CHAPTER 5

The Story of Ludwik Chlopicki

PART ONE-A Mysterious Old World Stranger.

The Count arrived in El Paso sometime in 1856, about the time the Peoria and Oquawka Railroad was completed from Peoria to the Illinois Central. If the Jenkins brothers and other early settlers ever knew his name they didn't use it. To them and to the visitors in the new prairie town, the elderly, out of place gentleman from Poland was known simply as the Count. Few believed he was really a nobleman.

Ludwik Chlopicki¹ aided in this mystery about himself by never talking of his past life or of relatives. Somehow, the pioneers sensed that they must not ask him questions that were personal. As the years went by they accepted him as the most polished and polite business man in the new village.

El Paso's first restaurant had been opened by Ben Hazlett in 1855 in a one story building² that was located on the township road, now Main Street, believed to have been located about twenty-five yards south of the present site of the El Paso Elevator Company's office. The new combined freight office and depot was just across the tracks west of that office.³ We soon find the Count in this restaurant, in which he lived and occasionally rented a spare room. It was owned by George C. Bestor of the Peoria and Oquawka Railroad, who had moved it from an unknown site to the north where it was originally built on Wathen or Gibson land, and it is believed it was at Bestor's suggestion the old Count moved into it.

The old world aristocrat was definitely out of place in a pioneer village with his perfect manners, foreign accent, and his reticence, but most of the settlers liked him and respected his peculiarities. Later exceptions were the town's two founders, Wathen and Gibson, who found him "for" Illinois Junction, as he called the area south of Main Street, and "against" El Paso, as the original town area to the north was named. He often entertained the Jenkins brothers and other new found friends with stylish type European dinners, where the table service, food and formal manners confounded some of the less tutored frontiersmen. None the less, it became a local honor to receive an invitation to what Isaac Jenkins called a dinner of state.

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