Marion, Illinois: Born on a Pumpkin

Marion, Illinois and Williamson County were born on the same day: February twenty-eighth, eighteen thirty-nine, when the state legislature carved the new county out of Franklin County to the north. Three commissioners from neighboring counties rode out to find a spot as close to the geographic center as practical. A settler named William Benson donated twenty acres for the new seat of government, and the town was named Marion, most likely in honor of General Francis Marion of South Carolina, the Revolutionary War guerrilla fighter known as the Swamp Fox.

The first county court convened in October eighteen thirty-nine in Benson's log cabin. The overflow crowd had to sit on pumpkins. Marion was incorporated as a city in eighteen forty-one and grew into the commercial hub of Little Egypt, the downstate Illinois region where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers meet.