Chenoa: Lincoln's Law Partner and the Town He Platted

Chenoa was platted in eighteen fifty-six by Matthew T. Scott on land in McLean County that the coming of the Toledo, Peoria and Western Railway had made suddenly valuable. The origin of the name is disputed, and several nineteenth-century explanations of its meaning have been rejected by later scholars.

The town grew quickly after Scott advertised it heavily to settlers and offered land for a church and a mill. Route Sixty-Six would run through Chenoa decades later, carrying Depression-era migrants and postwar tourists through the same flat, black-soiled farmland.