The WPA Guide to Illinois

The Prairie State

Federal Writers' Project

• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781595342119
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authors—many of whom would later become celebrated literary figures—were commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are among the more than 6,000 writers, editors, historians, and researchers who documented this celebration of local histories. Photographs, drawings, driving tours, detailed descriptions of towns, and rich cultural details exhibit each state’s unique flavor.The Prarie State, nestled in the heart of the Midwest among the Great Lakes and Mississippi River, is finely represented in the WPA Guide to Illinois. The section on Chicago could stand alone as a guidebook in itself, spanning over 100 pages and incorporating the history and tourist attractions of the city. An essay about Abraham Lincoln by then governor Henry Horner, 26 total tours of the state, and a list of 50 books about the state of Illinois are also included in this extensive guide.

Part I

ILLINOIS: The General Background

THE ILLINOISAN

His Background

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HE WHO WOULD DESCRIBE a typical Illinoisan may well find, after carefully combing the State, that his only valid generalization is that an Illinoisan is one who resides in Illinois. The Illinoisan is first and foremost a heterogeneous character, and symbols fit him with little grace. The only concept that has achieved considerable circulation—that of a rural fellow, a bit coarse but possessed of shrewdness and humor—is at best an anachronism. Such a concept probably stemmed from Lincoln, as portrayed by eastern cartoonists. For want of an apter figure it has persisted here and there, although rather than describing an average resident, it represents a type difficult to find anywhere in the State today.

But the rural symbol is certainly not without basis. Illinois ranks fourth in total farm income among the forty-eight States. Among the lasting impressions of the traveler on his first visit to Illinois is that of miles of corn-rows springing from the rich black soil, of the little roads that depart every mile or so from the highway and follow a long hedgerow back to a tree-shaded farmstead. Only when one examines the make-up of the total population does it become evident that such a symbol is an over-simplification. Fifth in the United States in its percentage of farmers, Illinois nevertheless has three times as many industrial as agricultural workers. And if a hundred Illinoisans were picked out at random, 44 of them would be residents of Chicago.

That the residents of the Prairie State are three-quarters urban is only the broadest aspect of their variety in make-up. Elsewhere the roots of heterogeneity run deep into the history of the State.

Only in the earliest days of this region did the population follow a discernible pattern. In the early decades of the eighteenth century the French, bound together by their race and common purpose of subduing the wilderness, achieved the rough outlines of a unified society. “Under the utmost difficulties,” wrote a Jesuit from the American Bottom, “we are striving to bring order to this wilderness.” The few French settlements scattered about Illinois followed many of the patterns of the Old World. The church was the center of social as well as religious activity, and the priest ranked in importance with the civil authorities. A portion of the land was designated for common fields, and agricultural workers went out to their narrow strips of soil each day, and returned to the village each night. But the British conquered the French without setting up a substitute for their Gallic orderliness. The period of chaos that followed was ended with American conquest, but by that time the frontier reached Illinois, and settlers began pouring in. Today the remnants of the French period are no more than the fourth echo of an echo, surviving in little more than the names of a few old towns.

From all along the Middle Atlantic seaboard settlers came, from Kentucky and Tennessee, and from the South; most nearly to a dominant group were the Southerners. But it is significant that Nathaniel Pope, who guided the bill to admit the State into the Union through Congress, was opposed to slavery, despite his Kentucky origin. Pleading that the extension “would afford additional security to the perpetuity of the Union,” Pope had the upper border of the State moved fifty-one miles north and thereby gained unsettled land and a port-of-entry for anti-slavery New Englanders. That this port was to grow into the metropolis of Chicago, furthering the heterogeneity of the State, Pope could not know.

The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 abetted his plan. As New Englanders came to Illinois via the canal and the Great Lakes, Illinois began to take on much the same political complexion as a cross-section of the country as a whole. Princeton, Galesburg, Rockford, and dozens of other northern Illinois cities were settled by New Englanders, while at the other extremity the influence of the South was everywhere prominent, in accent and vernacular, as well as in architecture. “Where New England emigrants do not venture,” wrote a Northern Illinoisan, “improvements, social, agricultural, mechanic, or scientific, rarely flourish, and seldom intrude.” The Southerner, in turn, excoriated “Yankee kinks in politics”—and tradition of heterogeneity became more firmly established.

With the opening of the railroad era in the fifties, and the first faint rumblings of industrialization, there entered a new element. In 1856 one-fourteenth of all the immigrants landing at New York came to Illinois. By 1860 their total had passed 300,000, with Irish and Germans predominating, and almost half of Chicago was foreign born. As Chicago boomed, many of the foreign born remained in the city, easily finding jobs in the countless new industrial plants. But others, particularly the Swedes, Germans, and other races of an agricultural bent, filtered out into the State and eventually settled in many of the smaller towns. Ernest Elmo Calkins, in They Broke The Prairie, tells of how the Swedes, followed by other nationalities, came to Galesburg, and how the stiff New England traditions of that town gradually underwent the infiltration of a new and vital force. In its broader aspects, it is a case history of the last great contribution to the variety of Illinois.

Today the population of the State is almost equally split between native white stock of native parentage and those who were foreign born or who had foreign or mixed parentage. Assimilation, however, has been a major factor for at least forty years; since 1900 the number of foreign born has remained constant while that of foreign and mixed parentage has steadily increased. That this assimilation has been cultural as well is evidenced in the State’s low percentage of illiteracy—2.4 per cent against 4.3 per cent for the country as a whole.

Clearly the infusions into Illinois from its very beginning have rendered a symbol for its residents improbable. Yet, since a land can mold its people into a pattern, it is pertinent to examine briefly the profile of the State.

Both agriculture and industry are of fundamental importance. Geographically the State belongs neither to the North, South, East, nor West, but at a peculiar focal point of all four. The visual evidence of this is frequently missed by through-State motorists because a large portion of transcontinental traffic traverses only the Corn Belt. Even there the fusion of the industrial East and the agricultural West occasionally occurs where farmers’ fields extend almost into the shadows of mine tipples and industrial plants. In latitude the agricultural economy shifts from Northern dairying through Midwestern corn-raising to Southern fruit-farming and cotton-growing. And at the lower tip of the State the heat of the South seeps up the Mississippi, ripening the crops a month earlier than elsewhere and slowing down the pace of human activity.

What is an Illinoisan? In the voices of the people there is no clue, neither in the stridency of Chicago’s street urchin nor in the Southern accent, tinged with a faint twang, of the lower Illinoisan. It is not wholly without meaning to say that the Illinoisan is simply a resident of Illinois, and that his heterogeneity is in itself the final key to his nature. Historically his State has been one where paradox blossoms continually, where both Lincoln and the suppressors of Lovejoy were nurtured; where the Utopias of the Janssonists and the Icarians rose in counterpoint to the lusty individualism of old Chicago; the home of both William Jennings Bryan and Robert Ingersoll, of John Peter Altgeld and Samuel Insull. Across this State have eddied almost all the major currents from both without and within the country. Criss-crossed by railroads from all corners of the country, a steel-maker as well as a wheat-stacker, Illinois in its entirety functions as a working model of the Nation as a whole. Therein the heterogeneity of the State takes on meaning and becomes in itself a symbol burdened with deep significance.

THE LAND ITSELF

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SEEN FROM THE AIR, the land of Illinois reveals graphically the agricultural importance of the State. Carved by intensive cultivation into an intricate mosaic of squares and rectangles, the level prairie resembles nothing so much as a vast stretch of modernistic linoleum. In the grainfields no land is wasted; pasture adjoins field, farm fits snugly against farm, and between them is nothing but the straight line of a fence or hedgerow of osage orange.

Lying between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, Illinois enjoys a drainage system extraordinarily complete and extensive. Water from 23 of the 48 States crosses its surface and flows along its boundaries, eastward through Lake Michigan to the Atlantic Ocean and southward in the Mississippi to the Gulf. Although its topography presents no striking contrasts of surface contour, the State is separated into seven gentle but distinct basins, bearing the names of Lake Michigan, the Illinois, the Rock, the Kaskaskia, the Big Muddy, the Wabash, and the Ohio Rivers. The arteries and branches of these six great rivers serve 87.2 per cent of the 56,665 square miles of the State’s surface. The largest, the Illinois, runs from northeast to southwest and drains an area 250 miles long and 100 miles wide, comprising 43 per cent of the State.

The conception of Illinois as an unrelieved table-top admits pleasant and unexpected contradictions. A portion of the hilly Wisconsin driftless area projects into the northwest corner; there, at Charles Mound, is the highest spot in the State, 1,241 feet above sea level. An extension of the Ozark Range, with several hills exceeding a thousand feet in altitude, crosses southern Illinois. The Mississippi and its tributaries, especially the Illinois, have carved long ranges of bluffs, the more rugged portions of which have been enclosed in State parks.

Elsewhere is prairie, but its original extent and appearance have been greatly altered. The earliest settlers found almost half the State in forest, with the prairie running in great fingers between the creeks and other waterways, its surface lush with waist-high grasses and liberally bedecked with wild flowers. Here occurred the transition from the wooded lands of the East to the treeless plains of the West. Since this was the pioneer’s first encounter with the prairie, Illinois came to be known as the Prairie State, although westward lay lands more worthy of the title than the semi-wooded surface of Illinois.

The pioneers admired the grasslands, but clung to the wooded waterways. At the time of early settlement the fertility of the prairie was not known nor was it available until the invention of plows capable of breaking the tough sod. The waterways furnished timber for fuel and building, a convenient water supply, and protection for the settlers’ jerry-built cabins from prairie fires and windstorms. Fires invariably swept the grasslands in the late summer, when the Indians burned off the prairie to drive out game. When the settlers at last began to venture cautiously out from the groves, they took the precaution to surround their homesteads with several plowed furrows as a fire check.

The fame of the great stretches of treeless grasslands spread eastward, even to England, and magazines carried articles of description, speculating upon their origin (which is still unexplained) and the possibilities of their cultivation. Dickens, while visiting St. Louis in 1842, especially requested that he be shown the “paroarer,” as he noted it was pronounced locally. A rumbling, ancient coach took him out to Looking Glass Prairie, near Belleville, and he returned to write:

. . . . there lay, stretched out before my view, a vast expanse of level ground; unbroken, save by one thin line of trees, which scarcely amounted to a scratch upon the great blank . . . . a tranquil sea or lake without water, if such a simile be admissible . . . . and solitude and silence reigning paramount around . . . . I felt little of that sense of freedom and exhilaration which a Scottish heath inspires, or even our English downs awakens. It was lonely and wild, but oppressive in its barren monotony.

Lumbering activities and the pioneer’s early preference for the woodland reduced the forests from their original extent, 42 per cent, to little more than 5 per cent. What is now commonly thought of as prairie is often the increment gained from the clearing of woodlands. Given over now almost wholly to farms, the prairies are constantly in flux as the landscape alters with the agricultural season. April transforms the Illinois country into a vast patchwork quilt of fresh color. Spring planting brings forth teams and tractors that comb and dress the land with geometric nicety. By summer the contours of the prairie are soft and round with ripening crops. July ushers in three months of intense industry. Crops are gathered, threshing machines build mounds of chaff, trucks and trains loaded with grain begin to move toward the cities. When autumn comes, the prairies, gashed by plows and stripped of their harvest, have a worn, desolate aspect that is heightened by the somber browns and yellows of the season. The prairies are dull throughout winter save for intermittent snowfalls, and then, in late March, the land stirs, splotches of green appear, and farmers turn again to the soil.

The level aspect of Illinois topography has its explanation in the State’s glacial history. As late as 25,000 years ago—a tick of the clock in geological time—there was still to be found in Illinois the last of the great ice sheets that had crept down from the North and with a leveling action comparable to that of a road-scraper, effaced hills and valleys carved by centuries of erosion. Ninety per cent of the State’s surface was covered by ice; the only unglaciated areas are Jo Daviess County in the extreme northwest, Calhoun County in the west-central section, and the seven southernmost counties. In these areas the rugged terrain, sharply dissected by valleys, indicates the probable appearance of the whole of Illinois before the ice age. Elsewhere, save for sporadic outcrops, the uneven relief lies beneath a mantle of drift averaging 75 feet in depth.

The four ice-sheets that invaded the United States are definitely known to have reached Illinois. The next to last of these covered so great a portion of the State that it has been named the Illinoisan by geologists. Occurring approxima...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Contents
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• MAPS
• General Information
• PART I ILLINOIS: The General Background
• PART II ILLINOIS: Cities and Towns
• PART III ILLINOIS: Tours
• FIFTY BOOKS ABOUT ILLINOIS
• CHRONOLOGY
• INDEX