Fairmont City, Illinois: A Road to America

Fairmont City, straddling the border of Madison and St. Clair counties just east of the Mississippi, owes its existence to heavy industry and immigrant labor. The townsite was born in nineteen ten when the Pennsylvania Railroad built a roundhouse here.

Two years later, the Granby Mining Company opened a zinc smelter nearby, later taken over by American Zinc, recruiting workers from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Croatia, and Mexico. By nineteen twenty the village had grown to over a thousand residents, a genuine immigrant melting pot that gave itself the motto A Road to America. Beneath it all lay older history: the Cahokia Mounds, the great capital of the pre-Columbian Mississippian culture, sits on the eastern edge of the village.

A thousand years before the roundhouse, this ground was among the most densely populated places on the continent.