Centralia, Illinois

The county of Marion was formed and its boundaries defined by an act of the Legislature of the state of Illinois, which became a law on the 24th of January, 1823. Centralia is situated near the southwest corner of the county, near the center of Seven Mile Prairie. Central City, older by about two years than Centralia, is located at the point where the Illinois Central Railroad enters Seven Mile Prairie from the north, about one mile distant from the northern limits of the corporation. In the year 1850 the inhabitants of Seven Mile Prairie could have been counted on one's fingers. They were located, with the exception of a halfdozen families, at the edge of the wooded land which surrounded the prairie, and all lived, excepting perhaps an equal number of families, in one-story log houses. There is not, so far as the writer knows, a house now standing in Seven Mile Prairie which is a fair sample of the average residence of the time alluded to. The house was one story in height, the open space between the logs being chinked with small blocks of wood and daubed or plastered with clay. The chimney was on the outside at the end of the building and was composed of a framework of logs and sticks, lined in the lower portion with clay and stones and in the upper portion with clay alone. The roof and often the doors were made of clapboards riven from the trees of the forest. The floor was often made of puncheons split from logs and hewed on one side. It need not be stated that this kind of flooring was never tongued and grooved, and the floor was never air-tight, except when the floor was laid on the ground. Usually these houses contained but one room, in which the family performed all the various offices of indoor life. Here they dressed, talked over the family and neighborhood affairs, received company, courted and were given in marriage and married. Here also the women attended to those never neglected duties of the time, knitting, spinning and weaving, duties which have since almost lost their places among the household arts. The ques- tion occurs: Were these people happy amid such rude surroundings and with such privations of the conveniences of life? We may truly answer, yes. So emphatically true is it that life does not consist in the aboundance of our possessions. Ask those who lived at that time and they will tell you they were happy in those days, and will probably add that the good old times were better than the present strenuous period. Their happiness we may not gainsay, but as to those times being better than this present time, that does not follow. This is another question and one open to very serious question.

Passage source: Brinkerhoff's History of Marion County, Illinois, published 1909.

In 1851 the Illinois Central Railroad was sureyed and located, and Seven Mile Prairie, in which they had been no marked improvement, began to exhibit more animation. Unknown faces were less rare than formerly and citizens showed more anxiety to increase their landed possessions. In 1852 the work of grading was begun and many foreigners appeared upon the scene, some of whom remained in the country and were valuable additions to its population. The change wrought in the appearance of the county and the habits and pursuits of the people was wonderful. Where before there had been a sort of Rip Van Winkle sleep, all was life, industry and activity. New industries became available and old ones were stimulated by better prices and a home market. The people began to put the good old times behind them. Central City supplemented Walnut Hill as a commercial metropolis of the region. That part of the city of Centralia known as Jones, Eheninger,Mc- Clelland and Spear's addition was laid out in the summer of 1853. In the autumn of the same year A. P. Crosby's addition was laid out. In 1853 Centralia proper was laid out by the Illinois Central Railroad Company, and some lots were sold, but no deeds were executed until after the passage of the law of January 14, 1855, authorizing the railroad company to lay out towns and sell town lots.

Passage source: Brinkerhoff's History of Marion County, Illinois, published 1909.

The first house built in Centralia was the one-story frame house fronting north on the west side of the last railroad crossing but one in South Centralia, in the east end of which McCord & Davenport sold merchandise ; the west end of the same building was used for a residence ; the next building erected in our city was a one-story frame about ten by twelve feet in extent across the street north from McCord & Davenport's, in which Thomas Douglas, afterward of Sandoval, sold dried herring and liquid refreshments. The first house built in Centralia still stands, but the second and third, which were immediately across the railroad, east from it, being the one-story part of the Hoskins property, built by Joseph Hensley, have long since vanished.

Passage source: Brinkerhoff's History of Marion County, Illinois, published 1909.

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 Centralia Township - it names this place 13 more 13 times.