Illinois Trivia & Tidbits - Page 17

Looking for Illinois trivia? Try our list Illinois little know facts, tidbits and trivia.

Former miners take visitors on tours of a coal mine 600 feet underground at the National Coal Mine Museum near West Frankfort (pop. 8,402).

first appeared: 1/14/2001

Bryant Cottage in Danville (pop. 32,163) is where Abraham Lincoln met with incumbent U.S. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas and agreed to a series of seven public debates in 1858.

first appeared: 1/7/2001

The Illinois Railway Museum in Union (pop. 542) features 350 pieces of railroad equipment as well as a depot built in nearby Marengo in 1851 and moved to the museum in 1967.

first appeared: 12/31/2000

Gun-slinging lawman Wyatt Earp was born March 19, 1848, in Monmouth (pop. 9,447). Earp and his brothers are best known for their involvement in the infamous shootout at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Ariz.

first appeared: 12/24/2000

Built on swampland, many structures in early Chicago began to sink. Beginning in 1855, renovators replaced foundations and the city drained wetlands to stop other buildings from sinking.

first appeared: 12/17/2000

Josephine Cochrane of Shelbyville (pop. 4,826), a socialite who liked to give dinner parties, invented the first practical automatic dishwasher in 1886. The company she founded is now known as Kitchen Aid.

first appeared: 12/10/2000

James Jones, the author of From Here to Eternity, was born in Robinson (pop. 6,504) in 1921. Jones was the only major American writer to witness the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

first appeared: 12/3/2000

Equality Cave, near Equality, (pop. 755) is a cavern composed of two-and-a-half miles of passageways on the Shawnee National Forest.

first appeared: 11/26/2000

The town of Oblong (pop. 1,701) in east-central Illinois reportedly was named about 1830 by its first settlers who found a tract of oblong-shaped prairie bordered by several small streams.

first appeared: 11/19/2000

Kaskaskia (pop. 33) is the only town in Illinois west of the Mississippi River. It was east of the Mississippi until a 1799 flood made the town—the territorial capital a decade later—an island, with water flowing on both sides. The Mississippi eventually chose the new, shorter eastern route, leaving the town on its west bank.

first appeared: 11/12/2000

The world’s largest catsup (that’s how it’s spelled on the label) bottle is in Collinsville (pop. 23,057). The bottle really is an empty 170-foot-tall water tower, built in 1949 by W.E Caldwell Co. for the G.S. Suppiger catsup bottling plant.

first appeared: 11/5/2000

The Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site contains the remnants of one of the most sophisticated native civilization in North America north of Mexico. The 2,200-acre site just west of Collinsville (pop. 23,052) was inhabited from about 700 A.D. to 1,400 A.D.

first appeared: 10/22/2000

The Raggedy Ann character was created in 1915 by Johnny Barton Gruelle, a native of Arcola (pop. 2,820), who made up stories to entertain his gravely ill, bedridden 13-year-old daughter Marcella. After Marcella died, her grieving father began writing stories about the adventures of Raggedy Ann and her brother, Andy.

first appeared: 10/8/2000

At 1,235 feet high, Charles Mound—a gentle hill on a private farm—in Jo Daviess County in northwest Illinois is the highest point in the state.

first appeared: 9/24/2000

Peoria is the oldest European settlement in Illinois. In 1691, the French military, under the charge of Henri de Tonti, built a massive fortification called Fort Pimiteoui. Outside the walls of the fort, a French settlement grew among the American Indian villages.

first appeared: 9/10/2000

Batavia (pop. 21,591) earned its nickname the “Windmill City” because of the large number of farm windmills manufactured there in the past. When the United States Wind Engine and Pump Co. was founded in 1863, it was the largest factory of its kind in the world. The windmill industry ended in Batavia in the early 1940s with the beginning of World War II.

first appeared: 8/27/2000

An empty water tower in Niles is artistically disguised as a half-scale replica of Italy’s leaning Tower of Pisa. Built in 1933 to supply water to three swimming pools, the 96-foot structure is surrounded today by a small park and serves only as an attraction.

first appeared: 8/13/2000

Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, knew three different presidents who were assassinated. When Abraham Lincoln was shot, Robert rushed to his father’s bedside. As secretary of war 16 years later, Robert was at the Washington train station when President James Garfield was shot. And, he was nearby when President William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1901. After that he refused to attend presidential functions, believing he brought bad luck.

first appeared: 7/30/2000

Robert Pershing Wadlow, the world’s tallest man, lived in Alton until he died in 1940 at age 22. He was 8 feet, 11 inches tall. A lifelike bronze statue of the “Gentleman Giant” stands on the Southern Illinois University campus in Alton.

first appeared: 7/16/2000

Illinois had two state capitals-Kaskaskia and Vandalia-before Springfield. Kaskaskia (pop. 33) was the capital when Illinois became the 21st state in 1818. Two years later, Vandalia (pop. 6,169) became the seat of state government, and in 1839 Springfield was chosen.

first appeared: 7/2/2000

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