Gilman: Where Two Railroads Crossed

Gilman was platted in the fall of eighteen fifty-seven on flat Iroquois County farmland, chosen because it sat at the crossing of the Illinois Central Railroad and the Peoria and Oquawka Railroad. Cruger Secor and Company had won the right to name the new town and honored Samuel Gilman, one of their directors. The land belonged to three Methodist ministers and a local judge, the kind of partnership that was entirely normal when the railroad came through and everyone scrambled to get in on the ground floor.

By eighteen seventy, the census counted seven hundred sixty-one residents. Today Gilman sits at the junction of Interstate Fifty-Seven and United States Route Twenty-Four, the same crossroads logic that put it on the map a hundred and seventy years ago.