Mattoon: Where Grant Got His Start and the Mad Gasser Struck

Mattoon, Illinois, was a railroad boomtown that briefly made national headlines twice: once for a future president, and once for a mystery that was never quite solved.

The town itself was born at the junction of two railroads. In eighteen fifty-four, surveyors staked out lots at the crossing of the Illinois Central and the Terre Haute and Alton lines. The first train arrived on June ninth, eighteen fifty-five, and within a year Mattoon counted more than one hundred buildings. Merchants, factories, and settlers followed the rails, and the community soon became the commercial hub of Coles County.

Then came the Civil War. In May of eighteen sixty-one, the companies of the Twenty-First Illinois Infantry rendezvoused at Mattoon. The regiment had a discipline problem: its men were described bluntly as unruly. The state sent a captain named Ulysses S. Grant to bring order. Grant mustered the Twenty-First into United States service in mid-June of eighteen sixty-one, and within days had the regiment drilling with precision. He was promoted to colonel and led the regiment out of Illinois. Three months after leaving Mattoon he was a brigadier general. Within four years he would command all Union armies. The fairgrounds where those men trained was known locally as Camp Grant.

Nearly a century later, Mattoon made headlines of a stranger kind. On the night of September first, nineteen forty-four, a resident reported being overcome by a sweet-smelling gas that left her legs temporarily paralyzed. Within days, local newspapers were warning of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon. Dozens of residents reported similar symptoms over the following two weeks. Police investigated and found no evidence of a gas attacker. Many scientists concluded the episode was mass hysteria amplified by wartime anxiety. Others pointed to a local chemical plant whose emissions occasionally drifted over neighborhoods on shifting winds. The Mad Gasser was never identified and the case was never officially closed, leaving Mattoon with one of the more peculiar footnotes in American homefront history.