|
|
Macon County Remembered
Dan Guillory
May 10, 2007
In 1886, Leonard Swett, a Bloomington lawyer who had ridden with Abraham Lincoln and Judge David Davis since the earliest days of the Eighth Judicial Circuit, addressed the Illinois State Bar Association and described the lay of the land in the 1830’s and '40’s, a time when Macon County was still young and unspoiled. According to Swett,
The settlements of the state skirted along the timber, the streams were without bridges, and dim trails led from one county seat to another. There was not a foot of railroad in operation. . . . [Judge Davis said] that these were the happiest days of his life. I agree with him in this declaration, and recall with the vividness of yesterday how the quail whistled to his mate as we passed along, how the grouse with his peculiar whir arose from its hiding place in the grasses, how the wolf fled, and the red deer was startled from the grassy dell. Who that has enjoyed them, can ever forget those good old Indian Summer Days, when the atmosphere was filled with a smoky haziness by day, and it was often so light at night that one could read a paper. . . . [1]
This idyllic and pastoral world greeted the first white settlers drifting into Macon County in the 1820’s, although two French Canadian Brothers, the Lortonnieres (known locally as the Lortons) had been selling tinware, blankets, and knives to the itinerant Tamaroa Indians at a trading post near Friends Creek since about 1818—the year Illinois officially became a state. By 1826, the Lortonnieres were gone, and so were the Tamaroa.
In the fall of 1828, at a time when there was no Macon County and no City of Decatur, three men named Benjamin R. Austin, Andrew W. Smith, and John Ward made the trek from northernmost Shelby County to the town of Vandalia, where they petitioned the legislature to create a new county. At the time, Ninian Edwards was Governor of Illinois, and the petition was approved. Macon County was formed by slicing off a large portion of Shelby County, and Macon County, in turn, was carved up to create Piatt, DeWitt, and Moultrie Counties. This process of dividing and subdividing, reminiscent of cellular biology, was necessary because people did not want to travel long distances to acquire a marriage license, register a deed, or pay their taxes. Everyone desired a county seat that was within easy traveling distance.
When Thomas Lincoln and his extended family arrived in Macon County around the middle of March, 1830, the City of Decatur was newly founded and consisted of a few crude cabins clustered around a muddy area now known as Lincoln Square, where the old Transfer House, the de facto icon of Decatur, would later be built and stand for many years. The Lincolns settled on the high bluffs overlooking the Sangamon River in Harristown Township, just west of Decatur. Abraham Lincoln made his first political speech, an impassioned plea for improved navigation of the Sangamon, in the summer of 1830 in front of Harrell’s Tavern or Renshaw’s Store—the site is not exactly clear, and the two structures were physically close to one another on the “square.” Later that year, the Lincoln family and other “snowbirds” (as they came to be called) endured the devastating winter of the deep snow, when a crust of snow and ice some four feet thick accumulated all over the surface of Macon County. After living in New Salem, Vandalia, and Springfield, the newly invented Lincoln arrived as a lawyer in Decatur in 1838, to practice law on the First Judicial Circuit, of which Decatur was still a part. For most of his career, however, Lincoln--and the City of Decatur--were attached to the Eighth Judicial Circuit. Lincoln, Leonard Swett, and Judge Davis appeared frequently in Decatur during the 1840’s and '50’s. Lincoln often checked into the Revere House and typically bought some bread from a local baker before making the trip back to Springfield along what is now West Main Street.
In 1856, Lincoln traveled to Decatur, joining forces with a group of dedicated antislavery newspaper editors in a conference sponsored by the Decatur Magnet newspaper. The result of that meeting was the formation of the Illinois State Republican Party. On May 11, 1860, Lincoln was again in Decatur, and on that day he was first nominated for the Presidency of the United States in a wigwam hastily erected on the south side of Central Park. On the previous day, he had been photographed by Decatur photographer E. A. Barnwell, providing us with the only image of Lincoln taken in Decatur. On that day, Lincoln’s friend Richard Oglesby invented the slogan, “Lincoln the railsplitter candidate.” Lincoln’s last visit to Decatur and Macon County occurred on the morning of February 11, 1861, as his train to Washington stopped briefly at the Great Western (or Wabash) Station and he bid the assembled crowd a brief—and final—farewell.
In 1854, the face of Macon County—and indeed most of Central Illinois—changed drastically as the railroads arrived, the Illinois Central coming down from the north and entering Macon County in Maroa Township, and the Great Western (later, the Wabash) arriving from the west and entering the County in Niantic Township. Overnight it seemed that farmers who were barely scraping by could suddenly turn a profit—or even become rich—by selling their surplus grain, all because of the railroads that could deliver large volumes of grain to faraway markets at reasonable rates. Towns like Warrensburg Maroa, and Macon sprang up on the rail lines, and grain silos sprouted like giant mushrooms along the secondary lines and spurs. Finished goods like gingham cloth, cast-iron stoves, hats, lamps, and all sorts of tools and appliances suddenly became cheap and plentiful. By the advent of the Civil War in mid-April of 1861, the residents of Macon County were enjoying an unparalleled rise in their standard of living. The years after the Civil War, especially the 1870’s, proved to be a golden era for Macon County and Decatur in particular. The County Hospital opened its doors, the first City Directory of Decatur was published, and scores of agricultural inventions appeared, including the check-row planter, which allowed farmers to create fields as neatly lined as a sheet of graph paper. The county was becoming part of the regional agribusiness scene, the resulting capital empowering bankers like James Millikin, who used his considerable wealth to begin construction on Millikin University in 1901. A. E. Staley recognized the agricultural potential of Macon County and located his cornstarch factory in Decatur just before the outbreak of World War One. In the 1920’s Staley changed the landscape by introducing the soybean to the local economy, creating a kind of second agricultural revolution, just as powerful as the coming of the railroads back in the 1850’s.
Another powerful jolt of change had occurred in 1906 when the Interurban Railroad or Illinois Traction System crossed the Macon County line and arrived in Maroa, giving that town the double advantage of electric local train service and long-distance steam service. The Interurban accomplished on a smaller, social scale what the regular railroads achieved on a larger, economic scale. The Interurban facilitated all sorts of personal activities, like visits to city doctors and big city stores since these electric trains connected Champaign, Bloomington, Decatur, Springfield, and St. Louis at a time when very few cars existed in Macon County (the first was a Benz purchased by Hieronymus Mueller in 1905)—and, besides, the roads were virtually impassable except in the dry weather of fall. The Interurban conductors were user-friendly and stopped their rigs in the middle of cornfields and lonely spots on the prairie to pick up even a single passenger. Passengers left Decatur or Champaign with parcels, sometimes carrying musical instruments, crates of potatoes—or even live chickens. As decent roads and safer cars became commonplace in the 1930’s and '40’s, the Interurban gradually declined until it faded from the scene in the early 1970’s at a time when it was chiefly hauling freight.
The Interurban was also important because it speeded up the delivery of mail to out-of-the-way places like the smaller hamlets and villages. In an era of speed-dialing and text-messaging, it may be hard to believe that in 1908, the year that Henry Ford launched the fabled Model-T, a couple living in Maroa, say, could write a dinner invitation on a postcard addressed to relatives living in Blue Mound and have the card delivered the same afternoon. In 1906 the Post Office Department had removed the restriction which forbade patrons from writing messages on the backs of their postcards, and suddenly a whole new era of communication was possible. Telephones were still primarily an urban phenomenon, although larger villages like Maroa and Warrensburg certainly had some telephones at this time, but they were rare appliances on the farm scene. Besides, postcards were in high vogue, although they have never really gone out of style. Some villages went so far as to minimize the size of several views of the village and place them all on one card, creating a kind of panorama, like the Niantic postcard which incorporates smaller cards of the high school, the Christian Church, the Methodist Episcopal, Church, and the Catholic Church. [2]
Every village, hamlet, and town, as well as individuals, went to local photographers to have custom postcards created. People were extremely proud of their own communities, especially if the site contained a natural wonder, monument, statue, or building of historic significance. Springfield was flooded with Lincoln and State Capitol postcards, for example, and Decatur’s Transfer House and Millikin University’s Liberal Arts Hall were popular themes, to say nothing of locomotives, Lake Decatur, the County Court House, and other motifs. Generic cards with a blank space for the local town name were also plentiful, as shown by cards from Emery, Mt. Zion, and Maroa.
Some of these cards may appear a little crude by the technological standards of today, but many of them are superb examples of printing and photography. The best are truly works of art, and Macon County was blessed to have one of the masters of the trade working in the area, creating memorable images of downtown Decatur, Warrensburg, Argenta, and other places, as well as many family portraits. That man was Charles L. Wasson, featured in all the standard histories of American photography. Perhaps forty or fifty of his images have survived, but they are beautiful and sensitive revelations of life on the prairie in the decade before World War One.
Wasson came to Decatur to work for the International Stereograph Company and to establish their office in Decatur, but he quickly began to freelance on his own and soon abandoned his ties with the company. Wasson had been a war photographer in South Africa during the Boer War and had photographed the great San Francisco earthquake in 1900. He arrived in Decatur about 1905, and his shots of buggies, flivvers, parades, and pedestrians in downtown Decatur are exquisite little time-capsules. His photographs of surrounding towns, especially Warrensburg, are gems of photojournalism: every photo quietly tells a story. Watson studied old master paintings in Europe and tried to emulate the best of their effects in his work. His high quality postcards, especially the early ones, and those produced by C. U. Williams of Bloomington (whose work is also highly prized by local postcard collectors), were printed in Germany on very sophisticated presses until the U. S. Government outlawed the practice shortly before World War One. At the time, a postcard stamp cost one penny, and postcards were sold everywhere, including “mom and pop” grocery stores, like Nientker’s Store in Boody. [3] Out of all this technological and artistic interaction—photographic imagery, printing, and transportation technology—a kind of Postcard Culture emerged, one that still remains with us today, every time we visit a tourist site, a bookstore, or a museum. We even have “e-cards,” digital postcards that can be e-mailed over the internet.
Individual portraits and group portraits were the mainstay of most photographers, who tended to wander like gypsies from town to town, and only a few stayed long enough in one place to be identified with the locale. Wasson worked in Decatur until about 1925, when he bought large tracts of real estate near Lake Decatur, and gradually sold them off, lot by lot, to support himself until his largely unnoticed death in 1950. There was a formidable job of photography to be done, however; and Wasson’s peers could hardly keep up with the demand for formal portraits, especially multigenerational photographs.
A quick survey of the Macon County photographic archives, which are scattered in various locations, private and public, would reveal that between, say, 1895 and 1915, one of the stock photographic “opportunities” was the group portrait of several generations of the same family, inevitably including a tiny babe and a gray-haired grandfather or great-grandfather, like the portrait of Simon P. Nickey and family from Oakley, [4] or the portrait of William S. Smith and family of Decatur, a five-generation picture that celebrates the life of a man born in 1835 who lived until 1917 and founded the Goodman Band or Decatur Municipal Band, which is still in existence today. [5] The portraits, then, are not merely ways of preserving family stories; they are artifacts of cultural history. Family portraits, although popular all over the country, were especially popular in Macon County, because they helped to create a semi-official history of the County.
Family portraits were a way of making history, tying the family to the early events and historic personalities of the County, like Lincoln, Richard Oglesby, and James Millikin, while at the same time synthesizing and codifying the “official” history. Succeeding generations could learn their place in this line of succession by locating themselves and their parents in these photographic “proofs.” A local griot, or “tribal historian,” arose in the person of Nathan Krone who arrived on the Decatur scene in 1839. Krone became a rather prosperous and well-known druggist in downtown Decatur. Krone spent the last decades of his life—before his death in 1916—giving formal and informal speeches on early Macon County history. [6]
In like manner, family reunions in Macon County were raised to the level of an art form in the years before World War One. The Garver Family actually printed invitations for its reunion, held on August 30, 1906, an event that featured literary readings and musical entertainment as well as abundant courses of food. [7] The invitations to the event took the form of printed tickets. [8] Most of these family reunions were held in Fairview Park, like the Roy Dawson Family reunion of 1910 and the Bachrach Family Reunion of 1908, which required tables linked together in a line nearly two hundred feet long. [9] Obviously, more was being passed around than potato salad and homemade noodles; family members exchanged gossip but also revisited crucial moments in their family and “official” history. A strong sense of belonging was thus created, and this process was actually formalized by a group called the Macon County Old Settlers, composed of the original residents of Macon County. They met as a group from 1883 to 1946, and these “old settlers” are largely responsible for the common historical grammar of Macon County, the oral history containing the main facts about Lincoln, the Civil War, James Millikin, Richard Oglesby, Hieronymus Mueller, and so forth. They not only created the epic story but also helped to promulgate it. In this same vein, it is worth noting that one personalized history of Decatur did actually appear in print. It was a memoir by one of the old settlers, Jane Martin Johns. Her book is deliberately idiomatic and delightfully unpredictable: Personal Recollections of Early Decatur, Abraham Lincoln, Richard Oglesby, and the Civil War. [10] Jane Johns pulls together skeins of the informal material that was circulating around Decatur, recasts it in her own voice, and then arranges it according to her own personal chronology.
Now all these multigenerational photographs, the oral family histories and society histories (like that of the Old Settlers), and memoirs (like the one by Jane Johns), tended to include the county as a whole Yet the three formally published histories of Macon County (which appeared over a hundred-year span) were substantially histories of Decatur with “Macon County” attached as a convenient marketing device in the title. These three books all depended upon one another and all benefited, to some extent, from the common oral tradition that had been deliberately created by others. The first is John W. Smith’s History of Macon County, Illinois, from its Organization to 1876. [11] It stood alone until the centennial of the County occurred and Mabel Richmond edited Centennial History of Decatur and Macon County. [12] Richmond’s book provided a model for the masterful volume edited by O. T. Banton, which deals almost exclusively with Decatur: History of Macon County. [13]
There are a few other important sources for Macon County—as opposed to Decatur—history. Between 1870 and 1905 several publishers from Philadelphia and Chicago published atlases of Macon County. [14] These books were essentially vanity publications that allowed the rich farmers or “land barons” to have portraits of themselves published, as well as line-drawings of their estates, usually depicting a carriage being drawn by a thoroughbred with long, stylized legs. These atlases often recorded several generations living on the same parcel of land, and the books clearly attested to the agrarian wealth of Macon County in the early years of the twentieth century.
Later, in 1929, the Decatur Herald published a series of superb articles written by veteran reporter Edwin T. Coleman. The articles were published under the series title History of Decatur and Macon County. Unfortunately, the series was never collected and published in book form, even though Coleman actually wrote in brilliant detail about the fifteen towns and hamlets of Macon County, as did Florence White in her specialized study, Rural Schools of Macon County. [15] A virtually unknown and unpublished manuscript dealt with Long Creek Township in Macon County. Written by Bessie Lindsey of Forsyth, it was entitled Long Creek Township in Macon County. [16] Lindsey was a leading citizen of Forsyth and an accomplished writer who composed a serious academic book on glass collecting. She also published some small collections of poetry. Lastly, another important book on Macon County and Decatur was journalist Otto Kyle’s Abraham Lincoln in Decatur. [17] Kyle’s book was based on solid research from newspaper files going back to the 1830’s; his discussion of Lincoln in Decatur is simply the last word on the subject, an indispensable study.
It seems obvious that the story of how Macon County acquired its history (such as it is) is almost as interesting as the actual story itself. It might be argued that any county history tends to incorporate some gossip and hearsay. Such histories also tend to favor the principal city, often the county seat, and thereby shortchange the smaller communities. With its large industrial base, including Caterpillar, Tate and Lyle, and Archer Daniels Midland, it would seem inevitable that Decatur would dwarf Blue Mound, say, or Walker or Emery. Yet the whole County history is worth telling, and even though all fifteen communities cannot be addressed in a short paper, the larger patterns of settlement and interaction among communities can be described. And those patterns yield a better understanding of how Macon County fits into the larger context of the state of Illinois and the Midwest in general.
It is clear, for example, that railroads linked the smaller towns to one another and to Decatur, but it is less obvious that the railroad depots also provided a badge of identity and a very special clock pegged to railroad schedules, a psychic timetable by which people lived and organized their work routines. Trains came and departed at specific points in the weekly calendar. Visits to town, the loading of grain and other commodities, and other daily tasks revolved around the Illinois Central or Wabash Station, and to a lesser degree, the Interurban Station. It should come as no surprise that one of the favorite images on town postcards was that of the local railroad depot because in many ways it was the town, or at least its economic self. And the depot displayed the name of the town prominently in bold letters.
The other inevitable postcard image was that of the local churches. Macon County was an intensely religious place: at the turn of the century (1900) there were some four hundred churches in Macon County, and every hamlet contained at least one house of worship, if not two or three. Macon County experienced a proliferation of all Christian sects, not just the mainline protestant denominations. And there were many reasons for this religious explosion. In the first place, the early nineteenth century was the time of the so-called “Second Reformation,” a period of religious awareness and reformation, corresponding roughly to the Great Awakening that swept through New England in the 1740’s. John Wesley and the Methodists were part of this Second Reformation, as was Joseph Hostetler of the “Dunkard” sect, who came to Macon County in 1832 and founded what ultimately became the Central Christian Church in Decatur in 1832. [18] The Methodists founded their first Decatur church in a rough wooden building in 1834, under the leadership of the fiery and charismatic minister Peter Cartwright. The First Presbyterian Church of Mt. Zion had already been in operation since 1830. The Argenta Presbyterian Church opened its doors in 1843, and in nearby Oreana, a Baptist Church was founded in 1858, and a Christian Church in 1860.
In general, the Methodists tended to be the most numerous until about 1950, when all their branches combined to form the United Methodist Church. At about that time the Baptists became the largest denomination in the county, closely followed by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the Methodists. There have always been Presbyterians, [19] Lutherans, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and members of the United Brethren. Catholics, although a minority, have been in Decatur and outlying areas since the Civil War era, especially in such Decatur Township parishes as St. Patrick and St. James, as well as churches in Niantic and Mt. Zion Townships. A synagogue and Greek Orthodox Church did not arrive until well into the twentieth century. There are no mosques.
There are two important facts about this heavily Christianized cultural milieu: (1) although everyone may not have attended church regularly, a common Christian sense of ethics pervaded the county at all social levels. There were no ambiguities about right and wrong on basic issues concerning work, family, courtship, and social obligations. That implied code did not mean, however, that everyone lived a monastic life. In 1908, for instance, when revivalist Billy Sunday spoke to overflow crowds in Decatur, several downtown distilleries still did a thriving business, as did “sporting houses” on Merchant Street and along the Sangamon River bottom. But, by and large, the county was a safe and “decent” place where crime, especially bodily assault, was rare. Consensus-building and moderation tended to mark the social interactions of Macon County. The sense of obligation to help one’s neighbor was so firmly implanted that farmers regularly pitched in to harvest the crops of ailing or deceased neighbors—a practice that persists to this very day and symbolizes Macon County community spirit at its best. In the same spirit of community service, many residents wore several hats, simultaneously serving as teachers, farmers, and road commissioners.
(2) Secondly, religious denominations that had recently arrived in Illinois invited or encouraged members from their home states and communities to follow their lead and emigrate to the Land of Lincoln. Cumberland Presbyterians from Kentucky, for example, could follow their brethren to Mt. Zion and join a community of like-minded souls. Religion in this sense greased the social pathways and made a great deal of human interaction considerably less awkward. The peak human experiences of courtship, marriage, and death were ritualized and “tamed” within the context of a sympathetic congregation so people could act humanly without shame or embarrassment.
Moving to a new environment is fully challenging without the added burden of alienation. Life on the prairie could be lonely in the extreme, but church members automatically acquired a sense of belonging. As a result, these members of church congregations were fully engaged in their work and avocations. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, churchgoers built the county and they continued to bring in more churchgoers to swell the ranks of the county population. They tended to vote, run for office, build houses, pay school taxes, send their children to school, and even cheer the athletic teams. Even if they may have been clannish and overly pious on occasion, their monumental role in building the county cannot be ignored. Any history of Macon County is also a history of practical Christianity, of applied faith in a place where obstacles, including the vagaries of Illinois weather, could not be easily overcome. It took faith and a supportive network of fellow believers to make the unyielding sod turn into an agricultural miracle, producing some of the heaviest yields per acre on the entire planet.
Besides church buildings, another popular postcard image was that of the local school, although the architectural styles were predictable and boxy and did not show the individual styles evident in church design. School children also posed for regular photographs, and it is quite remarkable to discover how many children were slouching, or poorly dressed, or smirking while the picture was being taken. One gets the sense that these pupils were normal and frisky, certainly not the timid wards of some strict New England schoolyard tyrant.
In fact, one of the rather touching practices of turn-of-the-century school teachers was to give each student a commemorative card at the end of the year, perhaps with a picture of the teacher, a verse or two of poetry, and a list of all the students enrolled that year—a kind of yearbook on a card. A good example would be the card teacher Annie B. Florey distributed to her students at the Salem School in Mt. Zion on May 7, 1908. [20] The teacher’s gesture shows the closeness of teacher and student, and the genuine affection that arose in small, one-room school settings throughout rural Macon County, and even in the “big city” of Decatur. Once again, the school provided an opportunity for social bonding and community-building. After all, a rural person typically worked with and lived for the rest of their life with many of the people in attendance at that simple country school.
Schools, of course, sponsored athletic teams, and local support of the teams was a powerful way to demonstrate town spirit, especially when rivals were competing with one another. Many teams became legendary, like the Decatur High football team of 1913 or the Maroa basketball team of 1922. Maroa, like many other communities, actually sponsored a municipal baseball team, which featured Charlie Dressen, a player who later achieved national fame. [21] Decatur boasted the Commodores baseball team, as well as the Decatur Staleys football team, which later became famous as the Chicago Bears.
Also instrumental in creating a highly socialized sports-centered culture were the YMCA and YWCA. Women’s basketball teams were extremely popular, and they often had nicknames, like “The Topsys, “ who posed for their group portrait in the old YWCA gymnasium on May 15, 1910. [22] Their uniforms consisted of “jumpers,” headscarves, and long knotted ties. The YMCA championship basketball team of 1910 sported white shorts and dark sleeveless shirts on which was embroidered a large white letter “D” pierced by an arrow. [23] Numerically speaking, churches and sports teams are probably the most frequently occurring images in the photographic record of Macon County.
Athletic clubs and teams, whether school- or community-sponsored, were only the most visible and celebrated groups in a whole cluster of social organizations that offered men and women opportunities for social exchange and interaction. Macon County residents were joiners, and they flocked to the various local and national clubs and organizations, including the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and the Masons, who built their grand Masonic Temple in Decatur 1929, at the time one of the most beautiful public buildings in downstate Illinois. [24]
Local clubs sprang up everywhere, like the Woman’s Club of Decatur, which was organized in 1887, and by 1894 boasted 230 members. [25] The Decatur Study Class, a women’s discussion group, was very active in the 1930’s and included many community leaders. [26] The tiny hamlet of Emery boasted a Household Club for women and girls of all ages; they assembled in Fairview Park in 1939 to have their group photograph taken, a kind of ritual act that recalls the family reunion photographs taken in the very same park, thus linking the family and the club identities. [27]
The club, in effect, became a “second family.” Thus the Women’s Club of Forsyth posed for a group photograph in 1949. [28] The Forsyth group had met to celebrate the birthday of one its members, Mary Davis. These clubs were generally proactive and engaged in various “outreach” activities with the surrounding community. In its 1957 booklet the Garden Club of Decatur exhorted its members to “share garden blooms with the afflicted” and to share their “knowledge and experience with other gardeners.” Years before the phrase had come into being, these ladies were involved in the “greening of America.”
Now all these cultural influences, including a strong Christian ethos, the postcard culture, railroads, schools, clubs, and athletic teams contributed to a strong sense of community and social bonding. But economics played a critical role, also. The collective agricultural wealth in the form of hybrid corn, soybeans, hogs, and cattle was either directly exported to Decatur or flowed through the county seat in a special form of economic symbiosis. Farm-related income, after all, provided the capital to expand the industrial infrastructure of Decatur, but that same farm money bought shoes, buggies, and appliances in Soy City, or it was recycled to smaller retail outlets throughout the County.
Citizens in small settlements like Boody or Hervey City could participate in the “commonwealth” that the synergy of farm wealth and railroads produced. Money circulated in and out of the various townships so freely that J. T. Keatts, who ran a general store in Maroa, could distribute an advertising postcard touting petticoats made in Decatur. Two young ladies wearing the latest in 1910 fashion, lift their skirts to reveal layers of crinoline. “No, Dear,” coos one to the other, “it’s not silk; it’s Decatursilk.” [29] Many villages were doing very well economically in the years immediately preceding World War One, especially Warrensburg and Maroa, which boasted stables, hardware stores, general stores, veterinarians, two-digit telephone exchanges, grain elevators, and even “opera houses,” or vaudeville theaters. Argenta, Mt. Zion, and the village of Macon were also on a firm economic footing. In the present era, the ascendancy of Forsyth and Mt. Zion—the two fastest growing communities in the County—should be seen as the continuation of a long historical trend, not some recent aberration caused exclusively by “white flight.”
This overview of Macon County and its community-centered ethos may erroneously create the impression that all was heaven and light in Macon County. But there were unfortunate instances of social discord, including a horrible incident at the end of the nineteenth century when an innocent African American man, one Samuel Bush, was hanged from a lamppost in Decatur. Also regrettable was the harassment of the county population to buy War Bonds in 1917 and 1918, followed by the creation of “black lists” and the flare-up of anti-Catholic and anti-German prejudice. The village of Emery published a postcard in 1915 that poked fun at a fat motorist speaking in a Dutch or German brogue. [30] And although the Ku Klux Klan was active and highly visible in Decatur during the 1920’s—as it was throughout the nation—it fortunately disappeared from the scene by the end of that decade. So social turmoil was decidedly the exception, not the rule, in Macon County history. Moderation and consensus-building prevailed as they did throughout Illinois. In fact, Illinois historian James Davis has identified the striving for consensus as the key to the state’s character, a quality that distinguished Illinois citizens from those of the surrounding states, especially Missouri and Indiana. [31]
Although Macon County—and the City of Decatur in particular—experienced the severe tilts and turns of the economic downturn that marked the region as globalization and downsizing became grim economic realities, the present decade offers unprecedented opportunities as western economies try to wean themselves from imported oil and rely more and more on ethanol and bio-diesel fuels. Archer Daniels Midland and related companies in the area stand to profit immensely, as do the surrounding farms, which have truly evolved into mega-farms, factory-like in their scale and efficiency. In the past lies the future: Macon County once achieved greatness through agriculture, and there is every reason to believe that it can repeat its former achievements.
But economic success, no matter how impressive, is not enough. Senator Durbin of Springfield has proposed to turn all of central Illinois into a federally funded Lincoln heritage area. [32] That initiative--and others--might encourage the citizens of Macon County and Central Illinois to return to their roots and appreciate the rich common history of all the villages and townships. It is an awesome story, and anyone who hears it must come way inspired, and to some extent, renewed.
Endnotes:
[1] -Leonard Swett, David Davis: Address Before the Bar Association of the State of Illinois. Chicago: Bernard & Gunthorp, 1886.
[2] -See Dan Guillory, Macon County (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2007), p. 40, bottom.
[3] -Macon County, p. 40, top.
[4] -Macon County, p. 115, bottom.
[5] - Macon County, p. 20, top.
[6] -See Dan Guillory, Decatur (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2004), p. 69.
[7] - Macon County, pp. 21, bottom and 22, bottom.
[8] - Macon County, p. 22, top.
[9] - Macon County. P. 23, top and bottom.
[10] - Ed. Howard C. Schaub (Decatur, IL: Daughters of the American Revolution, 1912).
[11] - (Springfield, IL: Rokker’s Printing House, 1876).
[12] - (Decatur, IL: Decatur Review, 1930).
[13] - (Decatur, IL: Decatur Historical Society, 1976).
[14] - See, for example, Atlas of Macon County and the State of Illinois (Chicago: Warner and Beers, 1874).
[15] - (Decatur, IL: Decatur Historical Society, 1978).
[16] - Typescript. Decatur: Shilling Local History Room, Decatur Public Library, 1932.
[17] - (New York: Vantage Press, 1957).
[18] - Tony Reid, “Monumental Campaign: Relative Wants Joseph Hostetler to Receive his Due for Pioneering Work,” Decatur Herald and Review (Jan. 1, 2007), A1-2.
[19] - Cumberland Presbyterians founded several churches in the Mt. Zion area; by 1910,all the American Presbyterian churches joined together to create the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.
[20] - Macon County, p. 120, bottom.
[21] - Macon County, p. 82, bottom.
[22] - Macon County, cover.
[23] - Macon County, p. 26, bottom.
[24] - Macon County, p. 29, top.
[25] - Macon County, p. 27, bottom.
[26] - Macon County, p. 28, top.
[27] - Macon County, p. 95, bottom.
[28] - Macon County, p. 102, bottom.
[29] - Macon County, p. 71, top.
[30] - Macon County, p. 92, top.
[31] - Frontier Illinois. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998. See especially Chapter 14, “Conflicts and Community,” pp. 355ff.
[32] - Mike Frazer, “Durbin Calls for Creation of Lincoln Heritage Area, “ Decatur Herald and Review, March 25, 2007, B1. |
