Clark County

U.S. Census Bureau

It was to Illinois that Christoph and his family headed when they landed in 1881, specifically to Clark County, on the east side of the state, just across the Wabash River from Terre Haute, Indiana. Rail travel was the only practical transportation, and at the time the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and St. Louis Railroad, the “Panhandle Route,“ ran all the way from New York to St. Louis, passing through Terre Haute and Marshall.

The Wabash had been a major steamboat and flatboat route. Vessels went to the Ohio River and then the Mississippi to reach New Orleans. In the middle 1800s, the riverside Clark County towns of Darwin and York had thrived, with a slaughterhouse in each. In the fall and winter hogs were slaughtered and the meat and lard was shipped downriver by flatboat. Other freight was corn, flour, poultry, hoop poles, lumber, and whisky.

First Clark County Courthouse, Aurora. (Historical
Encyclopedia of Illinois and History of Clark County, 1907.)

The county courthouse, first established in the now-defunct village of Aurora, had been moved in 1823 to Darwin, named after the English polymath Erasmus Darwin (though some wrongly ascribe the name’s source to Erasmus’s nephew, Charles). In 1839, a second move had taken the seat to Marshall, at the time a collection of a dozen houses on the great Cumberland road, now the National Road, sixteen miles west of Terre-Haute, and nine miles northwest of Darwin. The Cumberland Road was the primary reason for moving the county seat.

Clark County, Union Atlas Co., Chicago. 1876. (David Rumsey Map Collection.)

Between 1828 and 1832 Clark County had only three post office: Bachelorsville; Clark Courthouse (at Darwin), and Morton’s Store, and an amazingly small number of towns. By 1856 the number of post offices had grown to fifteen and Marshall was now included. In 1862, the list of Clark County post offices was not longer, but included some more familiar names with the addition of Clark Center and York. By 1893, Clark County boasted 27 post offices, many of them with now unfamiliar names — Allright, Beltz, Cleone, Cohn, Moonshine, Neadmore, State Line, Tom. The Imle post office was at Ernst.