Spillertown: Named for an 1817 Settler

Elijah Spiller arrived in what would become Williamson County, Illinois in eighteen seventeen. He was an early settler in the area, and when the coal-country village grew large enough to need a name, it took his. Spillertown incorporated in March nineteen hundred after a post office had been running since eighteen ninety-eight.

The village sat along the old wagon road running north from Marion to Benton, a route that carried farm goods and travelers through some of the richest coal country in southern Illinois. Coal has shaped this corner of the state for generations, and the Williamson County coalfields remained a defining part of life here well into the twentieth century.