Matthew T. Scott House, Chenoa

Matthew Thompson Scott arrived on the Grand Prairie of Illinois in the eighteen fifties with capital to invest and a vision of what drained, tilled land could become. Over the following decades he bought and sold more than forty-five thousand acres, founded the town of Chenoa in eighteen fifty-five, and built this house at the center of his five-thousand-acre personal farm. The rear section dates to eighteen fifty-five; the Georgian front was added in eighteen sixty-three, during the Civil War.

His wife Julia Scott became one of the founders of the Daughters of the American Revolution in eighteen ninety. The house also witnessed the wedding of Adlai Stevenson the First and Letitia Green, Julia's sister, and their first child was born here in eighteen sixty-eight. The house sits today on the National Register of Historic Places as a monument to the prairie land boom that shaped central Illinois.