Caseyville, Illinois: Coal, Casey, and the Early Railroad

Caseyville, east of the Mississippi in St. Clair County, was laid out in eighteen forty-nine by a coal mining syndicate that included Zadok Casey, who had served as Illinois Lieutenant Governor and as a congressman. The Illinois Coal Company sank shafts and within two years had built a private railroad from Caseyville down to Brooklyn on the Mississippi, where coal was loaded onto barges and shipped directly to Saint Louis.

A locomotive appeared on that line in February eighteen fifty-one, and the little settlement jumped from forty to a hundred and fifty residents almost overnight. The village stands as one of the first coal-mining company towns in Illinois, laid out for the purpose of getting fuel to market before the era of the great interstate railroads.