Route Descriptions: Iliinois

 Route descriptions courtesy of Mark Hansen

Kirksville to Quincy, Illinois: East of Kirksville, the rivers and creeks are tributaries of the Mississippi rather than the Missouri. The route extends east-southeast in Missouri through Adair Co to Knox Co to Lewis Co. Lewis Co was named for the explorer Meriwether Lewis.  Fronting the Mississippi River, it was settled and organized more than a decade before the counties to the west and like most river counties had a stronger southern influence. The earliest settlers, in the 1820s, were from Virginia and Kentucky. 

During the Missouri secession crisis in 1861 the area, like the state, was divided in its loyalties between the Union and the Confederacy. (A state convention voted down secession overwhelmingly but the two sides elected rival state legislatures and sent representatives to both the United States Congress in Washington and Confederate States Congress in Richmond.) Lewis County contributed two officers to the Confederate Army, one of whom led Confederate guerilla forces in a skirmish with Union soldiers near Newark in Lewis Co in 1862. 

The next county south from Lewis is Marion. Its riverfront town is Hannibal, renowned as the boyhood home of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. (He took his pen name from an expression used on the Mississippi for depth soundings, denoting two fathoms (12 feet), sufficient for navigating the flat-bottomed riverboats.) Hannibal is virtually a Twain theme park where you can visit his boyhood home, ride a riverboat, and visit sites (real and constructed) associated with Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, Huck Finn, and Jim, including the whitewashed fence. 

Today’s destination, Quincy, Illinois, is the county seat of Adams Co, both named for John Quincy Adams, the sixth president, in 1825, the year he took office. The community was previously known as Bluffs, for reasons you will quickly discern. The earliest settlers were veterans of the War of 1812, most natives of the northeastern states, who received western land grants from the government for their service. In the late 1840s, Quincy received an influx of “Forty-Eighters” forced out of Germany by the failed liberal revolutions of 1848, who settled on the south side of the city. The New Englanders’ and Germans’ shared allegiance to liberalism and opposition to slavery made Quincy stand out from the other riverfront towns in Illinois. The town prospered and many residents built fine homes on the bluffs. Before the Civil War, Quincy had a station on the Underground Railroad that sent fugitive slaves from Missouri and further south on to conductors on the Great Lakes and freedom in Canada. 

Quincy was the site of the penultimate of the seven debates in 1858 between Abraham Lincoln and Senator Stephen A Douglas that catapulted Lincoln to national prominence. The debate occurred in Washington Park, the event commemorated by a statue of the protagonists sculpted by Illinois artist Lorado Taft. You will see the park on your left at 4th St as you ride on Maine St to the hotel. 

The route crosses the Mississippi on the first automobile bridge over the river at Quincy, the Memorial Bridge, constructed in 1928. The parallel Bayview Bridge, which carries the westbound traffic on US 24, was built in 1987. The massive Mississippi River floods in 1993 closed both bridges for 73 days. In the southern part of the city, on the bluff above the river, is a city park, Indian Mounds. It preserves an earthen mound in a horseshoe shape constructed by Native Americans in the Middle Woodland period (ca 900 CE [AD]). It is one of an estimated 10,000 such structures that once stood in Illinois, mostly along the major rivers. The most important of the mound sites is Cahokia Mounds, 170 miles down the Mississippi near St Louis. The more than 100 mounds (the largest 100 ft high) were constructed during the Mississippian period (ca 1100 CE) for a city and surrounding settlement whose population may have been as large as 40,000. Considered “the most sophisticated prehistoric native civilization north of Mexico,” Cahokia is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Quincy to Springfield: Today’s ride crosses the Mississippi basin into the Illinois River watershed. Europeans first entered the region in the late 17th century. In 1673, the Quebecois French explorer Louis Jolliet and the Jesuit missionary Pere Jacques Marquette began an epic exploration of the upper Mississippi River by canoe. They followed the great river almost 600 miles from its confluence with the Wisconsin to the mouth of the Arkansas. On their return, at the instruction of Native Americans they met along the way, they paddled up the Illinois River and its tributaries to a portage that took them to the Chicago River and back into Lake Michigan. In their report to French authorities, Jolliet and Marquette noted the possibility of a canal across the subcontinental divide to connect the Great Lakes basin and the Mississippi River basin. It became a reality, and Chicago became the country’s great inland city, with the completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1848. Since the thirties, navigation on the upper Mississippi and the Illinois (and the Ohio as well) has been supported by a series of locks and dams, 27 on the Mississippi (No. 21 is a mile below the bridges into Quincy) and 8 on the Illinois (the first the LaGrange lock and dam, about 10 miles upriver from Meredosia, where the tour route crosses the Illinois). 

The second SAG stop is in Jacksonville. In the middle of the 19th century, it was the adopted home of Stephen A Douglas, a diminutive (5’4”) Democrat known as the “Little Giant,” who was the dominant figure in Illinois politics, a major player in national politics during his 18 years in Congress, and the Democratic Party nominee for president, against Lincoln, in 1860. (Douglas moved to Chicago after his marriage and election to the US Senate in 1847.) It was also the home of Richard Yates, a Whig congressman in the 1850s and the Republican governor of Illinois during the Civil War. 

A third notable politician, the “Great Commoner,” William Jennings Bryan, was a Democratic congressman from Nebraska and the party’s nominee for president in 1896, 1900, and 1908, famous for his “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 convention and for his role in the “Monkey Trial” of John Scopes in Tennessee in 1925. He attended prep school and college in Jacksonville. 

In 1838, a band of some 850 Potawatomi Indians who had resisted relocation out of Indiana passed through Jacksonville on their way to a reservation in Kansas, forced along by 100 armed militiamen. More than 40 died, mostly children. The Potawatomi “Trail of Death” also went through Springfield, Decatur, and Monticello on the routes ahead.  

A few miles east of Jacksonville, the ride route on Old US 36 goes through the unincorporated town of Alexander. Approximately two miles east of Alexander, the road crosses the meridian 90 degrees west of the prime meridian at Greenwich in England – a quarter of the way west around the world (or three quarters east). (There’s a marker on I-72 at the spot but I doubt it’s marked on Old 36.) 

The day’s destination, Springfield, is the capital of Illinois and the home and resting place of Abraham Lincoln. Born in Kentucky and raised in Indiana, he moved as a young man to Illinois, eventually settling in New Salem, about 20 miles northwest of Springfield, where he served as a captain in the Illinois militia during the Blackhawk War and first was elected to the state legislature. He read for the law and moved to Springfield at age 27 to establish his practice. In Springfield, you can visit Lincoln’s home at 8th and Jackson, his law office, his tomb in Oak Ridge Cemetery, the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (with an outstanding collection of artifacts and amazing holographic displays), and the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln delivered one of his most famous speeches, “A House Divided.” 

Springfield also has the beautiful Dana-Thomas House, architected by Frank Lloyd in his Prairie Style and owned and lovingly restored by the state. On the grounds of the Illinois Capitol, opened in 1877, is one of my favorite political statues, a tribute to Everett McKinley Dirksen, Republican senator from Illinois and the Republican leader in the Senate from 1959 to 1969. Dirksen was a garrulous, witty, larger-than-life figure known for his paeans to the marigold, which he tried for years to designate the US national flower, his pragmatic approach to leadership, and his bons-mots (e.g., “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money”). At his feet are an oil can (representative of the political leader’s craft) and a Republican elephant and Democratic donkey shaking hands. Go to the back, and you see that their fingers are crossed.

Springfield to Champaign:  The ride route to Champaign crosses both branches of the Illinois Central Railroad, the Galena Branch in Decatur and the Chicago Branch in Champaign. (The IC is now part of the Canadian Northern.) The first great accomplishment of Sen. Stephen A Douglas was legislation giving title to federal land to the IC to finance its construction. Although the government had previously used land grants to support the development of canals, it was the first time the device was used to fund railroads. Land grants supported the construction of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s and most of the subsequent lines through the American West. The Galena Branch of the Illinois Central passed straight up the state’s spine from Cairo (pronounced “kay-ro”) at the state’s southern tip, at the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi, to Freeport in the north before turning sharply west to Galena in the northwest corner. The Chicago Branch veered off to the north-northeast at Centralia, 100 miles south of Decatur, and entered Chicago on the lakeshore (on right of way purchased from Stephen A Douglas!).  When the IC was completed in 1856, it was the longest railroad in the world, approximately 670 miles.  The railroad operated a steamboat line between Cairo and New Orleans; by 1874, through construction and acquisitions, it extended its rail all the way to the nation’s second largest port (and later east as far as Georgia and west into Texas). Some of you will recall the 1970 song by Steve Goodman, “City of New Orleans” – “Good morning, America, how are you? / Say don’t you know me, I’m your native son” – which describes a journey on the IC’s famous Chicago to NOLA passenger train (heard here in the version recorded by Arlo Guthrie). 

The Illinois Central was the vehicle for the two Great Migrations of African Americans from the South to Chicago in the teens and the forties and fifties. Central Illinois is part of the traditional Corn Belt, which stretched from Ohio through Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa to southern Minnesota and eastern South Dakota and Nebraska. From the middle of the 19th century into the late 20th, many of the farms were feeder operations for hogs and cattle, using the corn they raised as feed. Decatur calls itself the world’s Soybean Capital. In the twenties, farmers in the area became the first in the United States to produce soybeans on a commercial scale. Production expanded markedly in the forties, when war disrupted global trade. Like alfalfa and clover, soybeans fix nitrogen (or, more accurately, soybeans host symbiotic bacteria that concentrate atmospheric nitrogen in nodules in the plant’s roots), so it is often grown in rotation with corn. The beans are crushed to produce oil (used in food and industrial products) and high-protein meal (predominantly used as animal feed). 

Decatur was and is a center of corn and soybean processing. The A. E. Staley Co produced cornstarch (for food and laundry), corn oil (for cooking and margarine), and corn syrup (for sweetening foods). In the teens it sponsored professional baseball and football teams; the Decatur Staleys team was a charter member of the association that became the National Football League and the team that became the Chicago Bears (the team’s mascot is called Staley Da Bear). Archer-Daniels-Midland, now ADM, began life as a linseed oil processing company and expanded into other oils, meal, flour, and “textured vegetable protein” (also known as soy meat), which it invented and patented in 1965. Staley and ADM were long headquartered in Decatur and ADM and Staley’s successor company, Primient, still have large processing operations in Decatur and the surrounding area. 

In Decatur in 1866, 12 local veterans of the Union Army became the charter members of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization conceived by Dr Benjamin Franklin Stephenson, a Springfield doctor who had served as a surgeon in the 14th Illinois Infantry. Stephenson swore them in. An organization dedicated to the interests of northern Civil War veterans, the GAR was the first mass-membership association in the United States, reaching a peak of 410,000 in 1890 (a remarkable 39% of surviving Union veterans). In 1868, its commander declared a holiday for remembrance, May 30, Memorial Day, which Congress later codified in law. It also lobbied successfully for generous government pensions for Union veterans and their dependents; by the 1890s, 970,000 veterans and their dependents and survivors received pension payments, whose costs accounted for nearly 40 percent of federal expenditures. A plaque at 253 South Park St on Central Park marks the site of the first meeting. 

Today’s destination, Champaign, is the twin of Urbana, Peyton’s hometown. It incorporated as West Urbana in 1855 when the Illinois Central located its railhead two miles west of Urbana; it became Champaign a few years later, taking its name from the county in which it is the largest city. Urbana and Champaign are the home of the University of Illinois, established in 1867. (The campus extends into both cities but is predominantly in Urbana.) It has over 55,000 students. The university is particularly renowned for its innovations in electrical engineering – its faculty member John Bardeen won two Nobel Prizes in Physics for the invention of the transistor (at Bell Labs) and the standard theory of superconductivity (at Illinois) – and computing – U of I built the first non-government computer (ILLIAC I in 1952), the first successful consumer web browser (Mosaic in 1993), and the first touchscreens and plasma displays (in the 60s). Many of the pioneers of the Silicon Valley – Marc Andreesen (Netscape), Jerry Sanders (AMD), Brendan Eich (Mozilla), Larry Ellison and Bob Miner (Oracle), Luke Nosek and Max Levchin (PayPal), Stephen Wolfram and Theodore Gray (Wolfram Research), Steve Chen (YouTube), Martin Eberhard (Tesla) – got their start at U of I. (Urbana and Champaign style themselves the “Silicon Prairie.”) 

In the fifties, a U of I plant scientist, John Laughnan, developed “supersweet” sweet corn, now the predominant variety. The University is the land-grant (agricultural) university of Illinois. It has an experimental corn field called the Morrow Plots right on campus, just off the South Quad, opposite the Main Library. It is a National Historic Landmark.