History of Alexander, Union and Pulaski Counties, Illinois, Part 12

Author: Perrin, William Henry, d. 1892?
Publication date: 1883
Publisher: Chicago, Ill. ; O.L. Baskin & Co.
Number of Pages: 948

USA > Illinois > Union County > History of Alexander, Union and Pulaski Counties, Illinois > Part 12
USA > Illinois > Pulaski County > History of Alexander, Union and Pulaski Counties, Illinois > Part 12
USA > Illinois > Alexander County > History of Alexander, Union and Pulaski Counties, Illinois > Part 12

Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).

May 10, 1876-The Cairo City Property, being unable to pay the loans negotiated in 1863 and 1867, the mortgages were fore- closed, and the property of the Trust sold to the bondholders under the mortgage.

January 20, 1876-A new Trust formed, called the Cairo City Trust Property, under which the property is now managed by S. Staats Taylor, and Edwin Parsons, Trustees.

The finale of all this is, there was much more legislation than city or railroads con- structed. It is an evidence that the way cities are built is not by cunning or strong

HISTORY OF CAIRO.

legislative acts, but by strong, enterprising, busy men; not by powerful, speculative cor- porations, but by independent individuals; not by anticipating the incoming rush of the thousands who make it a metropolis, and dis- counting in advance the per capita profits of their coming, but by voluntary acts of each one, acting in ignorance and unconcern of

what the future is or may be of the place- the busy, enterprising men of small capital and vast energy. These are the broad and strong foundations of all great cities that have ever yet been built in this country. It is the antipodes, in everything of a movement to found a city, to be, when completed, the property of a chartered corporation.

CHAPTER V.

THE LEVEES-HOW THE TERRITORIAL LEGISLATURE BY LAW PLACED THE NATURAL TOWN SITE ABOVE OVERFLOWS-FIRST EFFORTS AT CONSTRUCTING LEVEES-ENGINEER'S REPORTS ON THE SAME-ESTIMATED HEIGHT AND COSTS-THE FLOODS-THE CITY OVERFLOWED

-GREAT DISASTER, THE CAUSE AND ITS EFFECTS-THE LEVEES ARE RECON- STRUCTED AND THEY DEFY THE GREATEST WATERS EVER KNOWN.

TN the preceding chapter we have at- tempted to give a succinct account of the many charter and other corporation laws passed in reference to founding the city of Cairo, commencing with the first act of the Illinois Territorial Legislature, of June 9, 1818, and in chronological order tracing these acts down to date. Following this, in the natural order, would be a similar account of the construction of the city's levees, from the first little rude embankments of William Bird around his little trading house, to the present more than seven miles of the finest, and probably the most solid, protective em- bankments in the world.

In the year 1828, John and Thompson Bird brought their slaves over from Missouri, and built an embankment around the hotel that then was the solitary building in Cairo; which stood a short distance below the pres- ent Halliday House. It was a frame build- ing, about twenty-five by thirty-five feet in dimensions. This levee seems to have ful- filled its purposes well, and for years kept out the waters. The same parties soon after

erected another building, for a store, and as this was just outside the levee, it was perched on posts that were high enough to keep it from the raging waters.

For the particulars of the next attempt to construct levees we are indebted to the now venerable Judge Miles A. Gilbert, of Ste. Mary's, Mo., who gives us his recollections of the acts and doings of the old City & Bank of Cairo Company. He says: "John C. Comyges, the master spirit of this enter- prise, had just perfected his plans to go over to Holland, and bring to Cairo a shipload of Dutch laborers, to build the dykes or levees around the city, when he was taken sick and soon died, when the other incorporators, becoming discouraged, the enterprise was finally abandoned. In those days (1818), the public lands were purchased from the Gov- ernment, under a credit system of $2 per acre-50 cents in cash paid, and $1.50 on time. If the $1.50 was not promptly paid at maturity, the land reverted to the Govern- ment, and the 50 cents per acre paid was forfeited, and the land became again subject

HISTORY OF CAIRO.

to entry. In 1835, Judge Sidney Breese, Miles A. Gilbert and Thomas Swanwick re- entered these lands, the object being to revive the old charter of the City & Bank of Cairo Company, of 1818, which had not yet expired by limitation of its charter. In order to gain influence to effect this purpose, Miles A. Gil- bert and Thomas Swanwick sold an undivided interest to Hon. David J. Baker, Hon. Elias K. Kane, Pierre Mesnard and Darius B. Hol- brook." [Then follows an account of the chartering of the original Illinois Central Railroad, and the Internal Improvement Sys- tem, and the final release of the railroad charter to the State. For particulars see pre- ceding chapter. - ED. ] " Judge Gilbert in- forms us that one of the conditions of the Central's release to the State was, the State should build a road upon the proposed line and establish a depot in the city limits, and the city company was to deed the railroad ten acres of land for depot purposes, which deed was duly made.

"In 1838, D. B. Holbrook, the President of the Cairo City & Canal Company, went to England and negotiated a loan or hypotheca- tion of the company's bonds, to the amount of 155,800 pounds sterling. On his return, he revived and organized the Cairo City Bank, which was, as required by law, for the time being, located at Kaskaskia, when work was commenced at Cairo upon a large and extravagant scale. Anthony Olney was ap- pointed General Superintendent. A large force was set to work, building the levees around the city.

" Foundries, machine shops, workshops, boarding-houses and dwellings went up as if by magic. But in the midst of this general and cheerful prosperity, the banking-house of Wright & Co., of London, failed. The im- mediate cause of the suspension at Cairo was the failure of Wright & Co. to meet the

drafts then drawn on them by the Cairo City & Canal Company, and that were on their way to England. Had the failure been post- poned sixty days longer, and the existing drafts been honored, the Cairo Company could have met all its contracts thereafter incurred, by a little prudence, and the com- pany have been made self-sustaining. D. B. Holbrook made every effort in his power to raise means to pay and secure those whom the company owed at Cairo, but distrust had seized every one, and the result was the com- pany, bank, and all work suspended. Fol- lowing this, recklessness and mob law reigned supreme"-idleness, rioting, de- moralization and drunkenness held sway, and the seething, roaring mob were as a den of mixed wild beasts, where only the fierce and bloodthirsty passions were manifested or to be met. Here was the rapidly gathered together young city, of about two thousand people, plain laborers mostly, many skilled mechanics, boarding-house keepers, engineers, merchants, traders, contractors, and the women and children. Their incipient city fringed along the banks of the Ohio River, where the great old forest trees had been felled along the edges of the river bank to make room for this little border of mosaic work of civilization in the far West. The young town was in all its bewildering new- ness and freshness-that unfinished confusion on a fresh bank of earth here, a ditch there; a rough, stumpy, newly blazed road or trail, hardly yet cut by its first wagon tracks, lead- ing nowhere; newly-built houses dotted here and there as though dropped at random from the skies, without reference to their ever tak- ing their positions in streets or regularity, so new, too, were they, that a blanket, a piece of carpet or a quilt did duty for a door, and upon every hand were other still newer houses in every stage of building, from the few half-

HISTORY OF CAIRO.

hewn logs that lay scattered over the ground and obstructing the passage-ways, to those with the new board roof being nailed on; workshops, boarding-houses, hotels, foun- dries, in short, a great city was almost magically being built in the wild forests, and simultaneously a great railroad was being built in the city, and happy and busy men were working out this apparently inex- tricable confusion, and bringing order and symmetry out of disorder, when the crash came, and hope and confidence fled from the people; all labor instantly ceased, and whole families swarmed from their homes, cabins and tents, after the fashion of angry bees when a stick is thrust into their hive. Hol- brook's fair promises were scouted, the law of the land ridiculed, and pell-mell the mob commenced an indiscriminate sacking of all public or city company property. They mostly must have found but little comfort in this, as there was little or nothing that could be converted to private use that would be of any value, and hence the robberies or appro- priations must often have been after the fashion of the soldier, who started on the march to Georgia, and the first day out dis- covered the highways and the by-ways, the fields and the woods were full of bummers, who were stealing everything as they went. Piqued at his being behind the early birds, he looked about him for something to steal, when the only thing he could find left was a plow. This he shouldered, and in happiness resumed his march. After tugging in sore agony and distress under his load of loot for a few miles, he overhauled his elder patriotic brother, stranded by the wayside from a grindstone that he had appropriated a few miles back. These two patriots, as it is right and proper they should be, are now on the penson list, for permanent disability-not for wounds received in battle, but for strains

in transporting from the Southern Confeder- acy the sinews of war.

Mr: Anthony Olney, the Superintendent, attempted to stay the storm and protect the property, but soon saw how futile his efforts were, and he quit serious efforts in that di- rection. He died a short time after this.

Soon those to whom the Cairo City & Canal Company was indebted began to make efforts to collect their money by law. They attached everything they could find belonging to the company, which was sold at public sale for a mere trifle. For nearly two years the place was abandoned by all the repre- sentatives of the company, and the mob and the officers of the laws had effectually dis- posed of all the company's property.

In 1838, just previous to the commence- ment of the improvements noted above, the city company issued the following circular:

" The President of the Cairo City & Canal Company, having made arrangements in England for the funds requisite to carry on their contemplated improvements in the city of Cairo, upon the most extensive and liberal scale, it is now deemed proper to 'give pub- licity to the objects, plans and other matters connected with this great work, in order that every one who feels an interest or has pride in the success of this magnificent public enter- prise, may properly understand and appre- ciate the motives and designs of the project- ors.

" The company, from the commencement determined to withhold from sale, at any price, the corporate property of the city, un- til it should be made manifest to the most doubting and skeptical, the perfect practica- bility of making the site of the city of Cairo habitable. This being now fully established, by the report of the distinguished engineers, Messrs. Strickland & Taylor, of Pennsyl- vania, and also by that of the principal en-

HISTORY OF CAIRO.

gineers of the State works of Illinois, the company are (?) proceeding in the execution of their (?) plans, as set forth in their pros- pectus, viz .: To make the levees, streets and embankments of the city; to erect ware- houses, stores and shops convenient for every branch of commercial business; dry docks; also buildings adapted for every useful me- chanical an manufacturing purpose, and dwelling-houses of such cost and description as will suit the taste and means of every citizen -- which course has been adopted as the most certain to secure the destined popu- lation of Cairo, within the least possible time. The company, however, wish it fully understood, that it is far from their desire or intention to monopolize, or engage in any of the various objeets of enterprise, trade or business which must of necessity spring up and be carried on with great and singular success in this city; it being their governing motive to offer every reasonable and proper encouragement to the enterprising and skill- ful artisan, manufacturer, merchant and pro- fessional man to identify his interests with the growth and prosperity of the city. When the company makes sales or leases of prop- erty, it will be on such liberal terms as no other town or city can offer, possessing like advantages for the acquisition of that essen- tial means of human happiness-wealth. The President of the company is fully em- powered, whenever he shall deem it expedi- ent, to sell or lease the property, and other- wise to represent the general interests and affairs of the company."

This proclamation was the work of the President, Holbrook, and it was the aims, hopes, ambitions and intentions of the com- pany, as he was willing and eager for all the world to see and know them. In this mani- festo, Mr. Holbrook feels constrained, in the name of the company, to say, " that it is far

from their desire or intention to monopolize or engage in any of the various objects of enterprise, trade or business, which must of necessity spring up, etc." It was only after the calamitous crash came that people re- membered there had been anything really said in the President's circular except that " the President of the Cairo City & Canal Company, having made arrangements in England for the funds requisite to carry out their contemplated improvements in the city of Cairo, upon the most extensive and liberal scale, etc."

The subject of "funds" was all that caught the eye of the hopeful comer to Cairo, and the liberal and extensive works of building the foundations of the city, that caused the money to pour out to the people in a golden stream, were abundant evidences to all the world that the company had not only got the money, but were honestly putting it to the purposes for which they said "they had secured it " in their circular. But in the great financial wreck, that carried down such a wide circle of public and private enter- prises, and that came like a clap of thunder from a clouldess sky, the larger portion of the laborers that suffered from the visitation looked no further for the source of their woe than to Holbrook and his circular. And no doubt that here was the origin of the distrust of this man and his schemes, that eventually widely spread, and entered deeply into the minds of men all over our country, even 'to that extent that his usefulness ceased, and he returned to his Boston home to retire- ment from his struggles, to privacy and death.

When Holbrook got the money from Eng- land, he put his engineers at once to work to ascertain the wants of the town site in the way of protective embankments from the waters of the two rivers that laved the three

HISTORY OF CAIRO.

sides of its shores, and when they reported, he put 1,500 laborers upon this work, which he was pushing vigorously when the crash came. The levees along the two rivers had been regularly made and joined together at the southern extremity, but the cross levee on the north, to connect the two levees on the shores, and thus encircling the entire city, had not been constructed, and thus, practically, all the work completed was of little or no value without the completion of the north cross-levee.

As stated above, the Cairo City & Canal Company, and their Superintendent, Mr. Olney, had abandoned the town and their property, and, eventually, so did nearly all the 2,000 people that had gathered here, and so complete was this exodus that it is stated less than fifty of them permanently re- mained. These seem to have been an easy, devil-may-care class of men, who found themselves the happy possessors, and for all purposes of use and occupation, the owners of a great young city, or the half-finished ground-plans thereof.

The sudden coming together of what all the world thought to be a young and prom- ising great city was equaled only by its sud- den, almost complete desertion when the storm of adversity broke upon it.

The completed improvements in the town were the iron works of Bellews, Hathaway & Gilbert, which were supplied with the best English machinery, which were in full oper- ation, and turning out much valuable prod- nets. This institution continued its busi- ness, running its machinery to its full capac- ity until the 22d of March, 1842, when the floods of that year, owing to the unfinished condition of the levees, washed it away. This flood at the same time swept away the dry dock, which had been erected at a cost of over $35,000, when it was seized by credit-

ors, taken to New Orleans and sold. The City Company had made a large addition to the Cairo Hotel, which was thronged with guests at all times, many of them being tourists, attracted here by the wide name and fame of Cairo. Two large saw mills were turning out building lumber and steamboat timbers. A three-story planing mill was running to its fullest capacity. This was situated on the corner of Eighth street and the Ohio levee. The steamer Asia and the hull of the steamer Peru had been moored in front of the city, and were made into wharf- boats and hotels. Holbrook had erected a spacious and elegant residence on the spot now occupied by the Halliday House. The company had erected twenty neat and com. modious cottages during the season of 1841.

Then the numerous shanties, cabins and pole-huts, together with the unfinished levees and an unfinished railroad, were the heirlooms that became the possessions of the happy-go- lucky fifty people that remained here amid the general wreck and ruin.

In April, 1843, Miles A. Gilbert was ap. pointed Agent of the Cairo City & Canal Company, to take possession, care and gen- eral control of its property in the city. The condition in which he found matters upon his arrival here, the mood and temper and claims of the people, the lawless spirit of the mnob, and their primitive notions of the vested rights to everything that their occupancy had given them, the episodes Mr. Gilbert en- countered, that drove him to that " last re- sort of nations," are fully told in the bio- graphical sketch of him in another part of this work.

As soon as Mr. Gilbert had vindicated his right to the possession and control of the property, he put a force of laborers at work constructing the cross-levee, from the Ohio to the Mississippi levee, and this was com-

HISTORY OF CAIRO.

pleted during the year 1843. He also re- paired, strengthened, raised and leveled the old levees running along the river banks. The levees, as now completed, inclosed about six hundred acres of ground. Their average height above the natural surface of the land was between seven and eight feet.

Their efficacy as embankments to keep out the waters is well told in the following from Mr. Miles A. Gilbert: " They kept out the great flood in the Missisippi of June, 1844. Cairo was the only dry spot in the river bot- toms to be found between St. Louis and New Orleans. That season, I had a field of corn, of many acres, planted inside the Cairo levee, which grew to maturity and ripened into a good crop, although the water sur- rounding the city was about eight feet higher than the surface of the corn-field."

The flood in the Mississippi River of the spring of 1844 was historical, and remains to this day, as marking the extreme height to which the waters of that river have attained since its discovery. The writer remembers standing upon the high bluffs opposite St. Louis, when the waters of the river stretched from the base of the hills like a great sea, and as he looked west over the expanse of waters, could see no dry land except Monk's Mound, which was covered with domestic animals. From Alton to New Orleans, the river extended from the hills on one side to the hills on the opposite side, and probably averaged in width between fifteen and twenty miles. The destruction of human life, the devastation of property, in all this strip of wide country, for twelve hundred miles, was appalling. Houses, fences and buildings of all kinds were washed away, and a wide track of desolation marked the whole course of the river -- except within the levee of the city of Cairo. Here, Miles A. Gil- bert's field of corn was vigorously pushing

up its heads, to look and smile, perhaps, upon the angry flood that surrounded it. What a triumph for the young city, to fol- low, as it did, so closely in time upon the tracks of the financial disaster that had swept over it, and against which no levees or em- bankments could protect it! What a laurel wreath it was for Miles A. Gilbert and his co-laborers in their heroic determination to overcome all obstacles, and build a city here!

From the hour that Mr. Gilbert finished and inclosed the city with a levee, there has come to the town no disaster from the high waters in the Mississippi River; and yet the highest floods ever known in that river came while the levees were so con- structed and finished by Mr. Gilbert, and before they had been raised to their present height, which is an average of about twelve feet above the surface of the ground all around the city, or, in other words, five feet in height had been added to the original levees.

It is a well-established fact that even the first levees built here would have been an abundant protection from any waters in the Mississippi River. While this wonderful river, in its onward surge to the sea, defies and baffles the puny arm of man to guide, check or control it, yet nature has so arranged the topography of the country, through which the river runs between this point and St. Louis, that its greatest floods can do no harm at Cairo. At Grand Chain, the river has cut its bed down through the solid rocks many hundreds of feet, and the great, water-seamed cliffs stand facing each other, forming the narrowest point, and the highest perpendicular rocky bluffs on either side of any other place in, the Lower Mississippi. This narrow gorge holds back the water above, and allows it only to pass through in such quantities, that the wide bottoms that

HISTORY OF CAIRO.

commence here take them off as fast as they can come.

While this is true of the Mississippi River, it is not the case with the Ohio River. The same Grand Chain crosses the Ohio, and passes into Kentucky a few miles above here; yet the river channel has not been so con- fined by steep, rocky shores, but, upon the contrary, there is quite a sufficient space for the waters in uninterrupted [volume, even at the highest stages.

But recent experiences teach there has been a material change in the frequency and force of the high waters, especially in the Ohio River. The great freshets in the Mississippi are usually known as the " June rise," and generally come from the melting snows in the Rocky Mountain regions, while the Ohio River is almost wholly influenced by long- continued heavy rains in the Mississippi Valley. Since 1860, the drainage of the en- tire agricultural country in the Valley has been greatly increased, until lagoons and marshes and ponds that once held the rain- fall, and · allowed it to pass off only by evaporation, are now dry and well-tilled farms. So wide and thorough has general drainage been inaugurated, in surface, and subsoil and tile drainage, that it must greatly affect the gathering of the waters to the large rivers, and is, no doubt, one of the large factors in producing the change that has taken place in the annual freshets in our rivers. Still another alleged influence is the clearing out of the forests all over the country, and thus taking from the atmosphere and the soil one large source of gathering and holding back the waters. But this last theory is somewhat fuddled by the often-advanced philosophical idea that the cutting away of the forests re- duces the rainfall, and hence the great droughts which so severely afflict the country . at now frequent intervals. One or the other,

perhaps both, of these theories are false, yet there is one thing well established, namely, that a heavily-timbered country always be- speaks a large rainfall there, while the treeless desert as certainly tells of a cloudless sky and no rainfall. So, if the trees do not pro- duce an increase in the rain, the rain cer- tainly does increase the tree growth.

When Miles F. Gilbert had completed his levees around the city of Cairo, in 1843, he had walled the waters out, and fenced in the ragged squad of fifty men, women and chil- dren that constituted the population of the forlorn city. This tattered remnant of peo- ple had taken and held possession of the houses, and the first choice of hut, shanty, cottage, Holbrook's handsome residence, or mill, or factory, was to the swift of foot, who, when the exodus commenced, could get there first, and acquire ownership by possession. They evidently looked upon Mr. Gilbert with some distrust and ill-will, as he was “ not regular" in this; he claimed there were yet property rights here of the Cairo & Canal Company, and he further believed in the majesty and supremacy of the law of the land. He gave his time and labored faith- fully, never, for a moment, so doubting his eyes and senses as to lose faith in the future great destiny of Cairo. From 1843 to 1851 did he continue thus to "hold the fort," and protect the town and build up its inter- ests. In those eight long years of decay and dilapidation, the population increased only from 50 to 200 souls. Except for the efforts of Mr. Gilbert, there was an interreg- num here, and a prostration of the hopes of the town quite as profound as was the finan- cial and commercial panic in the country generally. And all over the West this pros- tration lasted until the passage by Congress of the bill for the building of the Illinois Central Railroad, in February, 1851.

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History of Alexander, Union and Pulaski Counties, Illinois, Part 12

Author: Perrin, William Henry, d. 1892? Publication date: 1883 Publisher: Chicago, Ill. ; O.L. Baskin & Co. Number of Pages: 948

Author: Perrin, William Henry, d. 1892?
Publication date: 1883
Publisher: Chicago, Ill. ; O.L. Baskin & Co.
Number of Pages: 948