Mill Shoals: Water Mill to Oil Boom

Mill Shoals sits on the border of Wayne and White counties in southern Illinois, taking its name from a water mill that William Weed built in eighteen thirty-five on the shoals of the Skillet Fork River. The village was formally founded in eighteen ninety-six. For a century it was a quiet farming settlement, the barrel-making industry having depleted the nearby forests decades earlier.

Then in the summer of nineteen thirty-nine, oil was discovered in the Storms and Stinson fields in the Wabash River bottoms nearby, and Mill Shoals found itself in the middle of an oil boom. The fields drew workers and changed the economy of the surrounding county for a generation. A mill on a shallow river, then a crop, then barrels, then oil: the village moved through Illinois's economic eras one after another.