Annawan, Illinois: Named for a Wampanoag Chief

Annawan is a small Henry County town whose name reaches back to colonial New England. In eighteen fifty-three Charles Atkinson and James Grant, landowners in the area, platted the town as a station on the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. They named it for Annawan, the last great war captain of the Wampanoag chief Metacom, captured by colonial forces in Rhode Island in sixteen seventy-six after King Philip's War.

Some accounts suggest a local Winnebago leader also carried the name, giving it a dual Indigenous resonance. The railroad was the town's reason for being, and it anchored a tidy agricultural community in the rolling farmland between the Illinois and Rock rivers, where it has remained a quiet waypoint on the Henry County plains ever since.