Berger-Kiel House

Samuel Dixon built the first house withm the limits of the present town of Mascoutah. Dixon was a hunter and lived just south of where the Postel Mills now stand. The town was laid out on the sixth of April, i8j7 by T. J. Krafft and John Flanagan. It contained six blocks of different sizes and was called Mechanicsburg. After the town was laid out Samuel Mitchell built a log cabin and established a saw mill . In 1839 an addition was made containing seventy-two lots, by Hilgard, Krafft, and Benjamin West. At this time the name was changed to Mascoutah. Many other additions have been laid out since then. Dr. Smith, a son-in-law of Major Brown, was the first physician in the place. The first school house was erected just north of the Postel mill. Nathan Fike was the first postmaster. Conrad and Philip Eisenmayer purchased the mill property in 1839. They soon took in as a partner Philip H. Postel. They enlarged the mill and became exporters of flour. The second mill, erected near the old site was built by Andrew Eisenmayer and Philip Postel in 1848 and now known as the Postel Mills. It has been enlarged and improved until now it is one of the largest mills in this section of the country, having a capacity of three hundred and fifty barrels of flour a day. The growth was slow until the German immigrants began to come about 1840 and later. Since then the growth of the town has been steady and now Mascoutah is one of the fine towns of the county. It has six churches, a fine public school system, including a community high school, a hat factory, a rubber goods factory, a municipal water works and lighting system. Good hotels, some fine stores and business houses of various kinds. Illinois State highway No. 1 5 runs right through the principal street and there is bus service to St. Louis.

Passage source: Centennial, McKendree College, with St. Clair County History, published 1928.

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 Mascoutah Township - 326 words on its settlement, mills, schools and churches.