Captain Elisha Kellogg, both of whom had won their military titles in the War of 1812, their families and Charles Collins, were from the East, the pioneer settlers came almost wholly from the Cotton States and for several decades the population of the county was overwhelmingly southern. The founding of Illinois College, in 1829, drew New Englanders to its faculty and, soon after, a number of New Englanders, in no way connected with the college, located in Jacksonville. These New Englanders gave the frontier town a decidedly Puritan caste.

Settlers rushed into the region so that the population, which was 19 at the close of 1819, was about 1000 when the county was established, January 31, 1823, and about 4,000 when the plat of Jacksonville was recorded, April 26, 1825. In 1830 the census gave the county a population of 12,714 making it the second county in the State in population. In 1840 with its 19,547 people it was the most populous county in Illinois.

Jacksonville grew slowly until 1830 when the census gave it a population of 446. After that year people flocked to the town and it became, in many respects, the most important town in Illinois. John M. Peck estimated its population in 1833 as 1,800 not including college students and Truman M. Post thought it had 3,000 people that year. In 1840 its population was about 1,900.

Jacksonville appeared to Henry Asbury in 1834 as the brightest and largest town in the State. William Cullen Bryant, in 1832, found the houses in Springfield not so good as those in Jacksonville. Allen Johnson in his "Stephen A. Douglas" says Jacksonville, in 1833, was “hardly more than a crowded village on the outposts of civilized Illinois," but Frank E. Stevens in his "Stephen A. Douglas, Autobiography," says "Jacksonville was then the most important city in the State. The ablest lawyers of the State practiced there. It was the pole star among Illinois cities. Everything which had political ambition behind it pointed to Jacksonville."

Truman M. Post, in 1833, found its 3,000 inhabitants crowded into log cabins, due to the fact that it was an extreme outpost towards the wilderness of the northwest, with the excitement and activity of enterprise and speculation universal. In 1833, according to John M. Peck, the town had sixteen stores, six groceries, two taverns, a number of tradesmen, numerous mechanics, eleven lawyers, and ten physicians. It had a flour mill, a saw mill, a cotton factory, a distillery, two oil mills, two carding factories, a tannery and three brick yards. Its public buildings were a spacious brick court house, a framed Presbyterian church, a large brick Methodist church, a brick Episcopal church under construction, a female academy, a brick market house, a jail and the brick Illinois College buildings.

In 1835, B. F. Harris found Jacksonville a beautiful place of about fifteen hundred people with "nice" buildings, and Springfield "a small village of about one hundred people and twenty or thirty shanties, a Hotel, a hard looking place."

Patrick Shirreff in his "A Tour of North America," printed in 1835, wrote "I according left Springfield, about nine o'clock in the morning, in a small stage, which reached Jacksonville about dark. The passengers dined by the way, and chiefly consisted of clerical students, on their way to Jacksonville college. From their conversation with each other, I learned they had lately been engaged in teaching in different parts of the country.