Sheffield, Illinois: Built by the Railroad Builders

Sheffield, Illinois was born in eighteen fifty-two as a coal stop, platted by two of the men who built the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad. Joseph E. Sheffield, a Connecticut-born financier, and Henry Farnam, his partner and chief engineer, mapped out the townsite themselves and agreed to name it Sheffield after a friendly disagreement.

The village was meant to keep trains fueled, but settlers followed the tracks and stayed. Sheffield sits in Bureau County about a hundred miles southwest of Chicago, and it remains a compact agricultural village of roughly eight hundred residents. The nearby Bureau Creek and its rich prairie soil kept it going long after the coal traffic moved on.