Buffalo Hart, Illinois

11 topographic sheets cover this place, the earliest surveyed in 1954 and the latest in 1985. It stands in Buffalo Hart Township. It lies in ZIP code area 62515. The Survey maps it on the Cornland quadrangle.

Buffalo Hart within Sangamon County

Topographic sheets covering this place

5 surveys from 11 printed sheets

Matched by testing this settlement's coordinate against the published boundary of every sheet in the United States Geological Survey's historical collection. Each opens the scanned sheet at the Survey.

1954 USGS Mechanicsburg quadrangle1:62500, 2 printings
1958 USGS Decatur quadrangle1:250000, 3 printings
1961 USGS Decatur quadrangle1:250000, 2 printings
1982 USGS Cornland quadrangle1:24000, 2 printings
1985 USGS Springfield quadrangle1:100000, 2 printings

In the county-history sources

6,075 words on this township

History of Sangamon County, Illinois; Together with Sketches of Its Cities, Villages and Townships ... Portraits of Prominent Persons, and Biographies of Representative Citizens. History of Illinois, published 1881 names this settlement in its chapter on Buffalo Hart Township. These are the passages that mention it, exactly as the scans read.

Buffalo is a village of about four hundred inhabitants, and situated on the line of the Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific Railroad, and was laid out and platted in May, 1854, by Charles R. Wells, the plat was described as the "southeast part of the northeast quarter, and the northeast part of the southeast quarter of section ten, and southwest part of the northwest quarter, and the northwest part of the southwest quarter of section eleven, township sixteen, range three west."

Passage source: History of Sangamon County, Illinois; Together with Sketches of Its Cities, Villages and Townships ... Portraits of Prominent Persons, and Biographies of Representative Citizens. History of Illinois, published 1881.

The village was platted and recorded under the name of Buffalo, the railroad company named the station Mechanicsburg; while the post office was called Watson. It was only after several years of continuous eft'ort that the names of the station and post office were changed to Buffalo. These several names caused much perplexity and difficulty, as may well be imagined.

The village has steadily grown until it now contains two dry goods stores, three grocery stores, one harness shop and hardware store, one drug store. There are three practicing physicians and one retired physician. Those in active practice are Dr. Leslie Gillett, Dr. L. P. Rogers, and Dr. John C. O'Conner. Dr. Peter T. Leeds is an old time practitioner, having been in the township about fifty years, and has retired from active practice. There are two blacksmiths' and one wagon shop, one elevator, and one steam flouring mill.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

Read the whole chapter on Buffalo Hart Township - it names this place 13 more 13 times.

Fires near this place

3 since 2005

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The federal wildfire occurrence database lists 3 fires within 5 miles of Buffalo Hart between 2005 and 2010, burning about 4 acres in total. None started naturally. None was recorded as arson. Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.

Reported cause	Fires
Missing data/not specified/undetermined	2
Recreation and ceremony	1

The most recent of them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service that recorded it.

Date	Cause	Size	Reported by	Name on the report
24 March 2010	Missing data/not specified/undetermined	1.0 acres	Illinois Division of Forestry Resources	1085
15 March 2005	Recreation and ceremony	under an acre	Illinois State Fire Marshal's Office	not named
16 October 2010	Missing data/not specified/undetermined	2.0 acres	Illinois Division of Forestry Resources	10336

Settlements close enough to share some of these fires:

Every fire recorded in Sangamon County

Storms near this place

1 since 2015

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The National Weather Service names Buffalo Hart in 1 storm report in 2015: 1 thunderstorm wind. No death or injury is recorded in these reports. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date opens the federal record of that event.

When	Event	Place named	Harm	What the report says
June 2015	Thunderstorm Wind	Buffalo Hart	$2,000	A tree was blown down across Route 54 south of Cornland.

Every storm recorded in Sangamon County

Nearest settlements

The eight closest, with where each one stands in the county. Distances are straight-line, computed from the Geographic Names Information System coordinates.

Place	Distance	Sheets
Dawson	4.3 miles	10
Barclay	4.6 miles	20
Buffalo	4.7 miles	10
Spaulding	5.9 miles	20
Williamsville	6.0 miles	17
Lanesville	6.7 miles	10
Riverton	6.8 miles	20
Knollwood	7.2 miles	17

Provenance

This settlement is recorded in the Geographic Names Information System as feature 405160. The sheet list is computed by point-in-boundary test against the United States Geological Survey's historical topographic inventory. Both are works of the United States government and carry no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105.

Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.

Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.