Kinmundy: A Scottish Village in Marion County

In eighteen fifty-six a London agent for the Illinois Central Railroad named William Ferguson toured the farmland of Marion County. Ferguson was from Kinmundy, a village in Scotland, and when the railroad platted a new town the following year, his birthplace got the honor. The Illinois Kinmundy was laid out in April eighteen fifty-seven in fifteen blocks east of the rail line and incorporated as a city in eighteen sixty-seven. The Marion County seat of Salem lies nearby, in a county named for Revolutionary War general Francis Marion the Swamp Fox, giving this slice of southern Illinois two place names, one Scottish and one South Carolinian, sitting a few miles apart.