O'Fallon, Illinois: Named at Auction

O'Fallon, Illinois, is a railroad town whose name came before the town did. Workers finished laying the Illinois division of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad through this stretch of St. Clair County in early eighteen fifty-four.

A depot and water tank went up on the north side of the tracks, and the stop was named O'Fallon Station in honor of Colonel John O'Fallon, a wealthy Saint Louis gentleman. City lots were platted and sold at public auction on May eighteenth, eighteen fifty-four, and a post office followed the next year. German settlers arrived looking for fertile farmland, and underground coal mining soon joined farming as a local industry.

The last operating mine, Saint Ellen, eventually closed, leaving O'Fallon to reinvent itself as a residential suburb of Saint Louis.