In the middle of the middle of the Middle West

Those of us with ties to the 44 or so Illinois counties lying between I-70 and I-80 have received a gift, but we don't all know it yet. Corn Kings & One-Horse Thieves: A Plain-Spoken History of Mid-Illinois, by my friend and onetime colleague James Krohe Jr., comes closer to unriddling the riddle of the Midwest than anything else I've seen. How is it that a place so bland has such a violent history and uncertain future? 

One way to begin to understand the past is not to blink at it. The author accurately compares the "removal" of Native Americans to recent episodes of "ethnic cleansing at its most ruthless." Similarly in agriculture: "Most of the prairie was  simply destroyed to get at the soils that lay beneath it"; what remains is appropriately preserved in tiny pioneer cemeteries.

The book's eleven chapters proceed both chronologically and thematically, keeping close to the ground. We learn that Decatur was the hub of railroad Illinois, selling more tickets than Chicago or St. Louis; that it took four days for Canton's abandoned International Harvester factory complex to burn down; that the Corn Belt Liberty League did not survive farm prosperity. (The attempted academic renaissance of midwestern studies should do this well.)

There is no slack water here; the author is always thinking. "On a memorable night in 1895, the Fulton County courthouse in Lewistown was burned to the ground as the last act in a bitter county seat war between that town and Canton. The incident provided material for several of Edgar Lee Masters's poems, making it one of the few times county government has inspired readable verse."

And he earns the epilogue, a reflection on the barely casual interest in the region's past that allowed Galesburg's first settlers' "Log City" and the massive World War II Camp Ellis in Fulton County to be obliterated. "The mid-Illinois landscape is peopled with spirits of these forgotten people and places and things . . . Old interurban and streetcar tracks still run through many a Main Street, buried beneath newer paving; where streets are worn, the rails sometimes are exposed, like the bones sticking out of a grave."

For those with roots south of the Quad Cities and north of Alton, this is a must-have. Others may find it a model for the kind of detailed and honest history other states and regions could use.

Krohe writes weekly in Springfield's Illinois Times and there provides a better biographical background than his publisher. His roots in mid-Illinois go back two centuries. "How does one find oneself turned around, looking backwards rather than forwards the way a real American should? I can say honestly that it was not my fault. My ancestors lured me into it."

Midwesternness

Charles Baxter, whose short stories and novels I have yet to read, is quoted in the April 28 New York Review of Books about the Midwest -- "the blandness of the landscape and the ways in which people here don't always talk about what's on their minds."

(It took a few days for that to come around and hit me in the back of the head.)

The late Kurt Vonnegut Jr., an Indianapolis native, doesn't seem to have had this problem. He once characterized his home town as "the 500-mile Speedway Race, and then 364 days of miniature golf, and then the 500-mile Speedway Race again." ("Address to Graduating Class at Bennington College, 1970," p. 161 in Wampeters, Foma, and Granfaloons)

What are your favorite Midwesternisms?

Could this be the next Albion's Seed?

Oxford University Press has just published New Zealand historian James Belich's Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1783-1939. It's in few libraries as yet, and I haven't seen a copy, but the OUP summary and generous blurb from Jared (Guns, Germs, and Steel) Diamond make me verrrry interested.

Belich is working in the same megahistorical zone as Diamond: why does today's world look as it does instead of some other way? Why didn't Chinese "discover" America, or North Americans "discover" Europe? Here's the key paragraph of the summary:

Between 1780 and 1930 the number of English-speakers rocketed from 12 million in 1780 to 200 million, and their wealth and power grew to match. Their secret was not racial, or cultural, or institutional superiority but a resonant intersection of historical changes, including the sudden rise of mass transfer across oceans and mountains, a revolutionary upward shift in attitudes to emigration, the emergence of a settler "boom mentality," and a late flowering of non-industrial technologies--wind, water, wood, and work animals--especially on settler frontiers. This revolution combined with the Industrial Revolution to transform settlement into something explosive--capable of creating great cities like Chicago and Melbourne and large socio-economies in a single generation.

IOW, among other things, Belich seeks to explain the Midwest (and similar regions worldwide such as Argentina, Australia, and Siberia). If it's up to its billing in substance and style, it may indeed rank with masterpieces like David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed and William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis. And for those whose ancestors peopled these places, it will be equally required reading.

"Perhaps the most unlikely scenario"

The Midwest might have been very different. Francois Furstenburg considers what we might humorously call the "prehistory" of the Midwest in the June American Historical Review 113:647-677:

"Taking an Atlantic perspective on the continental interior, it appears that the Seven Years' War, which ostensibly ended in North America in 1760 and in Europe in 1763, in fact continued with only brief interruptions to 1815 -- in the form of the American Revolution of the 1770s, the Indian wars of the 1780s and 1790s, and the War of 1812. Call it a Long War for the West. During this Long War, as the action shifted among various 'hot spots' across the trans-Appalachian West, the great issue animating Native, imperial, and settler actors alike involved the fate of the region: would it become a permanent Native American country? Would it fall to some distant European power? Or, perhaps the most unlikely scenario of all, would it join with the United States? Only in the wake of the British defeat in the War of 1812 was the region's fate as part of the expanding United States settled once and for all."

If you were raised on the kind of predestinarian history of the US as I was, you may be surprised that anyone would think it unlikely for the Midwest to become American. But it was no gimme. Anthony Wayne got the second largest city in Indiana named after him because he succeeded against the natives where two previous generals had failed, and failed miserably. More strategically, as Fursternberg points out, the original colonies faced east, across the Atlantic. The Appalachians were a considerable barrier, and once across them settlers were naturally oriented toward the south and the Caribbean by the way the rivers flowed. "In seeking to control both sides of the Appalachians, U.S. policymakers were attempting something that no political entity, Native or European, had ever accomplished without rapidly disintegrating."

The Minds of the West, first take

Where better to get buyer's remorse than when you buy a book or CD amid the excitement of a genealogy meeting? It's a definite risk. I picked up Jon Gjerde's The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West 1830-1917 at the DuPage County gathering last month, and I'm about a quarter of the way through and still happy.

Gjerde has some interesting and deep things to say about the nature of the Midwest, starting back when it was (as the title suggests) simply "the West," and caused no end of worry to fretful New Englanders and nativists in general. More on that later. Right now I'm noticing how vividly he shows how genealogy and history are just opposite ends of a whole spectrum of ways to study the past, and how the big picture and the little picture are both valid and shed light on each other.

Instead of just talking about the family factor in migration, he uses the diary of Sarah Browne Armstrong Adamson to follow her feelings in the later 1830s and early 1840s as her children move on from their Fayette County, Ohio, home to greener pastures in faraway Iowa -- and then when she hears that her daughter and granddaughter have died there. {83-85} Suffice to say it's the kind of grieving white people don't do any more.

The diary was transcribed by Carol Benning and reposes in the archives of the Cedar Falls [Iowa] Historical Society, which offers lots of regular genealogical fare including census records, marriage records, probates, directories, and a name-by-name Civil War roster.

Midwestern celebrity roots

Paula Stuart-Warren of Zimmerman (Sherburne County), Minnesota, blogging at Paula's Genealogical Eclectica, is happy to hear that the BBC's "Who Do You Think You Are?" may be coming to NBC.

whenever I see an obituary of some singer or actor that has mention of upper Midwest roots, I do some research to just see where that person fit into the history of the upper Midwest. It has been interesting to see what the ancestral towns are and what the rest of the family was doing in times past.

Past projects she's worked on professionally include the Beach Boys and John Berryman. Hmm, there's no obituary yet, but does anyone have the genealogical scoop on how Dave Letterman's Midwestern roots make him funny? Or long-lasting?

The Midwest as it might have been

I write to you from near the boundary of Assenisipia and Metropotamia...

Check out Thomas Jefferson's version of the Northwest Territory at Strange Maps. (Hat tip to Sam Smith for the pointer.)

Here's how it really happened, plus a slightly different version of Jefferson's map, all on John Lindquist's awesomely well-documented site. Looks like this is the one to bookmark, but also check out Illinois Trails, which has a number of early Northwest Territory maps, plus some genealogical leads if you have research targets that early in this part of the world.

Outline maps for counties

The inimitable Bill Bryson ("I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.") explains how important directions are to Midwesterners.

"Any story related by a Midwesterner will wander off at some point into a thicket of interior monologue along the lines of 'We were staying at a hotel that was eight blocks northeast of the state capitol building. Come to think of it, it was northwest. And I think it was probably more like nine blocks.'" (The Lost Continent, page 15)

In that spirit I was delighted to find Genealogy Miscellanea flagging the National Atlas website as an excellent source of free printable county maps for all states. It reminded me of another, more obscure site offering a variety of free maps: geology.com. For Illinois (and every other state AFAIK), geology.com offers

(1) county outlines (no names or towns) on a physical map of the state,
(2) county outlines with elevations (not much of that in Illinois),
(3) county outlines with major highways,
(4) county outlines with major highways and a good sprinkling of towns,
(5) county outlines and names with lakes and rivers,
(6) county outlines and names in color,
(7) county outlines and names and county seats in color.

Now, can anyone suggest a site that has a township map for each and every county in the US?

Welcome

My goal here is to post regularly about genealogy news and research and resources involving Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and their neighbor and feeder states. That's more or less the region also known as the Midwest; the Old Northwest; Region V; everything between St. Louis and Pittsburgh, Mackinac and Cincinnati; or "pretty much any place you can drive to from my house in 5 or 6 hours."

If you need to be convinced that this is fascinating stuff, or if you want to read long essays about what I did today, you're in the wrong place. If you're looking for national and international news, Dick Eastman's newsletter is indispensable.

But if you want to learn and comment along with me about which counties to hope your ancestors lived and died in... what major libraries and repositories are offering... what recent articles, books, or blog posts touch on our region... then please stay tuned!