Jubilee College State Park

In eighteen thirty-eight, Episcopal Bishop Philander Chase rode out from Peoria into the Illinois wilderness and staked a claim on a wooded ridge above Jubilee Creek. His ambition was a frontier college that would train clergy without sending young men east to what he called the corrupting influence of city seminaries. Jubilee College opened in eighteen forty, drew students from across the Midwest, and housed a printing press, a farm, and a girls' school.

Chase died in eighteen fifty-two, and without his force of personality the college withered, closing permanently in eighteen sixty-two. The Gothic Revival stone chapel he built still stands in what is now a state park, a quiet ruin on the wooded ridge, preserved as one of Illinois's oldest surviving collegiate buildings.