Go south, young man, go south-with apologies to Horace Greeley, the newspaper publisher who once used similar words to admonish young men to seek their fortunes in the West.
But no apologies for the advice. The southern tip of Illinois, known as Egypt and Little Egypt, is a vast and largely untapped reservoir of history, bucolic charm and scenic splendor.
It is rich in history because that`s where the settlement of the state began before it was even a state. It remains an uncrowded refuge from civilization because the very rivers that brought swarms of early settlers to the area-the Wabash, the Ohio and the Mississippi-now isolate it. And it has scenery not normally associated with the monotonous flatness of Illinois because the southward advance of the great glaciers stopped in southern Illinois, leaving long rolling hills and majestic, towering cliffs unscathed.
The area known as Little Egypt is bounded on the east, south and west by the Wabash, Ohio and Mississippi Rivers; its northern boundary is vague, with some folks asserting that it extends up to Vandalia.
One story holds that the area was so nicknamed because it encompasses towns with Egyptian-sounding names, such as Cairo, Karnak and Thebes. But that`s too simple. Another story with documentary evidence to back it up dates the origin of the name to 1831. That year northern and central Illinois suffered a freakishly late spring, a freakishly cool summer and a freakishly early winter. The combination doomed the corn crop and farmers were compelled to go south, which had had a normal growing season, to buy grain.
A.D. Duff, later to become a judge and law professor, gave an account of his encounters with these farmers to the Shawneetown Gazette. At the time Duff was a young farm boy, and many northern farmers drove their empty wagons past his farm. When Duff asked where they were headed, several replied that they, like the Bible`s Jacob, were ”going down to Egypt for corn.” The name, apparently, stuck.
Southern Illinois is a world unto itself, as remote from the northern and even central portions of the state as if it were a separate state. You begin to get a feel for the difference as you pass Effingham while driving down Int. Hwy. 57. By about that point the horizon, for many miles a perfectly flat line where land meets sky, begins to show irregularities.
Strange as it seems for Illinois, those steel-gray silhouettes in the distance are low-lying hills. Slowly, the rises and dips in the road become more pronounced, and the terrain, too rugged for farming, gives way to forests and streams.
But even before Effingham, say around Tuscola, if you get off the interstate and come into contact with the people, you`ll hear Southern accents as rich and full-bodied as any in Dixie.
And so it is wherever you drive in southern Illinois: Rolling woodlands interspersed with farms in the valleys, small towns (a population of 2,000 is a metropolis down here) and people with the time and inclination to bat the breeze with a stranger.
One of the first things you notice while driving here is that once you get out of town-whatever town it might be-you`ve practically got the road to yourself. The fact that there is rarely a car or truck bearing down on you from behind, trying to crawl into your trunk, may explain why you drift so effortlessly to a slower emotional pace; why you don`t feel so hurried; why you feel inclined to roll along at 45 m.p.h. when the speed limit is 55. This might be called taking time to smell the roses.
Marion is an easy shot straight down I-57, 5 1/2 to 6 hours south of Chicago, including stops, and it`s a good place to base a tour of the Ohio River border of Illinois. The town (population 14,000) bristles with motels and restaurants.
Perhaps the biggest single attraction in this southeast corner of Illinois (actually almost the entire southern tip of the state) is Shawnee National Forest, which extends from the Ohio to the Mississippi. That makes a stop in Harrisburg, 22 miles east of Marion on Ill. Hwy. 13, mandatory. Forest headquarters is on U.S. Hwy. 45, 1/2 mile south of Ill. 13. Their primary concern at headquarters is the national forest, but their excellent, highly detailed maps include sites, towns and roads not within the boundaries of the forest and not shown on state road maps.
East of Harrisburg on Ill. Hwy. 1 about a mile south of Ill. 13, perched on a hill overlooking undulating farm and forest land, is a sinister National Historic Landmark. Known by the picturesque name of Hickory Hill when it was completed in 1838, the three-story house now is better known as the Old Slave House. Truly an evil place, it is believed by many hereabouts to be haunted.
Its owner was John Hart Crenshaw, grandson of John Hart, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. In Illinois he amassed a fortune, gaining government leases to run a salt-distilling operation on salt springs in the area.
Illinois was a free state, but the original state Constitution permitted the operators of salt works in this area to lease slaves from their owners in slave territories. So for a time, in this little corner of Illinois, slavery was legal.
Crenshaw used this legal slave labor with apparent relish. It was generally accepted, but never proved, that he joined in the illegal slave trade, dealing with men who hunted escaped slaves-or even kidnaped them-as they crossed the Ohio River from Kentucky and then sold them south again.
One well-documented story involved a slave named Uncle Bob whom Crenshaw used for breeding, the children destined to be sold. Uncle Bob was 6 feet 5 inches tall and weighed 245 pounds, and was noted for fathering mostly boys, which were much more valuable than girls. He died in Elgin State Hospital in 1949 at the age of 114, still asserting that he`d fathered 300 children.
Crenshaw`s illegally held slaves were quartered in the notorious third floor of his mansion. The floor is 12 feet wide and 50 feet long with 7 tiny rooms on one side and 5 on the other. One of the rooms, little more than a closet, is labeled ”Uncle Bob`s Room.” Into this area, through the burning heat of summer and cold of winter, up to 100 slaves were held in barbarously close confinement.
Crenshaw easily was the richest man in the state. His land holdings were estimated at 30,000 acres, and the taxes he paid on his salt operations amounted to 1/6 of all the state`s revenue. For this reason he was a real power-the man to see-in Illinois.
It was to curry favor with him that a young Illinois politician, Abraham Lincoln, is reported to have visited Hickory Hill and even spent a night under Crenshaw`s roof. It was his visit here that is said to have introduced Lincoln to the reality of slavery and reversed his previous indifference to it.
If ever a house deserved to be haunted, it`s the Old Slave House. The pain and suffering its walls witnessed-the inhumanity-beggar the imagination. So many tormented souls torn from their bodies, so much anguish. . . . Perhaps the stories of ghostly happenings are true.
In recent years many people have tried to spend a night on the third floor. None has succeeded. Two ex-marines, Vietnam veterans who thought they`d lost their capacity to fear, came stumbling down after a couple of hours up there one night. They spoke of hearing ”things,” moans and sobbing.
The present owner, George Sisk, lives on the first floor and, yes, he says, he has experienced some strange happenings, though he stops short of saying the house definitely is haunted.
What kind of happenings?
”Oh, like I`ll be opening a door and suddenly it will be flung open, the knob just ripped out of my hand,” he says. ”Or just the other day my wife was closing the kitchen window and it went down with a terrific crash.
” `Hey, take it easy,` I said. `You`ll break the glass.` She was just standing there, staring at the window and shaking her head. `I didn`t do that,` she said.”
Besides Lincoln`s visit, there is another irony to the story of Hickory Hill: It`s just down the road from a town named Equality.
Old Shawneetown, about 10 miles from the Slave House, is the oldest town in Illinois, having been incorporated in 1814. One early resident was Gen. Thomas Posey, a member of George Washington`s staff who was present for the British surrender at Yorktown, Va. He`s buried in Westwood Cemetery two miles north of town.
In 1825 the Marquis de Lafayette, French hero of the Revolutionary War, visited the town, then the biggest and most important city in the state. He delivered a stirring address from the steps of the Rawlings` Hotel and attended a reception there in his honor.
There`s a somewhat embarrassing legend involving the banks of Shawneetown and the city of Chicago. In 1830 a group of Shawneetown bankers turned down the request of a delegation from Chicago for a loan-up to $5,000-to help get their city started. The bankers believed the little town in a swamp on the banks of Lake Michigan was ”too remote from Shawneetown to ever amount to much.”
Today there is Shawneetown and Old Shawneetown. Shawneetown (population 1,700) was established four miles from the Ohio River after a devastating flood in 1937. But a band of diehards refused to abandon the old town, and today 400 people call Old Shawneetown home.
Considering its glorious past, a history that once seemed ordained for greatness, Old Shawneetown today is a sad place. The once magnificent bank of Shawneetown on Main Street, built in 1839, is shuttered; its wide, grand, stone steps are worn; its masonry crumbling. Rusted steel barges and rotted wood barges litter the river bank. Up and down Main Street the stores that remain open badly need repair, yet to spruce them up seems pointless, for
”new” Shawneetown is only a couple of miles up Ill. 13.
Even the bridge that carries Ill. 13 traffic across the river into Kentucky can`t restore the town`s fortunes. Cars just go speeding by. But as they do, if the drivers look quickly and don`t blink, they might be able to spot the town that once was the biggest, busiest and most important in Illinois; that once hosted a Revolutionary War hero and was home and final resting place for another; and the bank that once considered its town`s future much, much brighter than that of Chicago.
About 25 miles downriver is Cave-in-Rock, population 450. Probably the most touristy town on this stretch of the river, it`s also the site of a state park by the same name with reputedly excellent overnight accommodations.
The locale was used in the movie ”How the West Was Won” and the ”Davy Crockett” and ”Daniel Boone” TV series. In these stories the cave was depicted as a hideout for river pirates, which is historically accurate, but far short of reality. The moviemakers` villains were veritable choir boys compared with the real river pirates of the late 1700s.
The worst of these were the Horrible Harpes, two brothers named Micajah and Wiley. Between them they murdered 35 to 50 people, usually disemboweling their victims, filling their stomachs with rocks and sinking them in the river. The Harpes were so twisted that other pirates who inhabited the cave, no saints themselves, kicked the brothers out and would have nothing to do with them.
Both men were eventually caught and beheaded. Micajah met his end across the river in Kentucky, where his head was impaled on a pole and stuck in the ground beside a road which still bears the name Harpes Head Road.
Ill. Hwy. 1 ends at the river, but a car and passenger ferry crosses the river into Kentucky. It`s the only way to cross the river between Old Shawneetown and Paducah, Ky., a distance of about 70 miles.
The hole in the cliff of the river bank remains the star attraction of the town and the 150-acre park. Cave-in-Rock runs 200 feet straight into the cliff, is 80 feet wide and the entrance is 25 feet high. The day I visited the outside temperature was 101 degrees, but inside the cave it was about 70.
At one time Indian hieroglyphics covered the walls, but pirates and contemporary visitors have obliterated them, leaving in their place such mundane declarations of love as ”Bob + Sue,” ”John (H) Marcia,” etc. One intriguing defacement appears in black paint on the ceiling at the entrance 25 feet above the ground: ”J. & B.C. Cole 1913.” It just goes to show that even graffiti, if it`s old enough, can take on a certain charm.
To get from Cave-in-Rock to Elizabethtown eight miles downriver you could backtrack up Ill. 1 and head west on Ill. Hwy. 146. It`s an easy and fairly scenic route. But a better choice would be the gravel Shawnee National Forest road, one of hundreds that crisscross the park. It`s slower, it`s bumpier (but not axle-breakingly so), and a cloud of white dust follows you all the way.
But chances are good to excellent that you`ll have the road to yourself;
you`ll have a chance to stop at Tower Rock, a scenic overlook on the Ohio River; and it`s pleasant to drive slowly down a road through a tunnel of trees and past postcard farms, glimpses of the river sparkling through the forest.
The locals call it E`Town, and its claim to fame is the oldest hotel in Illinois, the Rose, built in 1812 for travelers on the river. In its heyday, the Rose was the grandest hotel on the river and probably in the state.
The hotel still stands on the river in the neat little community of 450, but it has fallen on hard times. The back half of it-the side facing the river-has been chopped off so that it`s half its original size. Still, the view from the gazebo overlooking the river is serene, and it`s easy to picture elegantly dressed ladies and their gentlemen taking a summer night`s air on the lawn.
Just a couple of miles down the road is Rosiclare, population 1,400, which was named for two daughters-Rose and Clare-of an early settler.
Like so many river towns, Rosiclare`s glory days are long gone. Fluorspar mines used to haul wagon loads of ore down Main Street to be loaded onto waiting barges. Later, the ore moved on a narrow-gauge train to the river`s edge-the tracks are still there, imbedded in the pavement, and a conveyor lies rusting on the bank like some nightmarish dinosaur.
But Rosiclare is far from dead. It`s a tidy little town with marigolds growing in the cracks of some of the sidewalks, the kind of town where you could get used to walking across Main Street without looking for cars.
It would be criminal to visit this area of Illinois without stopping at one of its prettiest and most incongruous sites, the Garden of the Gods in the national forest. It`s just 15 miles north of Rosiclare up Ill. Hwy. 34.
The Garden looks more like the Wisconsin Dells, without the river or the tinsel, than Illinois. Paved roads lead to narrow walking paths that twist their way through the forest and up hills to burst upon a mountain top view that goes on for miles, a carpet of green that rolls away beneath your feet until it disappears into the misty blue-gray distance.
Even in the blazing heat of a summer day I could not help but marvel at how stunning this view must be in autumn when those hundreds of square miles of forest spread out below are aglow with red and gold.
It`s a fitting end to a trip along the Ohio River border of the state, for it epitomizes the wonderful difference between northern and southern Illinois.
For information on accommodations, restaurants and other attractions in southern Illinois, contact the Southern Illinois Regional Tourism Council, 501 W. DeYoung St., Marion, Ill. 62959; in Illinois call 800-458-0363, outside Illinois call 800-342-3100. For more information on Shawnee National Forest, write to the Forest Supervisor, 901 S. Commercial St., Harrisburg, Ill. 62946; 618-253-7114. For lodging reservations and more information about Cave-in-Rock State Park, write to Cave-in-Rock Restaurant and Lodges, Cave-in-Rock, Ill. 62919; 618-289-4545.
