The Ross Brothers Settle in Western Illinois

Micah
and Sarah’s Ross and their six sons and four daughters lived in a small home in
Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The family had little means to accommodate and
educate their children. The Ross boys, however, inherited their father’s
reputation for “good living, industry and perseverance, and success in his
general pursuits.” The boys would become soldiers, businessmen, western
pioneers, and founders of the largest county in Illinois.

With the beginning
of the War of 1812, two Ross brothers, Leonard, 30, and William, 20, were commissioned
captain and ensign in separate units of the 21st U.S. infantry
regiment. In the spring of 1813, the brothers were reunited by an order that
placed them with 400 other soldiers for the Battle of Sackett’s Harbor, New
York. The 500 Americans drove back 1,500 British soldiers to hold the harbor,
but the Rosses lost one-third of their men during the battle.

After
the war, William Ross returned to Pittsfield and bought a blacksmith business
he operated for five years. Wanderlust beat in his chest, however, and a desire
to see the bounty land he had earned as a veteran of the War of 1812 pulled him
to far western Illinois. Ross had a remarkable power of persuasion. He encouraged
three of his five brothers and three friends—and their families—to join him for
the rugged 1,200-mile trip to the Illinois Military Tract, a 3.5 million-acre
wedge of land between the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. William, brothers
Leonard, Clarendon, and Henry; and friends Samuel Davis, William Sprague, and
Joseph Cogswell, and their families arrived in Edwardsville as fall neared in
1820.

The
area remained Madison County until January 31, 1821. The Illinois General
Assembly at the capital in Vandalia recognized the sizable Ross-party
immigration into the Military Tract and created Pike County, naming it for
soldier and explorer Zebulon Pike. The new county was a huge municipality taking
everything north and west of the Illinois River to the small village of Chicago
to Galena and down the Mississippi River to today’s Grafton. Eventually, some
50 Illinois counties would be carved from Pike County.

The
Ross party in late summer reached Salu, a settlement that would become Alton,
where they decided to leave their women and children in the care of Major
Charles Hunter. A veteran of the War of 1812, Hunter had made his way to St.
Louis after the war and operated a mercantile business. After buying property
in Lower Alton, Hunter moved his family there and built the first wood-frame
house in the region. His Ross party guests spent the winter in a two-room log
cabin nearby.

At
the mouth of the Illinois River, Ross and his companions procured two Indian
canoes to which they lashed puncheon boards between them. Their crude ferry
carried them and their wagons to the north bank of the Illinois. Their horses
swam alongside.

The men wandered
northward, the woodlands “a revelation,” according to an early settler, “of
beautiful blossoms and . . . flowering shrubs.” As they made their way, they
noticed magnolia, horse chestnut, persimmon trees, some “forty feet or more
high,” shingle oaks, redbuds, plums, honey locust, and coffee wood trees. It
was an unsullied landscape that William Ross said had them “gazing spellbound.”
As he remembered, the party was “of one accord in electing this beautiful spot”
at the end of their journey. According to the plat by a federal surveyor of the
Military Tract, this was Section 27, Township 6 South. There were no more than
five other immigrants in the territory, including John Wood of New York and
Willard Keyes of Vermont, who since February 1820 had squatted on land about
1.5 miles south of today’s

On
the site they had chosen, the seven men of the Ross party built four
rudimentary log cabins before winter’s snow came. Early next spring, Leonard
Ross remained at the settlement when the others returned to Major Hunter’s
settlement at Upper Alton to retrieve their families.

Not
long afterward, other eastern acquaintances began arriving at Atlas. Among them
was James McDonald, who brought his wife and four daughters from Washington
County, New York, in 1821. He established the first farm between Atlas and
Louisiana, Missouri. From Sny Island, he also operated the first ferry, where
he was found dead the next spring, the apparent victim of a murder that went
unsolved. His widow married another newcomer, Joseph Jackson, later active in
Pike County politics.

William
Ross built the first brick home in the county at Atlas in 1821. A year later,
an addition would nearly double the home’s size. He built a two-horse-powered grist
mill, a band mill, and with J.M. Seeley, planted and harvested the county’s
first wheat crop. From the flour of that first wheat, ground in Ross’s mill,
the first biscuit was baked. Ross organized the first house of worship, a
Congregational Church. In that year, too, Daniel Shinn of Batavia, Ohio, built
the first courthouse at Atlas. Leonard’s oldest son John would teach at the
first school in it.

That
year, 1821, was a watershed for progress. But it was also devastating to every
family in town. That year, malaria tore its way through the small settlement,
putting nearly half its residents in the new Atlas Cemetery just outside of
town. Among the dead were William’s wife Nancy and his brother Clarendon.

William
Ross later visited New York and returned with a new wife, Edna Adams Ross. By
the time of his return, a post office had been established in what was named
Ross Settlement in his absence. Not fond of the honorific, the settlement’s
founder changed the town’s name to Atlas. Ross believed it promising enough to
predict that it would become “the star city in Western Illinois.” Two other
Pike County settlers, John Wood of Pleasant Vale and John Shaw, known as the
Black Prince from Coles Grove, would soon test Ross’s claim. That story next.

Sources

“The 1820 Coming of the
Rosses” at

Reg Ankrom, “Atlas Shrugged Off as Thriving City in Western
Illinois,”

Quincy Herald Whig,

April 21, 2018.

John W. Barber and Henry Howe,

All the Western States and
Territories.

(Cincinnati: Howe’s Subscription Book Concern, 1867), 229.

“History of Upper Alton, Illinois –
Including

and

,” at

John Livingston,

Portraits of Eminent Americans Now
Living: With Biographical Memoirs of their Lives and Action,

Vol 3. New
York: Cornish, Lamport, & Co., 1853, 427.

M.D. Massie,

Past and Present of Pike County, Illinois,
Together with Biographical Sketches of Many of Its Prominent and Leading
Citizens and Illustrious Dead.

Chicago: S.J. Clarke, 1906, 225.

“Micah Ross’s Immediate
Family” at

Jessie M. Thompson, “Pike County Settled 1820: 100 Years
Ago,”

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society,

Vol 13. Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 1920,