History of Alexander, Union and Pulaski Counties, Illinois, Part 28

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 28
USA > Illinois > Pulaski County > History of Alexander, Union and Pulaski Counties, Illinois > Part 28
USA > Illinois > Alexander County > History of Alexander, Union and Pulaski Counties, Illinois > Part 28

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).

The Iron Mountain Railroad is now a

regular Cairo railroad, by an extension from Charleston, Mo., to Bird's Point, giving the town an additional highway to St. Louis and the South. This is one of the valuable Mis- souri railroads, and was constructed and operated for years with the idea that it could afford to pass within a few miles of Cairo and ignore its existence. But time, and the growth and trade of the place, eventually compelled them to build into Cairo and estab- lish a transfer boat, and thus reach some of the rich harvest that awaited their coming.

Here are eight completed first-class rail- roads into Cairo, and the anticipations of the next few months are that the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad will be added to the Cairo list of roads, and thus form a direct line from the city to the Atlantic Ocean at Norfolk, Va., making, by many miles, the most direct road to the seashore. The value of this line, if carried out as now contemplated, would be incalculable to the whole Mississippi Valley. It would compel the building of a direct rail- road from Cairo West to the Pacific coast, or at least to a connection with the Southern Pacific Railroad. The Cincinnati & Cairo Narrow Gauge Railroad is now in course of construction. The road will run direct from Cincinnati to Cairo, passing entirely across the southern portion of Indiana, and have a length of 220 miles. This will bring a rich portion of the country to the Cairo trade.

The Toledo & St. Louis Narrow Gauge is now completed, and the construction of a branch from some point in Shelby or Edgar County to Cairo is being rapidly pushed to completion. This important link is essential to the filling out of the great net-work of nar- row gauge roads that are now being completed from New York City to the City of Mexico.

Thus may we not now hope that the commanding commercial position of Cairo will yet compel the making here of a great

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HISTORY OF CAIRO.

railroad and transportation and travel center, that nature evidently intended from the first it should become. At the least, here is light

and hope ahead for the people who have toiled and struggled and hoped so long and so faithfully.

CHAPTER XI.

CONCLUSION-THE FUTURE OF THE CITY CONSIDERED-HER PRESENT STATUS AND GROWTH- PRESENT CITY OFFICIALS, ETC.

"While others may think of the times that are gone, They are bent by the years that are fast rolling on."

A BRIEF retrospect, and a short sum- ming-up of Cairo as it is, will con- clude our account of its history; and in this retrospect we much wish we could answer, to our own satisfaction, the' oft-repeated question that the people have propounded to us in regard to the future of the city: "What is the city's outlook?" No town site has been more especially favored by nature, and few, if any, have been so sorely afflicted with untoward circumstances. And often the most heroic exertions in her behalf, by some of her people here, have re-acted to the apparent real injury to the prospects of the place. Her foundation was laid in a South Sea Bub- ble, by a visionary, impracticable, bankrupt corporation that gathered the first people here rapidly, and then tumbled over their own air castles and left the people in distress and despair. In a night, almost, a thrifty young city of 2,000 busy, bustling people was turned into an idle mob, wandering about the Ohio levee, and ready-and did attempt -to take by force the first steamer that touched at the wharf, and appropriate it to the purpose of taking the many workers, who bad been thrown out of employment, away from the place. The officers only saved their property by hastily drawing out into the stream. Then, after the levees were built,

the waters came and washed them away, and drowned out the town, and gloom and desola- tion marked its tracks. But above, and perhaps far greater causes of evils that have beset Cairo all its life, and of which it is not yet wholly exempt, have been the corporate and private monopolies that have sucked out much of that vitality that it so much needed for its own development. It altogether impresses us with the fact, that the remarkable natural wealth of advantages of the place have been among its misfortunes. As in some spots of the globe the wealth of soil, climate and vegetable and animal growth are so rank and profuse, that they overcome the energies of man, and remain a wilderness. the home of an unparalleled growth of vegetation, filled with ferocious beasts and poisonous insects. For instance, the wonderful land of Brazil, in South America, a scope of country larger than the United States, and the richest in climate and soil in the world, so rich and so prolific, that it defies the puny arm of man to conquer and become the master of its riot of power in productiveness of vegetable and animal life. From the very force and power of its abundance, it is made as uninhabitable as are the arid wastes of the sandy desert. In looking over the short life of the city, we cannot but be impressed with the fact that it has been one of its misfortunes in present- ing so many natural advantages as to tempt

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HISTORY OF CAIRO.

the schemers and the unscrupulous to com- bine and attempt to gather in to their own, benefits and advantages that were placed here by nature in quantities sufficient for al- most a young empire. Great cities in this country have not been built by corporations, backed by stringent or powerful laws of the State Legislatures. They need no combina- tions, companies or heavy capitalists in their young and growing days. It wants only the free play of individual effort, where each business man may see a hope to realize wealth and position by his efforts, and to know that in such a struggle he will not be crushed by a public or private monopoly. Hence, Cairo's first calamity was a charter granted for its building. Cairo, and its past history, and its destiny, are singular subjects to contemplate. There is, looking from one standpoint, no reason why there should not be as many people and as much wealth here as there is in Chicago, and, turning to the other side of the picture, the wonder arises why the 10,000 people who are now here ever came, or stayed when they did come. It has demonstrated what many wise heads believed impossible, namely, the erection of levees and embankments that would protect, not only against the "highest known waters," but against the unparalleled floods of 1882 and 1883. It has been the only dry land along the river, but it was an island in the waste of waters, and the overflow of the present year has demonstrated that it is not alone enough to keep the water out of the city, but the merchants and business men are now realiz- ing that they must keep up communication with the agricultural communities surround- ing the place, or business will stagnate, and hard times will come. Again, the levees have always presented vexatious questions, that were injurious because unsettled ques- tions. People have divided upon the policies

to be pursued in reference to grading up the town and the levees, and continued that un- settled state of the public mind that has caused injury to the permanent growth and especially the manufacturing interests of the place. A world-wide misapprehension and a common stock-slander on the extreme South- ern Illinois, has been in regard to the healthfulness of this section of the country. To the citizens, there is the patent fact that there is no healthier place in the Mississippi Valley. The general appearance of the peo. ple, the overflow of the school rooms with ruddy, chubby-faced, happy children, tell the whole story as to the health of the people; but the traveler sees a pond of sipe water, the low, swampy land about the city, and. being impressed before he comes with the common slander, imagines he needs a medi- cated sponge tied over his nose in order that he may not breathe in death in passing hurriedly through the place, and 'he writes a letter to the great city paper, telling the world of the dangers that he passed, and the providential escape he made, in passing through Southern Illinois. It is immaterial what the health statistics may show, these the affrighted slanderer will not see, particu- larly as they give the lie direct to his manu- factured stories; but if they did, upon the contrary, show a great death rate here, then, indeed, would these tables be quoted and re- quoted the year round, in great, fat display type, that all the world might see,

Cairo was the natural crossing point for the immigration and travel east and west, north and south. This point of crossing, in the center of the continent, was, by the war and other untoward circumstances, moved 300 miles north of this, and the south half of the Union, for commercial purposes, was wiped from the map of the country for a dec- ade or more, and the railroads built, and the

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HISTORY OF CAIRO.

cities sprung up, and commerce adjusted to this northern line, until it may now be for- ever impossible to change it. The very fact that Illinois penetrated, from the northern lakes, like a wedge, down into the Southern States, forming, as Daniel P. Cook argued, the keystone of the great union of States, has been turned, in the unfortunate quarrels of the late war, into a base whereon to place this end of the State in the same category, for the unholy sneers and slanders that were heaped upon all the South, and aided much in spreading her discredit world-wide. Then, the city is confronted with such questions as, Will the rivers continue to mark the flood line higher and higher, as has been the case the past two years? If so, indeed, then, what of the morrow? It is urged that the constant improvement in draining that is going on north of us-tile draining, espe- cially-that in many places is becoming so universal, and to these are remembered the fact that the forests are being cleared away, and that these facts, added to the levees thrown up at many places as railroad beds, must cause the waters to continue to rise higher and higher, until, in the end, there will be no such things as fencing them out with embankments. There were features of the last flood that fail to bear out this rea- soning. The waters at Cincinnati were five feet higher than ever known; at Cairo, only a few inches. Then, the hope and purpose of the river improvement now going on is to deepen the bed of the river by narrowing the current in the shallow and wide places in the river, and increasing the current (it is claimed, upon experiments, that this deepen- ing can be made to an average of twelve feet), and this increase of current and depth of the river's bed must lower materially the flood line of any high waters that may come down the rivers. The unequaled advantages

of Cairo for nearly all our manufacturing industries are beginning to be understood throughout the country. The accessions to the city in important factories in the past few years, show that shrewd men see here the best place in all the West to get the raw material and the machinery for its fash- ioning together, and then, when the article is made, with the easiest and best outlets to the markets of the world-transportation that can never combine or pool its business, to the detriment of the manufacturer or mer- chant. Then, why are not all the great manufacturing industries of the country rep- resented here, crowding the levees of the Ohio and Mississippi with their "flaming forges and flying spindles," and the roar and hum of machinery, and " the music of the hammer and the saw?" In short, why is not Cairo the great manufacturing city of America ? Nature has offered illimitable bounties to bring them here: why have they not come? Perhaps each one can figure out for himself the why and the wherefore of this. We believe the reasons to be partially artificial (these might be removed), and partly natural. One thing we may truthfully say of Cairo and her surrounding country: The locality has never been advertised to the world. A tithe of the money wasted from time to time, if it had been judiciously invested in adver- tising the superior advantages of this sec- tion of country, would have brought many more people here than are now citizens. Men sit around, and croak about capital com- ing here. This is not the way cities are built; but it is the men starting in trade and commerce; men who are possessed, often, of small means and great activity and nerve, that come to a new place, perhaps commence business in a tent or shanty; that push along, and eventually erect great business houses, and great factories, and build rich

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HISTORY OF CAIRO.

cities. The capitalists will only follow where these men have shown the way. We therefore think it probably an unwise act in the city authorities making so large a dis- trict of the city as the fire limits for build- ing purposes. It is very doubtful wisdom to obstruct the man of small means from build- ing. A town full of cheap houses is one of the best indications of coming prosperity. If they burn, they will take their insurance money, and only build a better grade of houses in the place of the old. The man wants all his money in his business, and it is only when he feels comparatively rich will he build fine or extensive establishments. To sum up the evils that have beset Cairo, we need only name the floods and fire, epi- demics and monopolies. These are her main grievances. To these may be added some mistaken legislation on the part of the city authorities, and particularly the grave mis- take of keeping the filling and grading ques- tions always open, and in an unsettled con- dition. This deters men from building, as well as others from coming here and putting up extensive manufacturing and commercial establishments.

It is better to settle it in some way, and let that be a permanent settlement.

Cairo bas passed her greatest trials, and whilst her triumph, even, has left her behind in the race with other cities that possessed hardly a tithe of her natural advantages, yet

her prospects just now are far better than they have ever been before. She has a per- manent population; they are creating the wealth that some day will do much toward building here a city. The wholesale trade of the merchants has sprung up in a very few years, and if good wagon roads are made to all the surrounding country, and kept up, a few years will mark a splendid and solid advancement of the town.

The social and intellectual activity of the community in recent years, is well indicated by a public free library, that is now prepar- ing a permanent and beautiful home for itself, and the two book and news stores of the city that are so largely patronized by the people, and the elegant and spacious Government Post Office and Custom House.

The present city officials are Thomas W. Halliday, Mayor; Denis J. Foley, City Clerk; Charles, F. Nellis, Treasurer; L. H. Myers, Marshal; W. B. Gilbert, Corporation Counsel; William E. Hendricks, City Attorney; MI. J. Howley, City Comptroller; A. Comings, Police Magistrate. Aldermen-First Ward, William McHale and Henry Walker ; Second Ward, Jesse Hinckle, C. N. Hughes; Third Ward, B. F. Blake, E. A. Smith; Fourth Ward, C. A. Patier, A. Swoboda; Fifth Ward, Charles Lancaster, Henry Stout; Street Superintendent, Nicholas Devore; As- sistant Chief of Fire Department, Joseph Steagala.

PART II.

HISTORY OF UNION COUNTY.

Winstead Davie.

PART II.

HISTORY OF UNION COUNTY 1

BY H. C. BRADSBY.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION-GEOLOGY-IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATING THE PEOPLE ON THIS SUBJECT-THE LIMESTONE DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS-ECONOMICAL GEOLOGY OF UNION, ALEXANDER

AND PULASKI COUNTIES-MEDICAL SPRINGS, BUILDING MATERIAL, SOIL,

ETC .- WONDERFUL WEALTH OF NATURE'S BOUNTIES-TOPOG- RAPHY AND CLIMATE OF THIS REGION, ETC.

History is philosophy teaching by example.

THIS and the two succeeding chapters T include the district composed of Union, Alexander and Pulaski Counties. The whole was once Union County, and the first three chapters bring the history down to the for- mation of Alexander County.

For school purposes-for the purpose of giving the people a most important education in the practical life interests -- there is no question of such deep interest as the geolog- ical history of that particular portion of the country in which they make their homes. The people of Southern Illinois are an agri- cultural one in their pursuits. Their first care is the soil and climate, and it is here they may find an almost inexhaustible fund of knowledge, that will ever put money in their purses. All mankind are deeply in- terested in the soil. From here comes all life, all beauty, pleasure, wealth and enjoy- ment. Of itself, it may not be a beautiful

thing, but from it comes the fragrant flower, the golden fields, the sweet blush of the maiden's cheek, the flash of the lustrous eye that is more powerful to subdue the heart of obdurate man than an army with banners. From here comes the great and rich cities whose towers and temples and minarets kiss the early morning sun, and whose ships, with their precious cargoes, fleck every sea. In short, it is the nourishing mother whence comes our high civilization-the wealth of nations, the joys and exalted pleasures of life. Hence, the corner-stone upon which all of life rests is the farmer, who tickles the earth and it laughs with the rich harvests that so bountifully bless mankind. Who, then, should be so versed in the knowledge of the soil as the farmer? What other infor. mation can be so valuable to him as the mas- tery of the science of the geology, at least that much of it as applies to that part of the earth where he h~3 cast his fortunes and cultivates

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HISTORY OF UNION COUNTY.

the soil. We talk of educating the farmer, and ordinarily this means to send your boys to college, to acquire what is termed a class- ical education, and they come, perhaps, as graduates, as incapable of telling the geolog- ical story of the father's farm as is the veriest bumpkin who can neither read nor write. How much more of practical value it would have been to the young man had he never looked into the classics. and instead thereof had taken a few practical lessons in the local geology that would have told him the story of the soil around him, and enabled him to comprehend how it was formed, its different qualities and from whence it came, and its constituent elements. The farmer grows to be an old man, and he will tell you that he has learned to be a good farmer only by a long life of laborious experiments, and if you should tell him that these experiments had made him a scientific farmer, he would look with a good deal of contempt upon your supposed effort to poke ridicule at him. He has taught himself to regard the word " science" as the property only of book- worms and cranks. He does not realize that every step in farming is a purely scientific opera- tion, because science is made by experiments and investigations. An old farmer may ex- amine a soil, and tell you it is adapted to wheat or corn, that it is warm or cold and heavy, or a few other facts that his long ex- periments have taught him, and to that ex- tent he is a scientific farmer. He will tell you that his knowledge has cost him much labor, and many sore disappointments. Sup- pose that in his youth a well-digested chap- ter on the geological history, that would have told him, in the simplest terms, all about the land he was to cultivate, how invaluable the lesson would have been, and how much in money value it would have proved to him. In other words, if you could give your boys

a practical education, made up of a few les- sons pertaining to those subjects that im- mediately concern their lives, how invaluable such an education might be, and how many men would thus be saved the pangs and pen- alties of ill-directed lives. The parents often spend much money in the education of their children, and from this they build great hopes upon their future, that are often blasted, not through the fault, always, of the child, but through the error of the parent in not being able to know in what real, practi- cal education consists. If the schools of the country, for instance, could devote one of the school months in each year to rambling over the hills and the fields, and gathering practical lessons in the geology and botany of the section of country in which the chil- adren were born and reared, how incompar- ably more valuable and useful the time thus spent would be to them in after life, than would the present mode of shutting out the joyous sunshine of life, and expending both life and vitality in studying metaphysical mathematics, or the most of the other text- books that impart nothing that is worth the carrying home to the child's stock of knowl- edge. At all events, the chapter in a county's history that tells its geological for- mation is of first importance to all its people, and if properly prepared it will become a source of great interest to all, and do much to disseminate a better education among the people, and thus be a perpetual blessing to the community.

The permanent effect of the soil on the people is as strong and certain as upon the vegetation that springs from it. It is a maxim in geology that the soil and its un- derlying rocks forecast unerringly to the trained eye the character of the people, the number and the quality of the civilization of those who will, in the coming time, occupy

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HISTORY OF UNION COUNTY.

it. Indeed, so close are the relations of the geology and the people, that this law is plain and fixed, that a new country may have its outlines of history written when first looked upon, and it is not, as so many sup- pose, one of those deep, abstruse subjects that are to be given over solely to a few great investigators and thinkers, and to the masses must forever remain a sealed book. The youths of your country may learn the impor- tant outlines of the geology of their country with no more difficulty than they meet in mastering the multiplication table or the simple rule of three. And we make no ques- tion that a youth need not 'possess one-half of the mental activity and shrewdness in making a fair geologist of himself that he would find was required of him to become a successful jockey or a trainer of retriever dogs.

On the geological structure of a country depend the pursuits of its inhabitants, and the genius of its civilization. Agriculture is the outgrowth of a fertile soil; mining results from mineral resources, and from navigable rivers spring navies and commerce. Every great branch of industry requires, for its successful development, the cultivation of kindred arts and sciences. Phases of life and modes of thought are thus induced, which give to different communities and states characters as various as the diverse rocks that underlie them. In like manner, it may be shown that their moral and intel- lectual qualities depend on materal con- ditions. Where the soil and subjacent rocks are profuse in the bestowal of wealth, man is indolent and effeminate; where effort is re- quired to live, he becomes enlightened and virtuous. A perpetually mild climate and bread-growing upon the trees, will produce only ignorant savages. The heaviest mis- fortune that has so long environed poor, per-

secuted Ireland has been her ability to pro- duce the potato, and thus subsist wife and children upon a small patch of ground. Statistics tell us that the number of mar- riages are regulated by the price of corn, and the true philosopher has discovered that the invention of gunpowder did more to civilize the world than any one thing in its history.

Geology traces the history of the earth back through successive stages of develop- ment, to its rudimental condition in a state of fusion. The sun, and the planetary sys- tem that revolves around it, were originally a common mass, that became separated in a gaseous state, and the loss of heat in a planet reduced it to a plastic state, and thus it commenced to write its own history, and place its records upon these imperishable books, where the geologist may go and read the strange, eventful story. The earth was a wheeling ball of fire, and the cooling event- ually formed the exterior crust, and in the slow process of time prepared the way for the animal and vegetable life it now contains. In its center the fierce flames still rage, with undiminished energy. Volcanoes are outlets for these deep-seated fires, where are gener. ated those tremendous forces, an illustration of which is given in the eruptions of Vesu- vins, which has thrown a jet of lava, resem- bling a column of flame, 10,000 feet high. The amount of lava ejected at a single erup- tion from one of the volcanoes of Iceland, has been estimated at 40,000,000,000 tons, a quantity sufficient to cover a large city with a mountain as high as the tallest Alps. Our world is yet constantly congealing, just as the process has been going on for billions of years, and yet the rocky crust that rests upon this internal fire is estimated to be only be. tween thirty and forty miles in thickness. In the silent depths of the stratified rocks

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History of Alexander, Union and Pulaski Counties, Illinois, Part 28

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