CHAPTER 4
Railroads and Founding Fathers
The founding of El Paso, Illinois was a cold business venture, totally lacking in romance or thought of future history. It was wholly in keeping with the land boom of that decade, caused by the new railroads piercing our wide prairie grass plains.
Sites for the new towns were being staked off every seven or eight miles along each right-of-way, with quick profits in sight. Thus the Illinois Central, built largely from grants of land in alternating sections, established the towns of Minonk, Panola, and Kappa in that order as their rails pushed southward from the Illinois River at LaSalle toward Bloomington in 1852 and 1853. Nothing but prairie grass and one tiny cottonwood sprout stood on the future site of El Paso. How then did it happen that a town grew here, on a spot not selected for one by the Central?1
In midsummer of 1852, two young business men of Washington, Illinois, then a railless village east of Peoria, noticed there was still an unentered half section of land east of their home town, through which surveyor's stakes had been driven for the two-hundred foot right-of-way of the newly chartered Illinois Central Railroad Company. They conceived the idea of patenting these two adjoining quarters and then plotting a town site, hoping they could induce the proposed eastern extension of the Peoria and Oquawka Railroad to cross the Central over their land. They visioned fine profits if they succeeded; if they failed they would still own the land which was certain to increase in value because of its proximity to the railroad. Harry D. Cook, later of Kappa, had the same idea when he staked off his town of Oneida two miles north of Hudson and put in his bid for the same rail crossing, a bid that failed.
George L. Gibson had made the gold rush trip overland to California in 1849 with John Tucker, an adventurer whose wife's brother was a tight-fisted and shrewd thirty-six- year-old bachelor named James H. Wathen. Gibson, then thirty-three, found no gold, but he gained a pioneering spirit that acknowledged the need for railroads in a country so vast as he found this one to be.
Visiting their site, Wathen and Gibson found the level quarter sections with the Central's survey stakes almost tracing the dividing line on a slight angle from true north and south, but entirely within the
Page 44