The History of Peoria County, Illinois. Containing a history of the Northwest-history of Illinois-history of the county, its early settlement, growth, development, resources, etc., etc., Part 38

Author: Johnson & co., Chicago, pub
Publication date: 1880
Publisher: Chicago : Johnson & Company
Number of Pages: 932

USA > Illinois > Peoria County > The History of Peoria County, Illinois. Containing a history of the Northwest-history of Illinois-history of the county, its early settlement, growth, development, resources, etc., etc. > Part 38

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HISTORY OF PEORIA COUNTY.

Wealth has succeeded poverty, and privation has given way to comfort. The children of the pioneers have grown up surrounded by refining influence, and bear the stamp of training in a broader school than it was the privilege or the fortune of their parents to attend. Books and music have their appropriate places in almost every farm-house, and social intercourse is no longer restricted to the range of ox-cart communication. The finest horses, the choicest animals, the largest herds graze in rich pastures. It is no longer necessary to " turn the cattle into the big lot," as one of the pioneers expressed his early method as caring for his patient oxen. Fences mark the boundaries and sub- division of farms. As year succeeded year, flocks and herds increased in number and condition, and are still increasing ; and the markets of the East, nay, of Europe, find profit in choosing from the cattle of a thousand pastures.

Where the settlers were compelled to traverse the country overland, ascend or de- scend the river for hundreds of miles for flour and provisions, consuming days, and even weeks, in tedious journeys, there are now busy mills, which, besides supplying the local needs of communities, help to increase the commerce of the country by shipments to other and distant localities. Nor is it longer necessary to rely upon the uncertain visits of neighbors to distant post-offices and the fortunate possession of a quarter of a dollar, to secure a letter from friends in the old home. The system of postal delivery reaches the farther limits of the country, and letter postage is reduced from twenty-five cents to less than one-eight of that sum, and the rapid transit of news matter is an established cer- tainty, accepted without astonishment, or even a second thought. From surprise and interest manifested when the mail did come, it has changed to wonder when it don't come to the very minute of schedule time. From an occasional weekly newspaper, taken from some of the older States forty years ago, almost every household reads the daily and weekly publications, issued from steam presses in their own midst. These publications, too, take high rank among the thousands of other newspapers of the State and nation. They are conducted by gentlemen and ladies of culture, and carry the news from the four quarters of the earth to the remotest hamlet. Telegraphic wires bring to the very doors and counting rooms of business houses tidings from the great commercial centers, and tell producer and dealer when and how to dispose of the enormous products of factory and farm. Telephones connect office with office and residence with residence, so that friends living in remote quarters of cities can visit and converse with friends without leaving their respective domiciles. Banking institutions of solid worth exist in almost every town and village in the county, and monetary matters are conducted on as large a scale as in many an Eastern city founded more than a hundred and fifty years ago. Social clubs and amusement societies relieve the routine of business after the approved methods of cosmopolitans. Secret societies flourish and celebrate their mystic rites in richly- appointed lodge rooms, and hold honored rank among the general bodies of their respec- tive orders.

Social circles are as brilliant and cultured in character as any that grace the salons of Eastern capitals. Wealth and refinement are evidenced in the bearing of the people. The honest house-wife of the olden time may look with distrust upon the grander dis- play of civil ceremonies, but is powerless to stay the tide as it sets toward the oblitera- tion of simple habits. There may be much truth in the oft-repeated assurance that "girls were worth more in the early days," if the estimate of excellence be based upon physical prowess and domestic " faculty ;" but it must be remembered that each genera- tion plays its separate part in the drama of life. As the poet has written of individuals,

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players ; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts."

So is society constituted upon a plan that places each succeeding generation or division

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in a role different from that which preceded it. The standard by which to measure woman's might to-day is not that which tested her qualities as a pioneer, but rather that whieli proves the use she has made of the advantages of the present. It would be as just to condemn the young man of to-day because he is not drilled in woodcraft and able to read the marks of Nature like the wild red man. The fathers who paved the way for the introduction of modern ideas needed, perforee, to know the signs by which the Indian chief governed the warriors of his band. But those symbols are obsolete now, and would encumber the mind with useless information.

The man whose genius introduced the principles of mechanics into the working of farms signed the last pages of the first volume of the history of the pioneers and inau- gurated a new era, from which the present power of man must be calculated. The farmer who tills a thousand acres now, is surely no weaker than he whose limits were one hundred in the "good old days." Yet the muscular development has not increased during the years that are covered by this history. It is mind, not matter, which governs, and the tendency of this age, which is truly termed the medieval, is to produce maxi- mum results from minimum forees. The laborious methods of planting and harvesting by hand have given way to the more admirable plan of employing mechanical devices to do the work.

Peoria county ranks her neighboring counties in just the degree that her intelligence has progressed. The end is far away, for the improvements over the original settlement are insignificant compared with the capabilities of her men and the possibilities of her resources. Nature has lavished abundant wealth upon her, and it remains for man to extraet it from the earth. The farms are inexhaustible in productive returns, if properly cultivated. The future promises much more marked changes in every branch of trade and commerce, and there remains for her inhabitants a golden and enviable harvest of results.

Pleasant for situation, rich in material wealth, peopled by intelligent men and abounding in an atmosphere of mental health, the County of Peoria is destined to oceu - py, in time to come as it has in the past, a leading position in the Great Northwest. The responsibility of working out and maintaining this destiny is entrusted to good and true men ; and the dawn of the twentieth century will behold in this fair region a source of constant pride.

To the brave pioneers who planted the standard of civilization in the fairest part of the country of the Peorias, Pottawatomies and Kickapoos, and the early and subsequent settlers who followed them until the wilderness was reduced to fruitful fields, belongs the honor of working out the great changes herein noted. To the men and women who came and dwelt in sod houses and log cabins, who subsisted on hominy and wild game till farms were started and made sufficiently productive to afford better fare ; who slept on prairie bedsteads ; who clothed their feet in buckskin moccasins, and their bodies in garments of the same, or fabrics entirely the result of their own handiwork, belongs the honor of laving the foundations of and giving strength and vitality to that forward move- ment that filled the country with wealth and prosperity. They began the work of con- verting the wild lands into civilized abodes with no other assistance than stout hearts and brawny arms. The patient ox, the sharp axe, the primitive hoe. the old-fashioned hand siekle, grain cradle, and the scythe were their only dependence. Machine art in the cultiva- tion of farms was but an embryo thought in the minds of inventors, and those who favored the development of that thought into the perfection of machinery for planting, tilling und harvesting erops of grain, and its innovation upon time-followed customs, were tu- boved and regarded with pitiful astonishment.

But more than all else, the pioneers who made the first bold strokes for homes in the beautiful country of the Peorias were almost without an exception, poor. Had there been unlimited numbers of approved appliances for agriculture at their very doors, they

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could not have availed themselves of the opportunities from lack of means. And there- in lies the pith and marrow of the credit due this advance guard. From nothing but that which nature lavishly supplied, they builded strong and well. They labored with the industrious energy of heroes, and deserved the reward of veterans.

The speculator and the capitalist who bought large tracts of land and allowed it to remain as nature left it, never added a single dollar to the acquired wealth of the country. Their possessions increase in value as the pioneers and early settlers improved the lands upon which they settled to make homes. Not to the men who, by some turn of fortune's wheel become possessed of " corner lots " and hold them for an advance in prices, belongs the honor of building cities, but to the liberal, sometimes almost reckless, enterprising men with more heart and energy than love of gain, is that honor due.

There is still another class that play a conspicuous part in the growth, development . and progress of country, towns and cities, and that is the bold, ambitious men who start pioneer newspapers. We say start, because but few of them continue their undertakings for any great length of time. Their efforts are not appreciated, and their journals are al- lowed to die for want of support. The sickliest issue of the sickliest newspaper ever printed accomplishes more to invite attention to the locality in which it is published, than a thousand letters from friends to friends. There is not a newspaper printed in Peoria county to-day, no matter how dyspeptic or seemingly reckless its editor, but is doing more to foster the country's "boom," maintain its supremacy and encourage the enterprises of big hearted men than all other agencies combined. And yet uo class of men receive a stingier acknowledgment. Uncounted thousands of dollars have been sunk, ambitions crushed, constitutions shattered and lives wasted by individuals in news- paper enterprises, but these personal sacrifices have always been the country's gain. The pioneer journalists are civilization's most faithful sentinels, and their memory deserves to be enthroned in the grateful hearts of an intelligent posterity.

CHAPTER I.

GEOLOGY OF PEORIA COUNTY.

Area - Coal Measures - Progression - Archeology - Origin of the Prairies - Economical Geology - Private Collections.

[The author of this chapter, Mr. William Gifford, of Radnor township, has been a resident of Peoria county for nearly half a century. Mr. Gifford began the study of geology in early life, and the cultivation of his innate scientific taste developed the desire for research and investigation almost to a passion ; and though he is far advanced in years his thirst for knowledge is unabated. While searching out the hidden mysteries and unlocking the secrets of the hills and rocks in Peoria and other counties, Mr. G. has surrounded himself with the best works of the ablest authors on his favorite science, and hence comes to the task fully prepared to speak authoritatively, and to instruct and edify. "The article will be found concise, able and accurate, and well worth a careful perusal." - ED.]

AREA.

Peoria county contains an area of about six hundred and thirty square miles. As an agricultural region it takes rank with the best counties in the State.

The cretaceous and tertiary periods are not represented in this or adjacent counties. They were probably lost by denudation, together with some of the upper coal veins, during the long and turbulent ice period.

The four divisions of the Quartenary are well defined. They rest directly on the

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npper carboniferous, a coal measure. The alluvial deposits are confined chiefly to the right bank of the Illinois river, forming a terrace of about twenty-four square miles, called LaSalle prairie, one of the best corn-producing sections of Illinois.

COAL MEASURES.

The great geological feature of Peoria county consists in its coal measures, which are co-extensive with its borders. Only two veins (four and six ) are worked to any extent. Coal from vein four is brought to the surface by horizontal tunnels at an expense of one cent per bushel, and half a cent in localities where it can be stripped. At no place in Illinois, or perhaps in the world, can coal be mined and brought to market so cheaply as in this county. It is now delivered to consumers in the city of Peoria for one dollar and fifty cents per ton. The thickness of this vein is from three feet ten to four feet eight inches, and is generally covered with a ferruginous shale, and concretions of bi-sulphuret of iron, richly stored with marine fossils, which are eagerly sought for by scientists. Its horizon is thirty-two feet above low water of the Illinois river.

Coal vein six is also worked with little labor, by horizontal tunnels. It is sixty-two feet above coal vein four, and is a good blacksmith coal, makes a hard vitreous coke, and is exclusively used in Peoria and contiguous eities for making gas. It contains but little pyrite, and in most localities has a good limestone covering. One distinctive mark of this vein is a clay seam, or parting, from one to two inches thick, dividing the coal hori- zontally into two equal sections. The fossils overlying this vein are well preserved and species numerous ; among the most common are Nyalena angulata, Pleurotomania car- bonana, Solenomia radiata, and Productus pratteninus.

Coal vein five has no reliable outerop in this county, but its horizon is well defined in the towns of Limestone, Jubilee, and Kickapoo by its characteristic fossils - Fusalina ventriccosa, Hempunites crasa, Chonctas messeloba, etc. The horizon of this vein has fur- nished a number of fossil coal plants, which have been figured and described by Leo Lesquereux, and are now being published by the State of Pennsylvania.

Coal veins seven, eight and nine are the only other veins represented in this county above the Illinois river, and they are too thin for mining and not easily stripped coal.

The horizon of coal vein nine in this county has given to paleontologists the most per- fect coal-measure fossils found in this State, if not in the world. Coal vein three lies one hundred and thirty-three feet below four, consequently about one hundred and twenty feet below the Illinois river. It is about three feet thick, and is considered a good coal. It is not worked in this county. One hundred and twelve feet below three, a coal vein was reached in Voris' boring -opposite to Peoria-three feet thick, which is considered coal vein one of the Illinois coal field, and the base of the coal measure resting on the conglomerate, twenty feet above the St. Louis limestone. Coal vein two has not been explored in Peoria county, but erops out on Spoon river in the southwest part of Fulton county.

PROGRESSION.

It is within the memory of many now living, this writer not excepted, when the church, the hall and even the district school house, was refused by those in authority to the lecturer on geology. The able and efficient James Hall. A. M., has been indignantly refused the use of a district school house in the Empire State - New York -to start a geological elass. They feared-they knew not what. During the last fifty years public opinion has been more tolerant and the geologist now walks side by side with those who love the creative God and study his works. Let us go back in the history of this planet, not to its creation, for that is beyond mortal wisdom, but to the commencement of the carboniferous period when the surface of the earth was hidden from the sun by the enrbon and noxious gases, extending a grenter distance than our atmosphere ; a single breath of

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which would have been fatal to any air-breathing animals. " Darkness reigned supreme." It was the commencement of a new area, a time when the Almighty scattered the seeds of the coal plants with His bountiful hand. The ferns, lepidondrons, stigmanes, sigel- aries, calmites and thousands of others, flowering plants and mosses to be harvested into His crucible to form coal.

Every year the mingled mass of vegetation was deposited, on the bog or marsh, to be by and by transformed into hard combustible matter, by the slow process of decom- position. The internal heat of the earth kept the surface continually warm : vegetation grew profusely night and day until enough had been harvested by the cycle of time to form a vein of coal ; then by the oscillation of the earth's surface it was thrown down and the ocean breaking through its barriers washed impetuously into the sunken basin cover- ing up the coal plants with sand, mud and gravel, which in time, became rock as the coal field sunk to a greater depth beneath the ocean. That rock serves as a protection to the miner as he now digs the coal from beneath it.

The decomposition of fibrous plants in contact with atmospheric air absorbed car- bonic acid ; the internal heat of the earth and the pressure of the ocean drove off the car- bonic acid gas, but left a large percentage of fixed carbon, which, combining with other chemical agencies, completed coal vein one.

Time passed on, and the surface was again exposed. The ocean receded, vegetation for another vein of coal started. and in like manner was submerged. Again and again was the same formula carried on, until twelve or more veins of coal had been formed and safely covered up for the future use of man, constituting a vertical section of fifteen hundred feet, called the coal measure, and the carboniferons period was closed and the making of mineral coal on this planet was finished : the materials used up, the process abandoned.

As the carbon in the coal was chiefly taken from the atmosphere, it became purer ; air-breathing animals were placed on the earth ; serpents and reptiles of enormous size had undisputed sway over land and sea ; but they gave place to other forms of life at the close of the Urasic of Reptilion period. The Cretaceous and Tertiary periods had their allotted time, and then followed a long and turbulent ice period, finishing up the surface for what the earth was created, the abode of man. Not alone in Peoria county nor in North America, but in all parts of the earth, in her hidden and capacious chambers was stored the product of coal gleaned from all vegetable matter for thousands of years, and and thousands of years again passed before those hidden chambers were revealed to man. Simultaneous with the invention of the steam engine came the discovery of those hidden coal fields ; and who, but those so blinded by ignorance and unbelief, but can trace the hand of Omnipotence in treasuring up fuel for the use of man when he most needed it ? It was reserved for " the fool to say in his heart there is no God. "

In naming the horizon of a coal vein the geologist can not depend entirely upon the resemblance of its outerop, or even its analysis to a similar vein in some other location. It is not unfrequently the case that a chemical analysis from different parts of the same vein gives a different result. As a reason it may be said that small annual coal plants in one locality would contain an excess of volatile matter, and the woody fibre of large plants and trunks of trees in another more fixed carbon. Neither must we rely implicitly on the overlying fossils, for some, the spirifer comeratus, athyris subtility and others ac- company each vein in the coal measure ; but the underlying fire clay and the shale, rock or limestone covering furnish other proof of identification and the observant student is not often misled. In all large bodies of water, lime, magnesia, soda and silica are held in solution mostly, as carbonates and sulphates. The carbonates are more readily precip i- tated in warm water, the sulphates in cold. Hence the diversity of sedimentary rocks on the same horizon may in part, be attributed to that.

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ARCHEOLOGY.

Peoria county contains ample evidence of two distinct races of pre-historic men. The first were the Mound Builders, the latter were cave dwellers, and both appear to have passed away before the advent of the more recent American Indians. Of the former history is silent, and of tradition there is none ; but they have left evidence that this country was inhabited during or at the close of the Miocene period ; a time so far back that no one presumes to compute it.

The evidence of the great antiquity of man is cumulative, and comes from all parts of the inhabited world. The Mound Builders were sun worshipers, and from the peculiar arrangement of their earth works, some believe they also invoked a Triune god. On the left bank of the Illinois river, opposite to Peoria county, there are two groups of mounds. They are ou both sides of Black Patridge creek, where it empties into the Illinois river. In both groups, standing on the highest point overlooking the river. are three mounds, fifty-four feet from center to center. equilateral, subtending an angle of one hundred and twenty degrees, with one angle pointing to the east. Back of them, and further from the river, are fortifications and burial mounds .. On the right bank of the Illinois river, nine miles north, are two other groups similar in all respects, the measure- ment of the latter filled the measurement of the former, with one angle pointing to the rising sun. Back of these are also earth works and burial mounds. In front of the tri- angular mounds, and between them and the Iilinois river, there has evidently been a fearful battle between two large bodies of contestants. On an area of not more than ten acres over two bushels of stone arrows and spear points have been picked up, and about five hundred battle axes, many of the latter broken, showing a hand-to-hand encounter, and that " man's inhumanity to man " has had early precedents.

In other parts of the country, at Kingston, Kickapoo and Jubilee, the tillers of the soil will point to the field where the plow turns up with every furrow the spear, arrow and battle ax.

A half mile below Chillicothe, and thirty rods from the Illinois river, a mound was opened which proved to be a sacrificial mound. It was circular, sixty-six feet in diameter, and six feet high. At the base, twenty inches below the surface of adjoining prairie and resting on the terrace drift, was the altar tablet, formed of water-worn igneous boulders of from four to six pounds, placed compactly side by side on a smooth and level surface. On this tablet was what appeared to be indurated ashes. The amount was estimated at eighty or one hundred tons. In this mass, which the pick would remove no more than the same blow would of solid ice, was found, by the aid of a strong lens, minute crystal of prussiate of potash, fragments of carbonized bones, charcoal, gravel and oxide of iron. (For chemical analysis see appendix marked A.) In the center of the mound, three feet below the surface, were two skeletons, one an adult, the other an infant. presumably, mother and child. the latter resting on the lap of the former, a covering of elay two inches thick, which had been indurated, covered the skeletons. A rude silver buckle on the up- turned forehead, and a perforated steel shuttle on the left side of the head, were all the relies obtained. From the materials which encompassed the bones outside of the clay casket, it is supposed to be an intensive burial ; they were coarse sand and gravel, and fragments of fresh water shells, mostly unias. Three other mounds have been opened. one at Peoria and two at Mossville, in this county, each with an infant skeleton lying in the lap of a female. Was the mother sacrificed for her child, or the child for the mother ?

Some idea of the antiquity of this last burial may be formed from the fact that the whole surface of the mound and the adjoining prairie was covered to the depth of twenty inches, with a fine black laeustrine deposit ; and like undrifted snow, resting comfortable on the terrace drift.

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Other evidences of the antiquity of man was found by Doctor Ziller, of Spring Bay. Sixty-three feet below the surface was discovered, by a land slide, several stone imple- ments. Thirty feet of the upper section was loose and thirty-three feet terrace drift. At the base of the latter, and resting on the boulder drift, was found those singular implements. They are made of chert, four inches long, two inches broad and seven- tenths of an inch thick ; pointed at each end ; the sides slightly curved outward, with a rough serrated edge. They must have been left there at the close of the Myocene period. Were they transported by ice, the upsetting of a canoe, or by man ? Seven of them are preserved.

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The History of Peoria County, Illinois. Containing a history of the Northwest-history of Illinois-history of the county, its early settlement, growth, development, resources, etc., etc., Part 38

Author: Johnson & co., Chicago, pub Publication date: 1880 Publisher: Chicago : Johnson & Company Number of Pages: 932

Author: Johnson & co., Chicago, pub
Publication date: 1880
Publisher: Chicago : Johnson & Company
Number of Pages: 932