Marshall: Lincoln's National Road Courtroom

Marshall was platted in eighteen thirty-five by Illinois politician William B. Archer and named for Chief Justice John Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. It became the seat of Clark County in eighteen thirty-nine and has held that role ever since.

The town grew because of the National Road, one of the first federally funded highways in the country, which passed directly through it and made Marshall a stopping point for settlers pushing west into Illinois and beyond. A statue of a young Abraham Lincoln stands at the courthouse. Marshall sits at the far eastern edge of Illinois, close enough to Indiana that it feels like a borderland, and the old courthouse and National Road-era buildings along the main square still carry the look of a town that was briefly at the center of everything moving west.