Sadorus: Champaign County's First

Henry Sadorus arrived at a grove of timber along the Kaskaskia River in April of eighteen twenty-four and became the first permanent European-American settler in what would become Champaign County, Illinois. The grove took his name, and when his son William platted a town there in eighteen thirty-seven, the Sadorus name followed. It holds the distinction of being the first town ever founded in the county, a fact that gives it an outsized historical weight for a village that today numbers only a few hundred residents. The name endures in the township, the village, and a small state historical marker beside the old grove, a quiet monument to the man who arrived first on land where the prairie met the timber.