Excerpt from History of Tazewell County, Illinois: Together With Sketches of Its Cities, Villages and Townships, Educational, Religious, Civil, Military, and Political History; Portraits of Prominent Persons and Biographies of Representative Citizens; History of Illinois The early history of Tazewell county is peculiarly interesting, and we are enabled to give it from the very earliest occupancy of Illinois by the whites. In point of time of its soil being disturbed by Europeans, it is more remote than any other section of our great Prairie State. The second centennial of its first settlement is at hand. In the county are places of unusual historic interest, and to those who have located here we judge it will be a source of no little gratification to inform themselves on the ante pioneer history of the county, which we detail at considerable length. In the compilation of this work we pass over a period of two hundred years. We have taken much care in recording the pioneer history, that. Future generations, those who will not have the early settler to relate to them the history incident to the settlement and development of this county, may familiarize themselves with it through this medium; and that the reader may see the county in all its various stages of progression. Ive do not profess to have fully delineated the trials, sufferings, and hardships that were experienced in converting even this fertile land from its virgin wildness into the luxuriant and densely populated country it now is. No! For human tongue or pen is far from being adequate to that task. Different persons have given us honest and sincere, but nevertheless conflicting accounts of the same events, and it has been both a difficult and delicate task to harmonize them, and draw therefrom reasonable and approximately correct conclusions. We had only one aim in view, one plan to carry out, and that was, to record events impartially - to detail them as they have actually occurred. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.