Galesburg, Illinois

Galesburg was founded in eighteen thirty-seven by a group of New Englanders led by the Reverend George Washington Gale, who envisioned a college town built from scratch on the Illinois prairie. Knox College opened the same year, and abolitionist convictions ran deep from the start: the town was an active stop on the Underground Railroad, and Knox is often credited with admitting Black students and women decades before most American institutions. The city of around thirty thousand today is best remembered for two things: the Lincoln-Douglas debate held at Knox College in eighteen fifty-eight, and as the birthplace of Carl Sandburg, the poet and Lincoln biographer who was born here on January sixth, eighteen seventy-eight. Sandburg's modest cottage birthplace is preserved as a state historic site.