It was commissioned for the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976. One of the city council members listed on the monument, Robert Gilliam, believe it or not, still sits on the city council.
Gifford built and lived in a log cabin in what is now the middle of Prairie Street, between Villa and Chapel Streets. The cabin also served as the town's first school, church and post office.
In the spring of 1832 Black Hawk invaded Illinois with a band of hostile Sauk and Fox Indians. The previous summer they had been driven from their corn fields and burial grounds near the mouth of the Rock River by white squatters and threats of military action by the state and national governments. They were forced across the Mississippi, and Black Hawk had signed an agreement not to return without United States permission. But it was too late to plant any crop, and that winter the Indians had suffered for want of food. Now some five hundred armed braves and their families were moving up the Rock.
The scattered whites were frightened, and the Governor called out volunteers to pursue Black Hawk. Poorly disciplined, the militia were routed at what is now Stillman Valley in Ogle County. For a time northwestern Illinois was kept in terror by Indian raids. Regular troops under General Winfield Scott were sent to help the bungling militia. They were delayed at Detroit and Chicago by a cholera epidemic, and by the time part of this force crossed the Fox River at a shallows about one mile below the village limits of what is now South Elgin, Black Hawk had been chased into the wilderness of Wisconsin. The soldiers from the East saw no warfare, but they did see northern Illinois, and they returned home to spread the word of its attractions.
Between the small lake port of Chicago and the lead mines at Galena near the Mississippi beckoned a fertile, well-watered region. The Black Hawk War had focused national attention on the area. Soldiers and militia acted as its explorers, newspapers printed their descriptions of the land of opportunity they had seen, and within two years seekers of permanent farm homes and town sites began to appear up and down the Fox River. The track from Chicago to the river made by the heavy supply wagons of Scott's troops was followed by many of these newcomers and became known as the Army Trail. A highway leading into the Fox Valley still carries this name.
The pioneers entering the Fox Valley came mainly from upstate New York and New England, where the stony, thin soil could not match the yields of farms opening in Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana. Although their large families were crowding small holdings, these settlers were not impoverished, having both the means to pull stakes and the ambition to better their condition. They arrived by way of Erie Canal boats, lake schooners, and rough wagon roads. Awaiting them was astonishingly black soil with groves of trees for fuel, buildings and fencing, a land sparsely populated by Indians.
The nomadic Potawatomis roaming the valley had pushed other tribes out of northeastern Illinois in the 18th Century. Allied with the British in the War of 1812, they were responsible for the Fort Dearborn massacre. By the 1820s, however, they had become increasingly dependent upon white manufactured goods, including liquor. They had refused to join Black Hawk in his foray, and in 1833, pressured by the U.S. government and half-breed traders, had ceded their remaining Illinois lands in a treaty signed in Chicago. Before the U.S. Senate finally ratified the treaty in May of 1835, the first white penetration had begun.
Young Hezekiah Gifford of Oneida County, New York, lured by tales of the rich soil in Illinois, reached the banks of the Fox River by way of the Army Trail in the spring of 1834. Delighted with the country, he returned to New York, married, and induced an older brother, James, to sell his property in Yates County and accompany him to Illinois the next spring. Hezekiah aimed to establish a farm, and James sought a location for a town.
The Giffords left central New York about the first of February 1835 with a span of horses and a wagon load of provisions and tools. Many other families were then on the road West. Most of them traveled on Sunday, but the brothers put up their team and rested on the Sabbath. They reached Chicago, then a village of little more than 3,(W, early in March. Leaving their wagon behind, they started on horseback northward along an Indian trail to the Milwaukee River in Wisconsin. The choice water power was already claimed, and they sent their horses with a fellow traveler back to Chicago and struck west on foot until they reached the Fox River. Following the river southward into Illinois, they reached what is now Elgin, thirty-eight miles west of Chicago, on April 3rd. James shrewdly had calculated the importance of a good river crossing site on a direct line between Chicago and Galena.
The brothers spent the night at the William Welch farm in the Little Woods area of St. Charles Township. The next day they returned and staked claims on the east side of the Fox. On the 6th Welch sent his sons with three yoke of oxen and a plow to break the land, sow grain, and make a fence to establish the claims. The Giffords returned to Chicago for their horses and wagon and procured additional supplies. From Chicago on April 11th James Gifford wrote to his wife, Laura:
Hezekiah and myself have located on the river, have a tolerable supply of timber, some good springs of water, and plenty of good prairie ... We have selected land lying in considerable swells, such as would be called in this country broken, as I would like to see something like hills. I have on my claim the best place for water power which I have found on the river from its source to some distance below this ... The Fox is the finest stream I ever saw, it has uniformly in this State a limestone bottom, its current uniform and gentle, its waters pure, and is abundantly supplied with fine Fish. We have selected for sites to build upon, an elevation of from thirty to forty feet above the river and from thirty to forty rods from it, a grove lying between.Devoutly religious, Gifford had selected the name for his new town before leaving New York. During the 16th century Calvinist reformers restricted church songs to what was contained in Scripture. A variety of metrical versions of the Psalms were set to music. The Scottish Psalter of 1615 introduced a new feature, common tunes which were not attached to any particular Psalm. Some of them were given names of cities and towns of Scotland. The Scotch tunes were taken up by the English psalteries. Gifford's Puritan ancestors had sung these hymn tunes for generations. He had helped to establish the town of Dundee, New York, which he named after one of' these tunes, and he now chose "Elgin," for his Illinois settlement. "I had been a great admirer of that tune from boyhood," he explained, "and the name Elgin had ever fallen upon my ear with musical effect."
In Chicago the Giffords met Joseph Kimball of Plymouth, New Hampshire, who had reconnoitered the Fox Valley the previous year. On this second trip West he left his home on February 24th and arrived in the Chicago area about April 1st. Along the way he had stopped at Washington, D.C., where he called on President Jackson and Vice President Van Buren in the company of his state's senators. Kimball was looking for a mill site, and the Giffords invited him to join them on the Fox River. Together with a brother, Jonathan, and a son, Samuel J., he laid a claim on the west side. Beginning about the first of May they built a house, made a garden, and planted corn. Their cabin was erected near the southwest comer of South and Vine Streets. Orchard Street derives its name from the fruit trees Joseph started with the graftings he had brought with him from the East.
In a letter to his oldest son, William C., on July 4, 1835, Joseph Kimball recorded an arrangement with the town's founder and noted his interest in a Chicago-Galena road:
James T. Gifford, Esq., from New York, near Utica, has a location on the east side of the river. He and we have agreed to build a dam together, he having the privilege of improving equal share of the water. Mr. Gifford is to build a flour mill and we are to build a sawmill ...
We think that Chicago will be one of the most important places in all the western country ... We have taken considerable pains to ascertain what chance there is for making a road in direct line from Chicago to Galena, and find that we are on the direct route between these two important places...Mary Jane Gifford, Hezekiah's bride, was the first white woman to arrive in Elgin. She came in June with Asa Gifford, her brother-in-law. Hezekiah's claim joined his brother's to the south, and his cabin was located on the east side of St. Charles Street, just south of the Yarwood intersection. Mrs. Gifford was an object of curiosity to roving Indians. On one occasion a delegation of braves entered the cabin and attempted to help themselves to flour without permission. She pushed one of them. This set up a roar of laughter, but they departed and later returned with Hezekiah, who gave them all the flour he could spare.
Samuel Jewett Kimball (1809-1866), "proprietor" of the west side, cooperated with James T. Gifford on early projects benefitting the community. The city's second mayor, Kimball considered it one of his duties to watch with the sick while the patient's family had some needed sleep.
James Gifford returned to New York for his wife, Laura and their five children, two spinster sisters, Harriet and Experience, and the family of Philo Hatch, who had married Laura's sister. They floated down the Erie Canal to Buffalo, and then embarked on a lake schooner. When they reached Elgin on September 12th, the youngest member of the family, Sarah, was lifted from the wagon and set down on her unsteady baby feet. They immediately collapsed, plunking her on the ground, and she was promptly declared Elgin's first real settler. Their cabin, about the middle of what is now Prairie Street between Chapel and Villa, was enclosed but not chinked up, and no floors were laid, so they moved into Hezekiah's. James Gifford's cabin served as a church on the following Sunday. The founder addressed the Throne of Grace, Harriet read a sermon, and Hezekiah led the singing.
While returning East for his family, Joseph Kimball was stricken with cholera and died in Ohio, but he had prepared the way for a swarm of relatives. Besides Jonathan, another brother, Phineas, came to the new settlement. He arrived with his wife and daughter in June and settled on the east side, north of James Gifford's claim. His cabin was located on the northeast comer of what is now the Kimball and Douglas intersection. Their distant kin, Samuel (Squire) Kimball came in the fall of 1836, preceded and followed by several of his sixteen children.
Two sons of Joseph Kimball were to become town leaders. Samuel Jewett Kimball returned to New Hampshire to marry, then arrived with his bride in the spring of 1836. William Currier Kimball moved in from Canada late in 1837. The first marriage, first death, and first locally elected officials were in the Kimball families, and their willingness to co-operate on many undertakings with the Giffords promised well for the future of the town.
Within a year most of the land along the river had been claimed by hewing bark from trees or by plowing furrows in the prairie. The claims were sometimes disputed. After Henry Sherman staked out land to the west of Elgin in 1838, he put up a small shanty and returned to New York for his family. In his absence the cabin was broken up by the Kimballs, but Sherman later went to court and held the claim. "The Kimball boys wanted the earth," he recalled. "I wanted only a slice of it."
The Potawatomis, awaiting their treaty payments prior to their removal across the Mississippi, bartered fish and venison for the pioneers' flour and tobacco. They were inoffensive, but the whites regarded them as dirty, lazy vagabonds. The leader of one band, Waubansee, had a settlement in the Big Woods, south of Batavia and east of the Fox; another, Nickoway, was camped in Dundee. There were no Indians in Elgin when the Giffords and Kimballs arrived, but burial mounds covered about fifteen to twenty acres between what is now Highland Avenue and Wing Street.
Their continued presence in the valley made the whites nervous, and a false report of an Indian uprising in 1836 brought all of six men to an emergency meeting in Elgin. The last major group of area Potawatorriis assembled at the Des Plaines River for departure in 1838. The enterprising, acquisitive emigrants, to whom they had become a nuisance, were not sorry to see them go. The only reminders of the Indians' sojourn in the valley were a few narrow trails and low burial mounds soon leveled by the plow.
Strenuous efforts were necessary to provide subsistence and to expand the facilities for raising a surplus with which to pay for the land when it was placed on sale by the government. "Money is very scarce at this time ... every man that has money is using it for speculation," wrote Samuel Jewett Kimball in a letter of June 4,1836. "It is almost impossible to have a dollar..."
Large sloughs of stagnant water had to be drained. Breaking the prairie soil required a strong team of eight or ten oxen, but they could not be procured fast enough to keep pace with the emigration. The gummy black earth also required a suitable plow. "We were troubled to find a plow that would scour and do a good work," remembered one of the settlers. "They would all bank up with dirt on the mould board." George Renwick, a blacksmith who arrived in the spring of 1838, solved the problem by copying a plow brought into the area from Virginia that could throw the furrow. He was soon crowded with orders.
The hand-made farm implements were heavy, rough and dull. The main crop was wheat. Sowing was done by hand scattering. The grain was cut with a cradle, then raked and bound by hand. With the gathering of the first crops, James Gifford devised a mill by hollowing out a large stump and fitting into it an immense stone which was raised or lowered by means similar to those used in raising water out of wells.
The log houses, usually about fourteen by sixteen feet in dimension, had a low loft for beds reached by a ladder or steep stairway. The cabin was sometimes whitewashed to improve its appearance. After the saw mills were started, a lean-to was added as a kitchen or bedroom and wood siding was nailed to the exterior walls. The settler's wife made her own soap and candles and washed with hard water softened by ashes. There were no screens or netting to keep out insects, in greater abundance than now. All the slaughtering, dressing and preserving of pork and beef was done on the farm. Fruit, except for wild specimens in season, was scarce until the orchards began to yield. Bread, pancakes, salt pork, and potatoes was the monotonous diet, supplemented by game or fish.
Deer appeared almost at the cabin doors. At night prairie fires occasionally lit up the heavens, and wolves howled in the distance. Despite their hardships and sense of isolation, this first wave of pioneers had taken possession of good earth at an advantageous location.
Well written. Now the soapbox: Pioneer here is also another word for colonist. Northwest Illinois was kept in terror by indian raids? It was native land and they were being pushed out of it. I guess when one takes one's land and contributes in the destruction of a way of life, one has nothing left to do but call the by-product "dirty, lazy vagabonds"...Even the burial grounds were erased. Advantageous location indeed. 1838 was a sad year.
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