USA > Illinois > Morgan County > History of Morgan county, Illinois : its past and present, containing a history of the county; its cities, towns, etc.; a biographical directory of its volunteers in the late rebellion; portraits of its early settlers and prominent men [etc., etc.] > Part 31
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Huram Reeve remembers the day as a warm and showery one during the forenoon. Near two o'clock in the afternoon it grew dark, like a rain storm was coming, and, in an instant, the strong wind, with the icy blast, came and all was frozen. Hurrying around to save some stock that he was fatten- ing, he was able to get a part of it under shelter, but most of the stock suffered severely. The creek was about bank full of water, and, as his horses, wagons, etc., were on the north side, and his house on the south side, he was anxious to get all near the house, that he might take better care of them. The next morning early, with his brother and some other help, he went to the creek to get the animals across, but, the horses not being shod, and the ice smooth, they cut the ice in pieces to get a track wide enough for the wagon, and with poles pushed the ice under the other to get it away, and then drove through the water. The ice had frozen in the short time between two o'clock, p. m., and nine o'clock the next a. m., fully six inches thick. He also found raccoons, opossums, and other
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animals frozen to death. Walking across the logs they were suddenly chilled and, falling off, they were unable to move again.
Mr. Timothy Chamberlain says he remembers the day distinctly, as his father and uncle were making a four-spoked wagon at the time, and he was working around home, sometimes helping them and part of the time working about the barn lot, and being warm he was in his shirt sleeves most of the time. It rained several times during the forenoon, and about dinner time Doctor Daniel Pierson, a near neighbor, sent for him to assist in driving his hogs up to the stock yard and weigh them. As was the custom in those days, when there was no public scales, where a number of hogs could be weighed at once, the neighbors assisted in catch- ing the hogs, and tying their feet, and using the old-fashioned steelyards to weigh them. They had just driven the hogs to the stock yard but had not commenced weighing any, when, without any warning other than a dark sky, the cold wind from the northwest suddenly struck them with force. Mr. Chamberlain jumped behind a stack of wheat for protection. The cold was so intense that the overcoat he had put on as he started, for fear of rain, was frozen like a board. The weight of the hogs was guessed at without weighing, and they drove them across the Pulliam Run, about one hundred and fifty yards from the stock yard, and, in that short time, ice had formed on the branch and the road was frozen hard.
Colonel George M. Chambers thinks that his date is as good as that of any other person./ He says, "I was here, at that time, making ar- rangements to move' to Jacksonville the following spring. Sometime about the 10th of December we had heavy rains, swelling the streams and destroying the bridges, turning colder and freezing the ground. It then commenced snowing, and continued several days until it was about a foot in depth. On or about the 20th it became mild, the snow melting rapidly and the atmosphere becoming hazy. I left the south side of the square about half-past eleven o'clock, wading in the slush and water, turned up West State street to the tavern kept by William O. Scott, on the lot now owned and occupied by James Berdan, but then known as the 'Heslep House.' We dined, in those days, at twelve, and when the boarders came in they were rubbing their ears and complaining of being very cold. I thought that they did not know what cold was.
"After dinner I remained by a comfortable fire about half an hour. On coming out the front door I found the snow and ice frozen so that I went down the street upon it. Passing by the lot o'n which the residence of Dr. King now stands, I saw some chickens standing by the fence with their legs frozen in the slush. In the lot on the north side, being part of the ground now occupied by the court house, there were also some pigs frozen fast in the ice.
" On the evening following, there arrived from Beardstown, a stage load of passengers from a steamboat that met the 'North wester' there. They, as well as myself, were anxious to get to St. Louis. Friend Scott exerted himself to secure us a conveyance, and on the following evening, after a number of failures, told us that he had got the right man. The next morning up drove George Richards, with a large, strong sled, and in piled eight or ten of us, and off we started. After a variety of ad- ventures we arrived safely in St. Louis. Left there on a small steamboat, on the first day of January, 1837. When we arrived at Cairo we found
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our boat too small for the ice on the Ohio. We made two other changes in boats, and when a few miles below Shawneetown, left the boat and ' took 'to the woods,' and hired horses to ride, and a man to bring the horses back, and on the 20th of January, 1837, arrived at the 'Galt House,' in Louisville, in the unexampled time of twenty days. They beat that time now, but I doubt if they are more thankful now than we were on arriving at our destination."
Daniel Clarke says: " The change occurred in the afternoon about two o'clock. There was snow on the ground, saturated with a slow rain, so that it had commenced running in the low places. I was on the north side of Indian Creek, just entering the timber with a drove of hors. I was assisted by two men on foot ; I was on horseback. One of the men was Uriah Houston, the other, Isaac Drinkwater. At the house of the father of the latter I had stayed the night before. The hogs belonged to Ralph H. Hurlbut, who lived at the time at La Grange Point, and was packing some hogs at La Grange landing. He had a boat for ferrying, and a lot to keep hogs in on the east side of the river. We reached the river about dark, and penned the hogs ; the wind was high, and the slush loaded on the boat so much that we could not cross with my horse. Mr. Drinkwater went home, his father's house being the first one on the east. side of the river, distant about seven miles. My home was at Mr. Hurl- but's from which I had been absent several days. It was a good home and I was hungry and at about nine o'clock p. m. there came a clear place in the river ; I hitched my horse in the shelter of a pecan tree that had been felled with the leaves on, and got into a canoe with two paddles and an ax to reach my home. The ice formed fast on the canoe, and I had frequently to clear it off with the ax, until I got under the lee of the west bank ; then it went free, in which free water I froze my left hand seri- ously. In the morning following. I went to feed my. horse, and found the river so solidly frozen that I rode him across, and had him in the stable before sunrise ; and immediately after got some teams and hauled saw- dust from Hinman's mill, and made a path to the' opposite bank, and drove the hogs across and had them in the lots on the opposite side. There were about three hundred of them; they had been purchased from Peter Taylor, Isaac Houston, George Newman, Wingate Newman, and others. I landed from the open water after ten o'clock p. m., and my recollection would make the ice the next morning one foot thick."
This remarkable event fixes the date of many occurrences in the history of the county. It is yet vividly remembered by the residents of that date, who relate many interesting reminiscences of that time.
The great Internal Improvement System was now agitating the citi- zens of the Prairie State, and railroads were beginning to be the common and the all-absorbing topic of the day. Vague ideas existed then concern- ing their construction and use. To many, they were only the introduction of a labor-saving scheme that would throw the common laborer out of work and the means of earning his daily bread. Especially did they argue this to the class of persons who were engaged in driving stages or employed on canal-boats. But the paper money, then just coming into use, blinded the masses, and the legislators, dazzled by its apparent suc- cess, built accordingly, only to see the final crash of 1837, and the fall of the entire improvement system. The State was checkered with lines of
-
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railways, existing only on paper. Remains of works built under this inspiration yet stand as monuments of extreme legislative folly.
The Northern Cross Railroad and the canal were all of the grand sys- tem perfected at the time. The railroad was the first in the West. It passed through Morgan County, and thereby became part of its history. We will therefore digress in our narrative, and give a short sketch of this enterprise which, in its day, was a State affair, and watched with anxious eyes by all her citizens. In' examining the files of the papers of that day, glowing allusions are made to the scheme, and great expectations antici- pated. Men were brought from all parts of the West to labor on the road. Advertisements like the following were seen in nearly every issue of the Illinoisan, then the leading paper in Jacksonville :
RAILROADS.
WANTED, 500 HANDS. We wish to employ 500 good graders, to finish grading the rail- road from Meredosia, on the river, to Jacksonville, and from Jacksonville to Springfield. We pay our hands on the first of every month. We also wish a few good superintendents, for grading, who must come well recommended. Also stone masons, superintendents, and other hands, to lay superstructure, which will commence at Meredosia on the first of May next. We have 57 miles of road to contract, and will be able to give employment to a large number of hands, for a considerable time. The country through which this line passes is high and healthy. The work has now been under rapid progress since the first of August last.
JAMES DUNLAP,
Jacksonville, Illinois, March 3, 1838. THOMAS T. JANUARY, Contractors.
The above advertisement appeared in the Illinoisan of that date, and from it the reader will learn something of the extent of railroads then, and the stir created by their construction. There was then not a · railway car in the Mississippi valley, and only a few miles of road in operation in the East. The great wave of "internal improvement " was passing over the State at the time, and if the reader of these pages will obtain a copy of the legislative acts of that, and a few succeeding sessions, he will see scarce any thing recorded save railroad, canal, or State road acts.
Agitation of the great "Internal-Improvement System " of the State began as early as 1835. Governor Duncan, in his message to the legisla- ture, at the special session begun on December 7, 1835, said : “ When we look abroad and see the extensive lines of intercommunication penetrating almost every section of our sister States- when we see the canal boat and the locomotive bearing, with seeming triumph, the rich productions of the interior to the river, lakes, and ocean, almost annihi- lating time, burthen, and space, what patriotic bosom does not beat high with a laudable ambition to give to Illinois her share of those advantages which are adorning her sister States, and which a munificent Providence seems to invite by the wonderful adaptation of our whole country to such improvements."
Pennsylvania and other States were at this time engaged in extensive systems of improvements, and as the sequel showed, Illinois did not lag in the race. Subsequent legislatures appropriated immense sums of money to aid in the erection of these works, and almost checkered the State with a net-work of railroads. The progress of the work on the canal was not arrested by the subsequent failures, but the remainder of the works of the grand system, with the exception of a part of the
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Northern Cross Railroad, the advertisement of which heads this article, simultaneously began in various parts of the State, nothing ever was done, except in detached parcels on every road, where excavations and embankments may even yet be seen, memorials of supreme legislative folly. That portion of the Northern Cross Railroad, from Meredosia to Jacksonville, thence to Springfield, was afterward finished at a cost of $1,000,000 to the State; its income proving insufficient to keep it in repair, it was subsequently sold for $100,000 in State indebtedness.
This railroad, the first in Morgan County, the first in Illinois, the first in the Mississippi valley, was chartered February 5, 1835. After various delays, work was begun in August, 1837, so says the advertise- ment quoted, and on May 9, 1838, the first rail was laid. Some eight miles were laid during the summer, and on November 8th the first locomotive-the Rogers -that ever turned a wheel in the Mississippi valley, was put on the track at Meredosia. It had been brought from the East by way of the rivers to St. Louis, thence up the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers to its destination. On the day it was put on the track it ran over the old flat bar track eight miles and back, carrying George W. Plant, afterward a prominent business man of St. Louis, Governor Duncan, Murray McConnell, one of the commissioners of the public works, James Dunlap and Thomas T. January, the contractors, whose names are already noted, Charles Collins, and Myron Leslie, of St. Louis, the chief engineer, Mr. Plant, and Jonathan Neely, the first conductor. The eager desire in the race of empire now gave Illinois a check for twelve years before another railroad was built. This was the Chicago and Galena, finished as far as Elgin, in 1850. This short railroad, in its incomplete condition, its small cars, and meager equipment, would indeed be a curiosity now. Yet it was a beginning, and as such was greater than any of its successors.
It has been supposed that the first railroad in the United States, was built in 1826, connecting Schenectady and Albany, in New York. This was one of the first railroads on which a locomotive engine was used in the United States, but the records of the town of Quincy, Massachusetts, the home of the Adams family, show that about the year 1825 a railway was built from that place to the Bay on the Atlantic Coast, about five miles distant. It is believed that no steam power was used on this road, the power used being that of horses or mules. Many suppose that the old Northern Cross Railroad, now the Wabash, is the oldest road west of the Alleghany Mountains. This is also an error. We have noted that the first rail was laid on this road in the Spring of 1838. Col- onel J. B. Moulton, a civil engineer of St. Louis, states that he went to Kentucky in 1836, and found a road in operation from Lexington ·to Frankfort. This road was built in 1833, and at the time of Colonel Moulton's visit, horses and mules were used to draw the cars. Strap rails were used, part of the ties being made of stone and part of wood. The former were found to be useless owing to their pulverization under- neath the rails, and their use was soon abandoned. Charles F. Taylor, Esq., a civil engineer, was engaged to remove the stone and put in wood. Colonel Moulton finished this road from Frankfort to Louisville in 1836; when the State foreclosed the mortgage it held, and leased the road to Swaggert & Co., who equipped it in 1841 or '42, and placed thereon a
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locomotive. This locomotive weighed fourteen tons, and cost fourteen thousand dollars. This road is now known as the Lexington and Ohio. From the above statement of Colonel Moulton, whose memory is accurate, it will be seen that the road in Kentucky was in operation four or five years before the one of which we are writing.
From the advertisement heading this article, we see that work was begun on the Northern Cross Railroad in the Autumn of 1837. The as- sociate editor of the Quincy Whig, who visited Meredosia with a view of learning something of the early history of the first railroad in Illinois, writes to his paper as follows :
" It was surveyed by James Bucklin, assisted by George W. Plant and John Van Horn. The profile of the work was drawn by a Pole named Edward Malowginowskie, a noble by birth, who had left Poland on account of some of the rebellions or persecutions there. He was a man of fine attainments and high character. After this survey and loca- tion, the division of the road beginning at the Illinois River, at this place, and extending to Van Gundy's, the first station east of here-about a mile east of where Bluff City now stands-was sub-contracted to J. C. & S. P. Thompson, D. & J. E. Waldo and Harvey Duncan.
" When everything was ready to begin work, it naturally appeared that so important an enterprise should be inaugurated with some formal ceremony. The day for beginning arrived late in the Autumn of 1837, and the sub-contractors took their men, accompanied by a large number of citizens, to a point whence the road was to start, on the bank of the river. There Mr. J. E. Waldo, now living in New Orleans, and Dr. Owen M. Long, now consul at Panama, were chosen speakers for the occasion.
" The toast-master of the day was Samuel Talmage, a noted charac- ter of that period. The day was given up to speech-making, jollification and hilarity, and it would be very interesting at this distance if one could report some of the wonderful orations delivered. One of the toasts is distinctly recalled thus : " Our friend, T. T. January-a man with a cold name but a warm heart." Mr. January is still living, and is a wholesale trader in St. Louis. Mr. D. Waldo, now the postmaster here, being then the oldest man as well as the oldest citizen of the place, was desig- nated to dig the first spadeful of dirt. The labor he performed was all the work done on the road that day.
" The work of grading went on all winter and was finished in April. The track was laid by putting down a piece of square timber called a mudsill, on the top of which cross-ties were laid. On these a wooden rail was laid and flat bars were spiked on top of the rail. The bars were two and a half inches wide and one inch thick. It is not now distinctly remembered whether this iron was of foreign or domestic manufacture, but it was brought by way of New Orleans to St. Louis, and there deliv- ered from the steamer Vandalia to the steamer Quincy, then run by J. H. and E. Lusk, between St. Louis and this place.
" The first locomotive that ever turned a wheel in the Mississippi valley was brought here in pieces and set up to operate this earliest Illi- nois railroad. It was made by Rogers, Grosvenor & Ketchum, of New- ark, N. J., and was landed here from the steamer Quincy in the Autumn of 1838, soon after the iron had been laid on the road. It was a curious
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HISTORY OF MORGAN COUNTY.'
little contrivance, and, as compared with the more modern construction of locomotives, was a consummate piece of clumsiness. The driving- wheels were about two and a half feet in diameter, and, in every other respect, it compared equally well with the locomotives of the present day.
"A man by the name of Fields came out with the engine to set it up, and, on the day he got it on its feet, the jollification ran so high that he got off his, and had to be carried to the hotel for repairs. On the way he protested that they were heaping undeserved honor upon him and begged to be laid down and treated as a man of no distinction or eminence. He was the first engineer on the road, and he ran the little engine- the Rogers-for about a month. Afterward a man by the name of Higgins run it; but he melted out some of the flues, and at last got discharged for dissipation. Finally two young men by the name of Gregory were put in charge of it, and after a while they succeeded in running the engine off the track between New Berlin and Springfield.
" They seem to have been unable to replace it on the track, for it lay out on the prairie for a year, or a year and a half, and was then sold to General Sample, who practically bankrupted himself in various futile efforts to reconstruct it into some sort of road engine for hauling freight across the country from Alton to Springfield in competition with the railroad.
" At last mules were substituted for the engine, and were used till. the road passed out of the hands of the State."
Mr. James Harkness, a civil engineer of St. Louis, in a correspon- dence concerning the early railroads of Illinois, writes to the Railway Age, of Chicago, as follows :
" The writer arrived in Springfield on the 4th of July, 1837, in search of work. I heard of the road that was going to be built and thought I might get a job on it. I saw J. M. Bucklin, the chief engineer, and some of the contractors, and was engaged to build their bridges.
" There was a great scarcity of men, more particularly those that could use the pick and shovel, etc., and I agreed to find some. I returned to Louisville, Ky., and sent word out that I would give nineteen dol- lars per month, and eight jiggers of good whisky per day. That soon procured some two hundred and fifty ; I also got Robert Mc Reynolds and Joseph Williams, who were expert whip-sawyers, to come and saw the bridge timber for me. The corps of engineers was J. M. Bucklin (who surveyed Chicago and the Illinois and Michigan Canal, when about twenty years old), chief ; Edward Harkness, assistant (who resigned in a short time), Mr. Hawn succeeding him; John VanHorn, Edward Malowginowskie, George P. Plant, and others, not now recollected. Thompson, from Pennsylvania, was master mason, and the writer master carpenter.
"I went into the timber, cut the trees, rough-hewed them, hauled them close to the bridge, and counter-hewed and sawed them into the proper dimensions.
" The bridge was across Mauvaisterre Creek, and was one hundred and four feet span. The plan was a combined arch and truss. It stood
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for eighteen years, with very little repairs, when it was burned through the neglect of a temporary watchman. After I had all the timber in the yard, and one bent completed, one of the journeymen told the contractors that he could finish the bridge at less wages than I was getting, sixty dollars per month. He finally got it done on the ground, but utterly failed to raise it, and ran off in disgust. I finally told the master mason how to do it.
" The want of locomotives necessitated the use of horses for some. time. The road was first located where it now is, at Jacksonville, but the people on the south side of the square said it would make property worth a great deal more there and they must move it across the square, or they would not pay their taxes, and it had to be run that way ; but. they soon found that it caused a great many runaways, and set some houses on fire (there were no spark arresters then), when it was changed back to its proper location. When the very poor iron would draw the equally poor spikes, the ends would turn up and we called them snake heads, and very troublesome snakes they were, as they often ran up through a car and ripped up things generally.
" The work began at Meredosia, on the Illinois River. There were two passes in the bluff, called Taylor's and Van Gundy's. That by Taylor's was the cheapest and best, but it would not touch several tracts. of wild land that belonged to some of the magnates, and it waslocated up Van Gundy's Run, and thus improved two large tracts, one called " Duncan's big field" (in which the writer has killed several deer), of one thousand acres. We ran a straight line of several miles up this prairie and struck the only house, or cabin rather, on it. It belonged to: Mr. Lazenby, an Englishman, whose wife had such good use of her tongue that we went back several miles and ran a line that left the cabin a few yards to the north, and this gave great satisfaction to the settle- ment at large.
" At my suggestion, Mrs. L. got another cow and furnished us with frequent lunches, which we highly appreciated. By the time the "boys " got near her she had learned to make "milk-punch " and " egg-nog " out of good new juice of the corn, at a " bit " (12}c) per gallon, and by the time the track was laid, she had made the price of a good two-story frame house, and the cabin was given to some choice young " Irish Graziers."
" Verien Daniels took charge of the first locomotive on the road after his predecessors had succeeded in burning out its flues, and running it off the track. Daniels repaired the flues and began to run it. On one of his first trips, he found Lazenby's cattle on the track, and the bull showed fight. He shouted and threw sticks of wood at him, but that did no good. So he backed a short distance and came up a second time, but that only made the bull madder; again he backed and the bull after him. But by this time Daniels was getting mad also. He said to me, " by dadds, I will try who has the hardest head, so here goes." The meeting came near being fatal to both, but Taurus came to grief by rolling down the bank and never troubling the engine again. There was neither bell, whistle, nor cow-catcher, in those days. The first snow that fell, after the road was completed to Jacksonville, was some six or eight inches deep, and caught the train a few miles from Bethel,
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