1882 History
Chapter 12 - South Litchfield Township
ITS DESCRIPTION, BOUNDARIES AND GENERAL TOPOGRAPHY — SETTLEMENT OF WHITE PEOPLE — THEIR EARLY HABITS AND INDUSTRIES — FACTS AND INCIDENTS — EDUCATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS — MISCELLANEOUS TOPICS, ETC., ETC
by H. A. Coolidge
THE northeast third of this township was originally well timbered, and forest is found on one or two sections on its south border. The surface is generally well-drained by Long Branch, Shoal Creek, Lake Fork and its three northern affluents. The northwestern sections discharge their surplus waters into the Cahokia. The center and west portions of the township are not as fairly drained as the other divisions, and may be called flat. The soil obeys the general law of change and decrease in depth, as one travels south. The black, clinging soil, peculiar to the prairie, loses its northern depth. White soil is more frequently met. But there is as much in the cultivator as in the soil, and farmers in South Litchfield are among the solid men of the county. Brick clay is found near the town and down by Shoal Creek. Stone is quarried along the Creek and down Rocky Branch.
The township is exclusively agricultural. There is no shop or store or mill now nearer than Walshville and the city of Litchfield; and but two churches — a German Lutheran in the south, and a union house in the east. The people are all farmers. Three railroads, the original Terre Haute & Alton, the St. Louis Division of the Wabash, and the Jacksonville & Southeastern — the last one just opened — connect the township with the wide, wide world.
It was originally settled in 1816, by Nicholas Lockerman, who occupied the east half of the southeast quarter of Section 15, now the property of John A. Briggs. The first settlement in the county was at the Clear Spring Church, in Hillsboro Township, about two miles east of South Litchfield, and the early settlers located in the neighborhood, along the West Fork of Shoal Creek. Lockerman was not a desirable neighbor. His life was a scandal. He had a natural, but no legal wife, and Rev. James Street, finding him and the mother of his three children one day in the corn-field, lectured him so sharply and effectively that he coerced him to marry the woman, and the ceremony was performed in the field. It was the first marriage in the county. One of his sons settled on the Davenport place, in the city of Litchfield, and another one on or near the Martin Ritchie farm in North Litchfield. He was killed, many years since, at Zanesville, by Andy Nash. The family long ago became extinct in this region. Probably Mr. Street settled at Clear Spring in 1814, as we have seen a tax receipt given him, in this county, dated that year. If this be conclusive as to the date, the settlement of the county must be set back a year or two.
The Indian trail, from the timber on the Cahokia to Shoal Creek, crossed the northwest corner of the county. So well was it used that the path, hard beaten, is still accurately remembered, and flint arrow-heads were frequently found on the prairie, by the older settlers. The existence of “buffalo wallows" seems to indicate the fact, or at least the belief, that buffalo once roamed this region, and an occasional bear or panther was seen by frightened families peering into their homes. The fear of Indians was not unknown, and the trampling of a man's horse around the house has sent the trembling inmates into the loft, to shiver in fright until a new day banished their terrors by disclosing the cause.
The political condition of a people depends on the tenure of land. If a settler could call land his, in the sense that a horse or a rifle was his, the region could not be retarded in its development, or such grave embarrassments arise as have been witnessed in older States. The land tenures of the Northwest were perfect, and hence its peace was placed on a solid basis. The sole contingent blemish in the titles is the right of eminent domain. The land in this region was put in market for the benefit of the State by attracting settlements. There were no "land grants" in those days, when the price of land was put up to enrich the seller. The worth of a State is its people and their condition, and it is yet a question whether the people which feed the world or the one which clothes the world; the people who produce or the people who traffic, will, in the long run, be the world's arbiters.
We have been moderately curious as to the motives which set journeying hither so many from the States south of the Ohio. Most of the emigrants had not reached life's meridian. They were young, hopeful, courageous, and poor in actual worth, but rich in possibilities. Illinois was a Territory, reposing under the noble provisions of the famous Dane Ordinance of 1787. Not a few of the pioneers have left their record that they sought homes here because the land would not be blemished by negro slavery, and civil and social distinctions would be yielded only to those who owned "niggers." A fat soil ready for the plow, cheap lands and a temperate climate, were not peculiar to Illinois or South Litchfield. For the grand simplicity, the sturdy virtue of their lives, they got recognition and fame as Enoch Arden did — after death. And though few families in South Litchfield are descendants of the pioneers, yet these few retain their pre-eminence, and from them are selected with rare assent of unanimity, the guardians of the orphans, the administrators of estates and the servants of the public in township or county offices.
We cannot write history as a blind man goes about the streets, feeling his way with a stick. The facts are transparent, and through them we catch gleams of other facts, as the raindrop catches light, and the beholder sees the splendor of a rainbow. We are to speak of common men whose lot was to plant civilization here, and who, in doing it, displayed the virtues which render modern civilization a boast and a blessing. These early times cannot be reproduced by any prose of a historian. They had a thousand years behind them, and in their little space of time they made greater progress than ten centuries had witnessed. Theirs was a full life. The work thirty generations had not done, they did, and the abyss between us of to-day and the men of sixty years ago is wider and more profound than the chasm between 1815 and the battle of Hastings. They did so much that it is hard to recognize the doers. They had a genius for doing great things. That olive leaf in the dove's beak perished as do other leaves, but the story it told is immortal. Of their constancy, one can judge by the fact that not one of them went back to the ancestral South.
The only history worth writing is the history of civilization, of the processes which make a State. For men are but as coral, feeble, insignificant, working out of sight, but they transmit some occult quality or power, upheave society, until from the moral and intellectual plateau rises, as Saul above his fellows, a Shakespeare, a Phidias or a Hamilton, the royal interpreters of the finest sense in poetry, in art and statesmanship. At the last, years color life more than centuries had, as the sun rises in an instant, though he had been hours in hastening to this moment.
As the county, in 1830, contained but 2,953 inhabitants, in 1840, only 4,490, and ten years later 6,277, it will be understood that the border townships, separated from Hillsboro, the political and commercial capital, by the deep valleys of Shoal Creek and its West Fork, must have gained slowly in population. Lockerman's cabin was the nucleus of the earliest settlement. Melchoir Fogleman located south of him just over the line in Walshville, and slowly pioneers planted themselves between their homes.
In 1821, Melchoir Fogleman, John Norton and James Bland, his son-in-law, had their homes in South Litchfield. It is not possible to determine the order of their arrival. It appears plainly that they located about the same time. There could have been only a few days or weeks difference in dates. Fogleman was a blacksmith, and brought from his North Carolina home the remarkable sum of $800 to Illinois, and after a stay of two years in South Litchfield, he removed to the neighborhood of Clear Spring, and in 1824 the Pepper Mill was built, the first water-mill in the region. Norton and Bland disappeared from the local history, leaving only their names. Spartan Grisham and Theodore Jordan lived with Fogleman, and were members of his family. Their descendants are still among us. Thus in 1820, Lockerman's was the sole family in the township, and the population of the county is estimated at 100 — nearly all in Hillsboro, and East Fork Townships. Lockerman lived on the southeast quarter of Section 15, near the spring. In the ten years ending with 1830, six families had settled in the township — four have been named and a Mr. Macaffee had settled where Newton Street now lives, and James Penter on Section 25, between 1825 and 1830.
Anthony Street, brother to James Street, made the gunpowder for the
settlers at the Pepper Mill, and Spartan Grisham and Theodore Jordan had
modest distilleries near by, and made whisky, which passed as a legal tender
at 50 cents a gallon. Before the Pepper Mill was built in 1824, the people
went to Old Ripley, or Edwardsville, to mill, and if those places could not
be reached, corn was grated on the lower side of a tin sieve, or it was
shaved off by a plane, or rudely crashed in a bowl, burned out in the top of
a stump, by means of a wooden pestle, suspended from a spring-pole.
The few families were within two miles of the east line of the township. In
1830, or 1831, John A. Crabtree located on the farm, where he lived in honor
and usefulness until his death, a few years since. Wholly uneducated in
books he possessed the masculine average common sense of his times, and like
all other pioneers, was a life-long Democrat.
It has not been possible to determine the date of the arrival of Jesse Horn, but it is possible it was prior to 1830. Several young unmarried men were domiciled with the earlier families. They were sojourners rather than settlers, and a portion of them were but the spume which crested the tide of advancing settlements, and having a large region where to choose, drifted to other neighborhoods. Some of their names are remembered, but their history has been forgotten.
The James Copeland family appeared in the township about 1832, and the Forehands moved from Clear Spring to the bluff southwest of Truitt's Ford, not earlier than 1830. We can hear of no family here which did not come from south of the Ohio, and the earliest ones were from North Carolina.
About 1838, the first schoolhouse was built a hundred and twenty rods east of J. N. McElvain's. The first teachers are not remembered, but in 1843 John Fogleman taught one term. The usual terms were $2 per pupil for three months, payable in grain, pigs, a young steer or heifer, or wood, and sometimes in money. All the children attended. If their parents could pay, it was well. If they could not, nothing was said about it. Fogleman received about $40 for his school, and, after paying his board, had $30. The State had no public school system, and private schools alone were known here. The sessions opened in the morning and continued until night. The pupils were dismissed in season to reach home before dark. The teacher's hours were the same as a farm laborer's — from sunrise to sunset, and if the school was not up to the "graded" standard, just consider how much there was of it. People were not afraid their children would injure their health with hard study.
John Corlew moved into the township in 1836. He was a commissioned officer in the Mexican war, and was elected Sheriff in 1848, and again in 1852, and since the adoption of township organization, has been almost continuously Supervisor. William Simpson was an early settler in the southeast part of the township. He was County Treasurer in 1871-73, but with this exception has attended strictly to the care of his farm. He came in 1831. By 1840, the township contained about eight or ten families. This year John Fogleman settled on his present homestead. Lewis McWilliams arrived in 1843, and his brother Thomas in 1849, and a third brother, John M., probably about the same time. Ezra Tyler located within the city limits in 1849.
Newton Street settled on his present farm in 1833, and has restricted himself to agricultural pursuits. About 1852, himself and John M. Paden had a steam saw-mill near his house. He feels the incurable illness of old age, but is still glad in his conversation to live over again the half a century he has been an inhabitant of South Litchfield.
The first burial-ground was the Crabtree Cemetery, now in parts thickly crowded with graves, and there rest the early forefathers. There beneath noticeable monuments lie buried Stephen R. Briggs, long a Judge of the County Commissioners' Court; Israel Fogleman, the general guardian and administrator, and John A. Crabtree, the model of consistent firmness and average working good sense. The cemetery was laid out in 1843, and the first interment was Julia Parmelee, wife of John Young. The first church was the Union Church, near John Fogleman's, in 1853, and a burial-place is near it. The third church was the German Lutheran, near Henry Nemires, built about fifteen years since. The Methodist Chapel, at Hardinsburg, was the second one, erected in 1853 or 1854, and subsequently removed to the village of Litchfield.
At the close of this decade, the township may have contained thirty families, chiefly in the east half. The high road from Hillsboro to Alton, ran along the south line of the first six sections, and a mile from the county line, the village of Hardinsburg was planned on Section 7. Seventeen blocks, of eight lots each, were laid out and several families had homes there. James Cummings kept the public house and afterward built a store and was appointed Postmaster. It was the only village between Woodboro and Bunker Hill, and was founded before the hope was entertained of a railroad in the vicinity. With the founding of Litchfield, its growth ceased. A part of its buildings were removed to the new town, and in two years the site of Hardinsburg was a plowed field again. In local history it still retains its place as a village, as the town plat has not perhaps been legally vacated. But the passer-by sees nothing to instruct him that this was once designed to be the metropolis of the west side of the county.
Few of the early settlers came direct from the South. The Foglemans, the Streets, the Padens, the Forehands and the Corlews paused near Clear Spring or Woodboro for a few years, before coming west of Shoal Creek. Brokaw and J. N. McElvain. David Lay and W. Meisenheimer came during Fillmore's administration. Mount Olive, in Macoupin County, a short distance from the county line, was a German settlement, and Germans began to buy lands in South Litchfield. They never sell, but keep adding acre to acre, and to-day are the owners of the southwest part of the township.
The four events which have marked deepest the development of the township are the construction of the Alton & Terre Haute Railroad in 1854; the city of Litchfield; the Free School law, and the road law. The first put the people in easy communication with the river cities; the second afforded a local market; the third ministered to the better worth of the growing citizens, and the last has improved drainage and given safe highways.
The Litchfield coal mine, the oil wells and brickyards, are in the north part of the township, where are also the water works and huge ice houses.
During the war, a few residents proposed to nullify all laws for re-enforcing the army by a conscription. They made furtive visits and urged a neighbor to accept the leadership of the enterprise. They did not desire the draft enforced, as then they might have occasion to see Canada. The neighbor declined their overture, and the scheme was abandoned, and the authors went on voting the same old ticket from the force of habit. Wheat at $3.50 per bushel satisfied their loyalty.
The population of the township outside the city, is nine hundred and forty nearly, and the wide stretches of open land, which only a few years since were numerous, have now been reclaimed, and the last acre of speculators' real estate has passed into the hands of residents.
Extracted 13 Jan 2017 by Norma Hass from History of Bond and Montgomery Counties, Illinois, published in 1882, pages 255-259.
