Benton: Coal Country County Seat

Benton became the seat of Franklin County in eighteen forty-one, named for Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton. The town sits in the heart of southern Illinois coal country, where mining began in earnest in the eighteen eighties and reshaped everything. Between nineteen ten and nineteen twenty, Franklin County's population more than doubled, jumping from roughly twenty-six thousand to fifty-seven thousand people, as miners and their families poured in from across the region.

The high concentrations of methane gas in the local coal seams made the work exceptionally dangerous. Nearby Orient Mine, just a few miles away, suffered one of Illinois' worst disasters in December of nineteen fifty-one, when an explosion killed one hundred nineteen men underground. Coal made this corner of Illinois and it also cost it dearly.