Princeton, Illinois: The Hampshire Colony

Princeton was not settled by frontier drifters looking for land. It was planted deliberately, in the eighteen thirties, by members of the Hampshire Colony Congregational Church out of Northampton, Massachusetts. They came as a group, intending to transplant their New England community to the Illinois prairie intact.

They brought with them a Puritan passion for education and a deep commitment to abolitionism. Those values took root. Princeton became a strongly anti-slavery town and a station on the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom seekers on their way north.