Clinton

History

The city was founded in 1835 by Jesse W. Fell of Bloomington, Illinois, a land speculator and lawyer, and James Allen, a representative in the Illinois State Legislature. The two men were on their way from Decatur, Illinois back to Bloomington after a business trip and stopped to rest their horses on the open prairie halfway between the two cities. It occurred to them that this was an ideal location for a settlement, as there was nothing else nearby. They named the town in honor of DeWitt Clinton. Clinton is on the 8th Judicial Circuit, on which Abraham Lincoln traveled, along with Judge David Davis, for twenty years. Lincoln acted as lawyer because lawyers were scarce in the area at the time. One of the two registered historical locations in DeWitt County, the C.H. Moore House, is located in Clinton. The house was purchased and improved by lawyer Clifton H. Moore in the 1880s, and is now the DeWitt County Museum. Moore's private library of more than 7,000 volumes was left to the city upon his death in 1901. These books would make up the first collection of the Vespasian Warner Public Library, founded by and named for Moore's son-in-law. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in Clinton to which the following quotation has been attributed: on Sept. 18, according to Carl Sandburg. However, there is no official transcript of the speech. Lincoln's collected papers has a version of the speech taken from a contemporary copy in the Bloomington Pantagraph which doesn't contain it. It has also been attributed to a speech by Lincoln in Bloomington, IL two years earlier, and there is controversy over whether or not Lincoln ever said it at all.

Geography

Clinton is centrally located in the heart of Illinois and is accessible from U.S. Route 51, Illinois Route 54, and Illinois Route 10. According to the 2021 census gazetteer files, Clinton has a total area of , all land.

Race & ethnicity

Most-observed species

• American Crow

  Corvus brachyrhynchos C.L.Brehm, 1822 · Aves
  1,888
• Blue Jay

  Cyanocitta cristata (Linnaeus, 1758) · Aves
  1,666
• Northern Cardinal

  Cardinalis cardinalis (Linnaeus, 1758) · Aves
  1,655
• Red-bellied Woodpecker

  Melanerpes carolinus (Linnaeus, 1758) · Aves
  1,393
• American Robin

  Turdus migratorius Linnaeus, 1766 · Aves
  1,372
• Black-capped Chickadee

  Poecile atricapillus (Linnaeus, 1766) · Aves
  1,347
• Canada Goose (canadensis Group)

  Branta canadensis (Linnaeus, 1758) · Aves
  1,332
• White-breasted Nuthatch

  Sitta carolinensis Latham, 1790 · Aves
  1,288

Most recent

• M 3.8 — 2026-01-20
  4 km NW of Ohlman, Illinois