Woodhull: A Village Named for Its Founder

Woodhull is one of those Illinois prairie villages that carries its founder's name and little else to mark the passage of time. Maxwell Woodhull laid out the town on September thirtieth, eighteen fifty-seven, in Henry County, in the northwest corner of Illinois. The county itself had been settled largely by New Englanders, descendants of Connecticut and western New York Puritan stock, who arrived in the eighteen thirties and forties and built tight agricultural communities across the prairie.

Woodhull followed the same pattern, expanding with additions in eighteen sixty-seven and eighteen seventy, then incorporating that same year. Today it remains a small farming village, population under eight hundred, sitting along state Route Ninety-Two in the corn and soybean country between the Quad Cities and Kewanee.