Illinois - The Prairie State
Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet explored Illinois in
1673, and although its rivers had been dotted with French and British
forts, trading posts and missionary camps thereafter, some 160 years
later had seen little progress in farming and development. The state
was a vast expanse of level ground, unbroken for but a thin line of
trees here and there. It was a tranquil sea or lake without water. It
was lonely and wild, yet oppressive in its barren monotony.
The ocean of grass which was tall, thick and unbroken by plow or
spade which covered most of this immense, flat region west and south
of Lake Michigan had repelled rather than attract pioneers. Eastern
farmers, which were more familiar with deep valleys and forests of
timber wanted no part of it. The prairie sod, too tough for ordinary
plows was assumed to be valueless. Together with extremes of
temperature, then as now, posed all too many problems.
Until 1825 the Great Lakes possessed no commercial link with the
eastern United States. In the early 1830's Chicago was little more
than a settlement of frame shacks in a lakeside marsh. Southern
Illinois became inhabited mainly by American farm families who had
crossed over from Kentucky and Indiana, as did the family of Abraham
Lincoln, and soon became a land of log houses and rough cabins. It
was during this year that the first mule drawn barges moved through
the new Erie Canal into New York State and thus opening an all-water
route between the Midwest prairies and the eastern region of the
states.
Throughout the east the first railroad steam engines amazed
spectators and passengers by winning races against horse drawn
vehicles. Soon thereafter, Cyrus McCormick perfected his mechanical
reaper, which now could do the harvest work of a dozen hand swung
scythes. At Grand Detour, Illinois in 1837 a Vermont born blacksmith
named John Deere began manufacturing the first steel plow that broke
the prairie sod efficiently.
Together, the railroad, the new plow and the reaper made it
possible to settle and farm the Midwest. Now the people came to the
prairies, not by wagon train or oxcart, but by barge, steamboat and
train. They came not by the hundreds but by the thousands. In the
half century between 1840 and 1890 the population of Illinois went
from 476,000 to nearly 4 million. And it was the great European
migrations of the nineteenth century that so increased the population
so rapidly. On the heels of the English and Scots came the Irish.
Then followed by Norwegians, Germans, Poles, Czechs, Russians,
Italians, French, Dutch, and Belgians.
To many the state offered living space for homes, farms and crops
such as they had never dreamed of. These immigrants came first as
homesteaders or as they came to be called, "sodbusters." And it was
their thought to make Illinois prairies one of the most productive
farming regions in the country. As Chicago grew into a city, its
labor force grew in its stockyards, railroad yards, mills and
factories. Great numbers were migrating from the south into the
state. In the 1850's Chicago and Illinois became the heart of a giant
new industry. Iron ore was shipped down from the Great Lakes from
northern Minnesota, while up from southern Illinois, which had been
found to have the richest bituminous coal deposits in the nation,
soon came mile long freight trains of fuel for the blast furnaces and
foundries. Illinois, the twenty first state having attained statehood
on December 3, 1818 would soon become an industrial giant along with
being one of the nation's major producers of agricultural products.
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