Harrisburg's Founding Fathers: Real Estate Developers in Pioneer Illinois
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The old Williford Cemetery is abandoned now. Under dense forest shade and a thick cover of underbrush lie the few broken gravestones left behind by those who see fit to steal from the dead.1 To the rear of the cemetery is a jumbled pile of rough foundation stones, all that remains of the first Liberty Baptist Church, a log structure that stood here between 1832 and 1860, about a quarter mile west of the present church.2 It was here that the nearby city of Harrisburg, Illinois had its origin. Harrisburg came into existence in 1853, rather late for a city so far south in the state, specifically intended by its promoters as a potential seat of government for the county of Saline, which had itself been created just six years before. Securing the county government brought benefits to any location, since, with the county seat, came hotels, restaurants, and public buildings such as a courthouse and jail, together with the contractors and work men needed to build them. Lawyers, doctors, and other professionals would inevitably make their way to a new county seat, and of course a full complement of county officers would find it convenient to live nearby, in an age when travel was slow and difficult. Perhaps needless to say, the value of real estate in and around a newly designated county seat could be expected to rise substantially3 the first thirty years of statehood, the number of Illinois counties grew from twelve to ninety-eight. Some of the new counties met an obvious public need, as population grew and shifted. Others, however, were created when ambitious and influential men persuaded the legislature to create counties the principal purpose of which was to turn some favored village or tract of real estate into a county seat. As one delegate to the state constitutional convention of 1847 complained, In nine cases out of ten the petitions for these new counties were got up by men looking for the county offices to be created; or by men anxious to have the county seat located on their land, thereby increasing its value.4 Before 1847 what is now Saline County was merely part of Gallatin, one of the oldest counties in the state. that year the legislature divided Gallatin County, and the 378 square miles in the western half became the new county of Saline, the ninety-ninth of the state's 102 counties to be created.5 The new county was still almost entirely rural, and contained no existing community that was clearly suitable for a new county seat. The Act that created Saline County left the location of the new courthouse to a vote of the inhabitants. Two places were in contention: the future site of the village of Raleigh, in what was then called Curran Precinct, and the little community of South America, west of the present Carrier Mills, near the Williamson County line.6 Neither place was especially near the center of the county, which was swampy and sparsely inhabited, but Raleigh was closer, and was chosen by the voters. That creation of the new county had not been a ploy to attract the county seat is shown by the fact that the voters of Curran Precinct had voted heavily against creation of the new county, just a month before a second election gave them the courthouse7. Once the decision was made, however, the County Commissioners moved quickly to survey a village they named Raleigh, and the court and county officers met there from 1847 until 1859.8 Although, as provided by the legislature, Raleigh had been approved by the voters, the choice was not universally popular. Raleigh was only six miles from the northern boundary of the county, but thirteen from the southern. Roads in the county were few, and those that existed were primitive. The long trek required to record a deed, to pay taxes, or to serve on a jury created dissatisfaction in the southern part of the county, and very soon a clamor arose for a new county seat, nearer the center of the county. The legislature responded by authorizing a special election to decide whether the county seat should be removed from Raleigh. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".