Published March 18, 2012
By Reg Ankrom
Willard Keyes had no
intention of letting the judicial seat of Adams County get away from the
settlement he and John Wood had established in 1822. So when three
state-appointed commissioners arrived in April 1825 to site the Adams County
seat, Keyes was ready for them.
Acting on a petition by Wood, the state legislature had
created Adams County in January 1825. Illinois law stipulated that the judicial
seat was to be situated as near the geographical center of the county as
possible. That should have eliminated Keyes’ and Wood’s settlement on the far
west side of Adams County as a candidate for the center of local government.
But Keyes, whose original journal is owned by the Historical Society of Quincy
and Adams County, was not going to abandon the courthouse without a contest. He
developed a plan.
Keyes had arranged a reception for the state’s commissioners
by three-fourths of the male population of Quincy at the time. They were
Jeremiah Rose, shoemaker John Droulard, and Keyes himself. Wood was in St. Louis.
After the welcome, the commissioners set off to find the county’s center. Keyes
guided them. In his years here, Keyes had become expert in Quincy’s natural
surroundings, and he used his knowledge of the area to work his plan. He led
the commissioners on a route calculated to win their affection—or their
surrender — for Quincy.
Keyes led the commissioners through briars, bogs, quagmires,
swamps and quicksand (in an area around today’s Mill Creek and Marblehead) and
through pits of snakes and a cave full of bats some six or seven miles east of
the river bluff (Burton Cave). By their return late that afternoon, the
commissioners were exhausted and disgusted.
The next day, Wood joined Keyes and his guests, now willing
to look elsewhere. Keyes and Wood led the commissioners on another circuitous
but more hospitable route to a spot at today’s Washington Park. There
Commissioner Seymour Kellogg of Morgan County gratefully drove a stake into the
ground and officially pronounced it site of the Adams County seat.
Agitation for a new court house in 1834 rekindled memories
that the law required it to be centrally located in the county. Land
speculators Stephen A. Douglas and two Jacksonville friends initially focused
on the exact center of the county, a place they called Adamsburg,within the
huge Military Tract. But when that property’s owners could not be found,
attention turned to Columbus Township, just east. It was about 18 miles
northeast of Quincy.
Almost overnight Columbus became a boom town. Businessman
Willard Graves had the town laid out in 1835 and in the Feb. 5, 1836, issue of
the Illinois Bounty Land Register advertised lots for sale. In the following
year, settlers built 100 homes in Columbus, and Graves built a saw mill on
McKee’s Creek. Easterner Daniel Harrison swapped eastern goods for commodities.
Clement Nance and Thomas Castle opened general stores, and W.D. McCann operated
a cabinet shop. The Bartholomews built the first corn mill.
By 1840 Columbus had a newspaper, the Columbus Advocate, with
Abraham Jonas, a Quincy lawyer, directing editorial policy. Jonas’s aim was to
make Columbus the county seat, and he and his neighbors got the question on the
ballot. On August 2, 1841, the county’s voters elected to move county
government from Quincy to Columbus by a vote of 1,636 to 1,545.
As soon as Justices of the Peace Henry Asbury and W.D.
McCann certified the election’s results,however, attorneys
representing several Quincyans alleged fraud and appealed to the
Adams County commissioners to stay the results. Commissioners William
Richards and Eli
Seehorn, each favoring Quincy, issued the stay. Circuit Judge Stephen A.
Douglas, appointed only months earlier to the local judicial district,
invalidated that action. Douglas ordered the commissioners to obey the law, transfer
county records and organize the county seat in Columbus.
Richards and Seehorn thwarted Douglas’s order by alternating
their attendance at commission meetings. With Commissioner George Smith, who
favored Columbus, always attending and either Richards or Seehorn
attending, there was no concurrence for carrying out Douglas’s writ.
Douglas issued another order commanding immediate action,
which Quincy attorney George Dixon appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court.
Archibald Williams of southeastern Adams County argued Columbus’s position.
Justices deferred their decision to their December session.
That gave Quincy time for another maneuver, this one to
divide the county, with ten eastern townships going to a new county, Marquette,
and the ten western townships remaining in Adams County. The Quincy group dared
Columbus to support the measure, knowing that Columbians would have appeared
disingenuous had they done so. Columbus proponents had justified their efforts
to gain the county seat by complaining Quincy was nowhere near the county’s
geographic center. In the way Quincy strategists drew the new county lines,
Columbus was put in the same position—at the far west side of Marquette County.
Columbus rejected the offer.
In February 1843 the legislature passed Quincy Rep. Almeron
Wheat’s bill and created Marquette County. Residents of the new county called
the new law despotic—they had not been allowed to vote on the separation — and
refused to take part in any county affairs. As the law required, an election of
Marquette County officers was held in April. Not a single vote was cast.
Judge Jesse B. Thomas, who succeeded newly elected
Congressman Douglas, upheld a prohibition of Marquette voters taking part in
Adams County affairs. Marquette had no county seat, no county services and even
no law. There was at least one benefit, however: there was no county tax.
In 1847 the state legislature amended the boundary of the
eastern county, changed its name to Highland County and aimed to establish county government, including
tax collections. Still, residents of the new county refused to organize.
A fed-up Archibald Williams, who had been elected a delegate
to the Illinois Constitutional Convention in 1847, dealt with the dispute by
winning approval of a constitutional limit to how long a proposed county could
remain unorganized. That should have ended the dispute once and for all. It was
the end of Marquette- Highland County, but not the end of the story.
On Jan. 9, 1847, fire destroyed the courthouse on the east side
of Fifth Street in Quincy. Once again, some outlying residents renewed the
cause to move the courthouse nearer the geographic center of Adams County. This
time it was Coatsburg that sought the county seat. But Adams County voters
apparently had had enough — 7,238 of them voted to keep county government in
Quincy and 3,109 voted for Coatsburg. Keyes had kept the courthouse in Quincy.
Reg Ankrom is executive director of the Historical
Society. He is a member of several history-related organizations, the author of
a history of Stephen A. Douglas and a frequent speaker on pre-Civil War
history.
