Geneseo, Illinois: A Church in the Wilderness

Geneseo was founded not by speculators or railroads but by seven Congregationalist families from upstate New York who wanted to build a church community on the Illinois frontier. In May of eighteen thirty-six their advance committee rode by wagon and horseback across Canada, through Michigan and Indiana, and into Henry County, where they bought a two-thousand-acre tract at a dollar and a quarter per acre from a place called Brandenburg's Tavern. The settlers named their new home after the New York town they left behind, itself derived from the Iroquois word meaning shining valley or beautiful valley.

They arrived in the fall of eighteen thirty-six and broke ground. The Illinois prairie grew the town into a prosperous agricultural city, shaped from the start by that unusual religious founding impulse.