Mahomet: A Connecticut Memory on the Illinois Prairie

The village of Mahomet carries a name that traveled a long way to reach central Illinois. When Connecticut settler Daniel T. Porter arrived along the Sangamon River in eighteen thirty-two, he called the new settlement Middletown, because it sat roughly halfway between Danville and Bloomington.

That name stuck until the Illinois Central Railroad arrived and discovered another Middletown already existed in the state. The railroad refused to use the name for its depot, and the village board voted to rename the town. Porter proposed Mahomet, drawing on a story preserved in Connecticut family lore.

A Mohegan leader named Weyonomon, a descendant of the sachem Uncas, had been known to colonial settlers as Mahomet. He had served as an ally and negotiator for his people in the early seventeen hundreds. Porter's descendants had carried that name west.

In eighteen seventy-one the board voted unanimously, and Middletown became Mahomet, a small Connecticut memory planted on the Illinois prairie.