Princeton, Illinois

Princeton, the seat of Bureau County, was planted in the eighteen thirties by transplanted New Englanders from the Hampshire Colony Congregational Church, organized in Hampshire County, Massachusetts. John Howard Bryant, brother of the poet William Cullen Bryant, was among the earliest settlers.

From its earliest years Princeton leaned fiercely antislavery. Owen Lovejoy arrived in eighteen thirty-eight after his brother Elijah, an abolitionist newspaper publisher, was killed by a pro-slavery mob in Alton. He preached abolition from the Congregational pulpit and sheltered fugitives from slavery in his Princeton home, now a museum with a hidden compartment. Today the county seat retains its Main Street grid and its identity as a quiet hub of north-central Illinois farm country.