Back to Rocky's Corner Archive
September 2006: Didja Know?
Our state has had a long and interesting history. Much of it is not taught in school nor is it common knowledge. We thought this month we’d follow up on this and expose you readers to a few “didja knows”!
#1) Didja know that once Illinois was one of the leading oil producing states? Ranking number 3 in fact. Maybe some of you have taken route 57 south and seen some of the present day oil fields. They are few and far between. Between 1907 and 1913 there was quite an oil boom in Illinois. An example of it is the town of Stoy in Crawford County. It had been a stop on the Indiana, Illinois, and Southern Railroad in 1880 and in a few years it acquired a Post Office and about 488 inhabitants. In 1909 the oil fields were drilled and before long the population swelled to an estimated 4000 people, bigger than the county seat, Crawfordsville. It was a typical oil boom town. Few permanent buildings, lots of tents and shacks and a wild and raucous place. Probably the natives dod not appreciate the rough and tumble place their town had become, but the whole thing lasted only 4 years and the place reverted to what it is today, a sleepy little backwater with the only remnant from the oil boom, a little church that was built at the time, using oil money, and which has become a historic site today.
I have sort of a footnote to that story from my own family, though it doesn’t deal with Stoy, but rather with McLeansboro, further south. My older brother married a pretty girl whose family had fled from that area during the depression and settled in northern Illinois, working by the month on the farm; Shortly after their marriage they had taken a trip down to McLeansboro, to meet some of my sister-in-law’s relatives. My brother talked about how shocked he was to see the conditions his wife had been brought up under. The phrase “dirt poor” was what he used to describe it, both because of the poverty and also because it applied to the soil of the farms which was so depleted as to hardly grow a good crop of weeds. Twenty years later they made another trip down there. In the interim oil had been found on the property (spurred by the need for fuel in World War II.
There had be en a remarkable transformation. The ramshackle houses and out buildings had been replaced by brand new ones. The crops were much better as some of that oil money was ploughed back into the soil in the form of fertilizer. My brother related how his wife’s uncle had taken him out to the oil well and opened the door to a little building. Inside a stream of oil was running from the pump to a storage container. My brother laughed at how his wife’s uncle said, with a big smile on his face “that runs like that all the time. Even on Sunday”. An oil boom has another side besides the raucous one.
# 2) Didja know that Illinois was once the site of the US army’s largest military base? Few people do. Even fewer know that it’s still there, underground. Starting about 1799 and about 4 years afterward, the government maintained about 1500 soldiers, more than a third of the entire US army at Cantonment Wilkinson on the banks of the Ohio River, overlooking Grand Chain, a 5 mile long series of low-water rapids between Cairo and Metropolis. The base was the brain child of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton who wanted to create a military presence in the Mississippi Valley, in case the young nation had trouble with Napolean. The place was named after its commander, General James Wilkinson.
Until recently the remains of the Cantonment Wilkinson could be found only in history books and the oral legends of Southern Illinois. Almost 200 years of settlement and planting had obliterated the place. Now, however, a team of archeologists are at work, digging to see what the soldiers left behind. It’s not easy. That part of Illinois is different from the rest of the state. Glaciers never reached this place to wear down, pulverize, and level. It is rough, hilly country, not very good for crops. It is heavily forested,
Records tell little about how the place was laid out. There are a couple of maps, they don’t help much. The archeologists are digging holes, using new electronic devices that detect unusual things underground. We’ve discovered the foundations of the houses where the officers lived, a broken bayonet, and a surprising number of buttons. They will be using the artifacts they unearth to create a picture of what this place was really like.
Didja know about all this?