About Us 1
A Place Called Maquon

The oldest name for a place in Knox County was the Indian word for mussel shells. "Maquon" is a village on the river called "Spoon, " an English word which describes the use made by the Potawatomi, as by other Indians, of these shells of the fresh water mollusks that were very abundant in the rivers of central United States before the plowing of the land would muddy and the run-off from the cities would corrupt our waters.

Before frontiersmen took the name "Maquon" for a settlement, it has been used alternately with the word "Spoon" to designate a stream that drained into the Illinois River. In the remarkable map collection of the Knox College Library one can trace the Indian name back through deviant spellings or soundings on American, English, Dutch, Italian and French maps to 1684. The valley of the Spoon River (A-ma-quon-sip-pi in the Indian language) had been the locale of Indian villages for many centuries. Near Maquon have been found shards of pottery of a type that has been dated 35O BC The clay of this pottery had been tempered with shells of mussels.

French adventurers, fur traders, and missionaries became familiar with the Upper Mississippi and Illinois Rivers during the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and the angle of the land area between these two rivers was one of the first geographical features to be mapped with some degree of consistency and accuracy. During the eighteenth century a village of French and Indians was located near the lower end of Lake Peoria. This outpost of European settlers was, however, wiped out during the War of 1812, when Illinois militia, in a panic over the danger of Indian attack, destroyed the settlement by scattering the Indians and by taking the French villagers as captives down the Illinois River to the "American" settlements in the bottom lands of the Mississippi River opposite and below St. Louis.

During the War of 1812 the Congress of the United States provided that each soldier should receive 160 acres of bounty land. For this purpose three and one half million acres of public domain between the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers was set aside as a Military Tract. In order that this land could be located and distributed, the national government hastened to contract with surveyors to lay out the land into townships and sections, to label these properly, and to provide descriptions that would distinguish the good from the less desirable land. This survey began in the autumn of 1815; by August of 1816 the area of what would be Knox County had been reached; and by the end of that winter the Maquon vicinity had been neatly divided into mile square rectangles.

In 1817 and 1818 about 18,000 of the warrants that had been issued to soldiers were exchanged in the East for patents worth a quarter section somewhere in the Military Tract, the actual choice being controlled by lot. Most of these patents, however, were soon owned by eastern speculators, and actual settlement of the bounty lands did not begin until years later. Most of the first settlers in Knox County, beginning late in the 1820s, would buy their land at the price established by Congress in 1820 -- $1.25 an acre! And during the thirties land purchases reached the proportions of a boom. By 1840 the area was well beyond the "frontier, " though not the "pioneer, " stage.

— Herman R. Muelder, Knox College

Taken from the book "History of Maquon and Vicinity"
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