Chenoa: Where Two Railroads Were Going to Cross

In eighteen fifty-four, a Kentucky banker's son named Matthew T. Scott started quietly buying thousands of acres of prairie in McLean County, Illinois. He had spotted something the mapmakers hadn't published yet: the survey lines for two railroads were going to intersect right here.

Two years later he platted a town on that crossing and named it Chenoa, a name that may come from a Native American name for the Kentucky River. The Chicago and Alton was already running; the Toledo, Peoria and Western was planned to cross it. Scott's gamble paid off, the town that grew up at that junction became a working agricultural and commercial center serving the Illinois heartland, and it still marks the spot where his two iron lines crossed.