Category: Canton, Its Pioneers And History

Canton, Illinois. Founded 1825, Celebrating 200 Years. Get Ready! The Official Celebration Begins June 20th through June 29th, 2025. Isaac Swan The original proprietor of Canton, was a native of Vermont, but emigrated with his father to Western New York while that region was still a wilderness. At the age of about twenty years he…

Excerpted from Canton, Its Pioneers And History, A Contribution To The History Of Fulton County By Alonzo M, Swan, 1871 PRIOR to 1821, the present site of the Town of Canton was uninhabited. Deer, turkeys, and other wild denizens of the wood and prairie, were the only occupants. In 1822, Theodore Sergeant, Captain D. W….

THE Act of the Legislature for the organization and establishment of the County of Fulton, and defining its boundaries as they now exist, was passed on the 28th of January, 1823. Several other counties had their boundaries defined by the same act, but were not to be organized until they should attain the requisite population….

ONE day in the fall of 1823, Henry Andrews relates, there came two land-hunters to the cabin of Col. Barnes. These men were Joshua Moore and Levi Ellis. Barnes invited them in the the most cordial manner to make his house their headquarters while in the neighborhood, and the invitation was cheerfully accepted. Mrs. Barnes…

Some time in about 1824, John Pixley, a tall, gaunt, red-headed man, a great blow and something of a hunter, shot a buck about where Piper’s Woolen Factory now stands in Canton. The deer was wounded: Pixley swore it had been shot through the heart. He followed it across the prairie to the head of…

The Pioneer was a jolly, generous soul. Meanness did not enter into his composition. The social scale was exactly balanced, all occupying precisely the same level. The idea that one man was socially the superior of any other man was not to be entertained for one moment. The earliest residences were cabins of unhewn logs,…

In the spring of 1832 the Black-Hawk War was a source of great alarm to the citizens of Canton. Major Isaiah Stillman, of Canton, in command of a battalion of volunteer infantry, was in the field, and had under him most of the young men of the community. On the 13th of May, 1832, the…

The first turning-lathe in Canton was owned and operated by Deacon Nathan Jones. It was a spring-pole lathe, with the cord wound around the stick to be turned, in such a manner that the stick ran half the time one way and half the time the other. Upon this lathe the deacon turned his chair-stuff….

A PIONEER corn-husking was an event of more than ordinary interest, at which would congregate the young and many of the middle-aged of the entire neighborhood. When the farmer’s corn was “snapped” from the stalk, in the husk, and the time arrived for it to be “opened” for winter use, a boy would be dispatched…

One of the earliest steamboats in the Illinois-River trade was the steamer “Exchange,” which plied between St. Louis and Peoria. She was familiarly known as “The Shingle Weaver”; so called from the fact of her carrying upon her hurricane deck a machine for cutting shingles, which was operated by the machinery of the boat, cutting…