Mill Shoals

History

The first Euro-American settlers, primarily of Scotch-Irish descent, came to White County, Illinois between 1807 and 1809. The first settlements were near the Little Wabash River and Big Prairie, one of the numerous prairies in the county. Many came through the land office at Shawneetown, which was a port for flatboats which traveled the Ohio River. The second half of the 19th century saw the establishment of the towns of Norris City, Springerton including Mill Shoals. Once the home of a thriving barrel-making industry which depleted the nearby virgin forests Mill Shoals had primarily been an agriculture village until 1939 when oil was discovered in the area. In the early 1970s the oil industry declined steeply and thus returned Mill Shoals to its agricultural roots. The town retains the authentic WPA Post office mural. From the Institute of Cultural Affairs 1978 Human Development Project Report:"Mill Shoals is a representative mid-American small town with a population of 314 people situated in White County in southern Illinois. It is one of many secluded villages in the hills surrounded by fertile river bottomlands that make up the Wabash Meadows. U. S. Highway 45 passes north-south through the center of town, and a spur of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, built in 1870, brings two freight trains weekly. A county road connects Mill Shoals with Burnt Prairie five miles east along the old stagecoach trail that once connected Ohio River traffic from Shawneetown to central Illinois." Incorporated in 1872, Mill Shoals takes its name from the water mill built by William Weed in 1835 on the shoals of the Skillet Fork River at the western boundary of the community. The town is governed by an elected mayor and council, who were responsible for a water supply system and a…

Geography

According to the 2010 census, Mill Shoals has a total area of , all land. Mill Shoals is located in Illinois, two-thirds of the way from St. Louis, Missouri, to Evansville, Indiana, at the juncture of Interstate 64 and U.S. Highway 45. Source: "Inside a 200 mile radius of Mill Shoals is a unique geographical and historical area described as the Mid-America Basin. It was here, 175,000 years ago, that the Illinoian Glacier withdrew, leaving two great drainage systems in its wake. On the west side of the Basin the Illinois and Missouri Rivers join the Mississippi River; on the east side the Wabash and Tennessee Rivers join the Ohio River. The systems meet at Cairo, Illinois to begin a long journey through the Gulf Coastal Plain. The retreating glacier left rich mineral deposits of oil, coal, and fluorite to await 20th Century exploitation, and ground out a fine top-soil that was to yield vast timber areas of maple, ash, and oak, as well as fertile fields of wheat, corn, barley, and soybeans, As early as 15,000 B. C., pre-historic Indian peoples hunted the mammoths that roamed the area and eventually developed a series of substantial civilizations of the mounds and of the woodlands, climaxing in the Illini Confederation of the 17th and 18th Centuries. In the 18th Century, French and English explorers competed for these lands beginning with Marquette and Joliet in 1673 and ending with the American conquest under George Rogers Clark in 1778, when the Province of Virginia claimed the territory west to the Mississippi River. The next quarter century saw the advent of frontiersmen such as Daniel Boone paving the way for the great western migration. After the War of 1812, the pioneers poured into the Basin along the Cumberland Highway (now U. S. 40) through Terre Haute,…

Race & ethnicity