Morton, Illinois

Morton was founded in the eighteen thirties in Tazewell County, said to be named for Marcus Morton, a Massachusetts politician who had nothing in particular to do with central Illinois. The village grew slowly as a farm community on the Illinois prairie until railroads arrived in the late nineteenth century and tied it into the regional grain trade. What put Morton on the national map, though, is pumpkins.

The Libby's canning plant here helps make Morton today processes the majority of the pumpkin used in American pumpkin pie, earning the town its official billing as the Pumpkin Capital of the World. Every September the Morton Pumpkin Festival draws visitors to a village of around seventeen thousand to celebrate what became, almost by accident, the center of an unlikely agricultural empire.