Greenville, Illinois

Greenville is one of Illinois's oldest towns, planted in eighteen fifteen by George Davidson on a bluff overlooking Little Shoal Creek. Davidson had fled milk-sickness in Madison County and built a home and tavern here. Bond County formed around it two years later, named for Shadrach Bond, a farmer, army colonel, and politician who would become Illinois's first state governor.

Greenville was not Bond County's first seat of justice, it was the third, taking over in eighteen twenty-one. It has held on ever since. Today it is a small city of roughly seven thousand people, home to a small liberal arts college and the familiar grain-and-feed economy of central Illinois, anchored in a county that has carried the same seat for more than two hundred years.