The first settlers in what became Mendon Township in Adams County were farmers. The Ebenezer Riddle family's ancestors had come to Pendleton County, Kentucky, from Ireland in the 1700s. In 1829 Ebenezer came north and bought 320 acres of land in the southeast quarter of Section 9 in Mendon Township. By 1834 he had prepared enough hand-sawn wood to build what was almost certainly the first frame house there. Teenager John C. Hardy came from Tennessee in 1830 and established a farm in Section 29. He married in 1835 and years later was described as "one of the early, energetic, and enterprising citizens who have used their energies and exertions toward the county's improvement and prosperity.…"
After the American Revolution ended in 1783 and the Constitution was finally adopted in 1789, the states turned their Western land claims over to the new federal government. The new country's economy was unstable, weather contributed to several years of poor crops, and the custom of leaving one's land to the oldest son was still strong, so many of the young adults were eager to leave New England and head west. That first generation had challenges and opportunities that had never existed, and young families followed the rivers into the lands west of the Appalachians by the thousands.
Beginning about 1790, the great evangelistic revival called the Second Great Awakening had begun sweeping through New England, touching thousands of lives. Yale College in New Haven, Conn., was considered to be one of the centers for the religious awakening. Several of the first families who moved to Adams County did not intend to farm but to start new communities based on Yankee commitment to frugality, hard work, education and a local Congregational church.
In 1831 Congregational Deacon John B. Chittenden, who lived in a spacious house on Boston Street in Guilford, Conn., a few miles east of New Haven, organized five covered wagons and 36 people to travel to Quincy, Ill., to find a place nearby in which to establish a new community. "In this undertaking he had two distinct objects in view; first, to establish, strengthen, and extend, the Christian religion, by the organization of churches, Sunday Schools, Bible classes, etc.; second, to better provide for his family of boys in a new country."
The journey was probably more daunting than anyone imagined. After a difficult three months of travel, the wagons were frozen in, near Hannibal, Mo. After three weeks there, Chittenden arranged for horses to be brought to tow the wagons to Quincy on the Mississippi ice. They arrived in December 1831, and the travelers spent their first night in Quincy in the riverside log cabin home of founder John Wood. The group stayed in Quincy for the winter, explored the area, and on March 2, 1832, Chittenden bought the southwest part of Section 11 of what would become Mendon Township from old French trader Jacob Gershong. A log cabin had already been built on the parcel, and about 10 acres of the prairie had been cultivated. The first settlers' child born there was Sarah Chittenden, the following spring.
As early as 1832, a school was organized in the Chittenden home, taught by Cornelia Burgess, one of the members of the party from Guilford, who later became the second wife of Willard Keyes, co-founder of Quincy with John Wood. In February, 1833, the Chittenden cabin also was the site on which the first Congregational church was organized in Illinois.
In 1833, Chittenden, Benjamin Baldwin and Daniel Benton platted a town and named it Fairfield, but soon changed it to Mendon when they learned that another Fairfield, Ill., existed. The citizens immediately constructed the Union Meeting House, in which any congregation with a minister was welcome to meet. The new blacksmith, E.A. Strong, became a well-studied Episcopalian minister. The Congregationalists shared the building, constructed their own church in 1838 and then built a larger one in 1853.
The vast Quincy District of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which included Mendon, had been assigned to famed circuit rider Peter Cartwright in 1832. When the first Methodist church was organized at Mendon in 1839, Enos Thompson, from a family of barrel coopers near Paloma in Honey Creek Township, became the preacher for the Mendon circuit. Salem Evangelical Church of Mendon was established in 1853, and the building was dedicated the following year. Other churches were established late in the 19th century.
Mendon's post office was recognized in 1834 with Abraham Benton, from Connecticut, as the first postmaster. His brother, Daniel, opened the first store. S.R. Chittenden, John's son, was also an early merchant, and the family continued to operate various enterprises, including a grain elevator and a bank, for generations.
The prosperity of the Mendon area made it an early political center. In the election of 1840, hundreds came from all over the region to attend a huge barbecue in support of the Whig candidate for president, William Henry Harrison. Orville H. Browning of Quincy, a friend of Abraham Lincoln, was the speaker.
In 1872, artist's drawings of the large, beautiful homes, great barns and fenced and well-tended yards of Orville E. Riddle and S.R. Chittenden, and the three-story residence of Dr. Young, were published. Virtually every record of the first five decades of the thriving community support the assertion published in 1879: "and within the next few years Samuel Bradley, John B. Chittenden, the Bentons, the Baldwins and other thrifty Connecticut Yankees came to the Prairie and formed there a prosperous settlement."
Linda Riggs Mayfield is a researcher, writer and online consultant for doctoral scholars and authors. She retired from the associate faculty of Blessing-Rieman College of Nursing, and is on the board of the Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County.