Alexander County IL Archives History - Books .....Chapter XIII Plats And Maps 1910 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/il/ilfiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Joy Fisher sdgenweb@yahoo.com September 19, 2007, 7:42 pm Book Title: A History Of The City Of Cairo Illiniois CHAPTER XIII MAPS AND PLATS BEFORE referring to the maps and plats of Cairo as made by the land companies which desired to start and establish a city here, I desire to call attention to a list of old French and English maps which show the early existence here of a French fort, probably the very first structure ever erected at this point or place. These old maps might have been very properly given in that part of the book where I have spoken of Sieur Charles Juchereau de Saint Denis and his fort and tannery, but I have thought it best to include them herein. I have made a very careful investigation of the matter of the existence of an old French fort here or within a few miles of the place, not further off, certainly, than the hills which approach close to Cache River about six miles north of us. I have done this in order to ascertain if the old fort could probably have been the later Fort Massac, forty miles up the Ohio River from us. In volume No. 8, pp. 38 to 64, of the Publications of the Illinois Historical Society, is found an able paper by Mrs. Mathew T. Scott, of Bloomington, entitled "Old Fort Massac." In this paper Juchereau is frequently spoken of and his fort mentioned as the early or first Fort Massac. Mrs. Scott's quotations from the Margry papers, especially her quotations in the original French, pp. 57 and 58, tend strongly to show that Juchereau's fort was not on the Ohio River forty miles from its mouth, but was at or very near to the mouth of the river; otherwise, it is very hard to account for such language as this: "A la riviere de Ouabache dans le lieu ou elle se descharge dans le Mississippi" and "a la embouchere de la riviere a Ouabache sur la Mississippi." Fort Massac was, of course, at first and for a long time, a French fort or post; and the generally accepted authority about the matter is that it was established at that place or point on the Ohio to protect the French northwestern country from the strong and warlike tribe of Cherokee Indians. These Indians dwelt along the line of the Tennessee River, which, for a long time in the earliest history of the country, was called and put down on the maps as the Cherokee River. The fort was on the first high ground below the mouth of that river and1 was well located to defend against incursions of these Indians into the northwest country. I have made inquiries at many places and have been uniformly told there can be little doubt as to this old fort being at or near the mouth of the Ohio River and not at the site of Fort Massac. The site of the old French fort is indicated on the old maps by a cross or star on the point where the two rivers unite. The list of thirty-five to forty old maps, procured by me from the Library of Congress and the Historical Library of Chicago, show an old fort here, with such descriptive words as these: Old Fort; Vieu Fort; French Fort Ruined; French Ft.; Ancient Fort; Fr. Ft.; Altes Fort; The Fort; Ancient Fort; Fort; The Fort; French Fort; French Fort Destroyed; Ruined Fort; Ancient Fort Francois; 1755, An. Ft., R., a la Cache; 1765, Lieut. Ross, Ancient Fort Destroyed; Delisle, 1718; Homann, 1730; Popple, 1733; Le Roque, 1742; Seale, 1744, D'Anville, 1746; Jeffreys, Bellin, London Magazine, 1755; Rocque, Overton and Sayer, 1755 to 1766; Rhode, 1758; Homann, 1759; Bowen and Gibson and Bowles, 1763; Kilian, 1764; Delarochette, 1765; D'Anville and Seale, 1771; Pingeling, 1776; 1777, _ 1778, 1783, 1784, 1785, 1796 and 1798, D'Anville Lodge, Beaurain, Walker, Boudet, Gussefeld, Wilkes, Sayer and Bennett, and Phelipean. The first map or plat of Cairo was made in the city of Baltimore in 1818 by Cone & Freeman. John G. Comegys no doubt had charge of the work. A Major Duncan had made, it is supposed, the necessary surveys; but it is not certain that surveys were made. They may have made the plat to represent what they thought would represent the plan of the city when the surveys were made for streets, blocks, lots and public grounds. We present elsewhere an exact copy of this plat, which is also somewhat fully described in Chapter IV. The Cairo City and Canal Company made a few maps of the site as they proposed to lay it out for a city; but it is said no actual surveys were made and that all that was done was the making of outline plans, showing streets, blocks and public grounds, but no lots. Their first civil engineers were William Strickland and Richard C. Taylor. The former styled himself architect and engineer, and the latter engineer and geologist. A copy of one of these maps is found elsewhere, and a copy of the survey by James Thompson, made in 1837, for that company, and also a copy of a map showing the line of their proposed canal. This company never in fact reached a stage of platting for the sale of lots or other property. This seems always to have been a matter of the future; and their long delay in offering property for sale was the cause of many complaints and kept the people who were here in a very unsettled condition. The situation or site did not admit of an easy platting into satisfactory subdivisions for a city; and hence the divers kinds and descriptions of plats made by the different proprietors. It is not until we reach the Cairo City Property people that we find almost a penchant for city map-making. Col. Taylor in his deposition, already referred to, states that their first plat was filed and became a public record December 10, 1853, and that all maps or plats made before that time were merely provisional affairs and bound no one. In the suit in which that deposition was taken, the city's attorneys produced a map which they claimed showed that the wharf or river frontage and certain other grounds were public property or had been dedicated to the public. The proof on this point does not seem to have been very strong, and Col. Taylor's testimony seems to have been quite sufficient to overcome it. The earlier maps of Col. Taylor's Trustees exhibited many features which did not appear on the one filed for record in 1853, or on any others subsequently filed. On the earlier ones, a number of public parks were indicated, among them Crescent Park, at what was then the southern point of the city; Town-send Park, of considerable size, north of 17th Street and adjoining Cedar Street on the west; Delta Park, in the curve of the Mississippi levee as it turns northward out near the river; and St. Mary's Park extended from the present Park Avenue all the way over to Washington Avenue. As thus laid out or marked on the plat, this park was more than twice its present size; but the Trustees seem to have felt that their lands were too valuable to admit of so much thereof being devoted to the uses of the public. Holbrook Avenue once bore the name of Schuyler Avenue, after Robert Schuyler, the first president of the Illinois Central Railroad Company; but Schuyler having fallen into disrepute, the name of the avenue was changed to Holbrook. On one of these early plats the lines of the old Holbrook levees up the Ohio and Mississippi rivers are indicated, and the cross levee built under the supervision of Mr. Miles A. Gilbert from a point near the intersection of 18th Street and Ohio Street on the Ohio River to a point where Thirty-fourth Street, if extended, would intersect the Mississippi shore. The land inclosed by these three levees seems to be spoken of as the original city or the first division thereof. West of Holbrook, Park Street extended to the Park and from thence it was called Park Avenue. Further on West were Mulberry Street, Cypress Street, Oak Street, Papaw Street, and last of all was Metropolitan Avenue. On this plat there was no street east of Commercial Avenue. The cross streets extended to what is now the railroad bridge embankment and the last of them was platted 47th Street. Maps with these parks indicated thereon as above described and attached to the lengthy notices advertising the* city were circulated all over the country as late as 1855 and 1856; and is it to be thought strange that the people, when they saw that these public places, supposedly dedicated to the public, were one by one being withdrawn or erased from the city plats, were more and more confirmed in their opposition to the policy and management of the Trustees? This feature of the situation furnished one of the chief grounds for the suit instituted by Judge Fredolin Bross against the company in the year 1864, and which is more fully referred to elsewhere. One map, a very large one and which Mr. Miles A. Gilbert, in his affidavit given in the chapter on the "Wharf and Wharfage," says is a copy of the small one made by Strickland & Taylor, was on file in the circuit court of the United States at Springfield in the suit begun by the Trustees against the City of Cairo in 1864. I have obtained leave from the Hon. J. Otis Humphrey, judge of the said circuit court, to withdraw the same for presentation to the A. B. Safford Memorial Library. EXPLANATIONS OF MAPS.—Henrie's survey of our township was made in 1807, and when it was a part of the Randolph County of Indiana Territory, and when the Indians were to be seen almost everywhere. The frightful massacre in the township just this side of the mouth of the Cache River took place February 9, 1813. Some of the Birds were probably here then and very near the point. Col. Taylor, in his deposition taken in 1866 in his suit against the city in the United States court at Springfield, said that when he came here in April, 1851, only about fifty acres of the land on the Ohio and near the point had been cleared and that the remainder of the country in this vicinity was covered with very dense woods. Comegys' or Major Duncan's map of 1818 was made in Baltimore that year by Cone and Freeman, and is fully explained in Chapter IV. James Thompson's survey of the township in 1837 was accompanied with the fullest possible field notes and explanations, contained in the small book described in Chapter VI. Strickland and Taylor's map of the city and the map showing the plan of the canal of the Cairo City and Canal Company, both of the year 1838, need no explanation further than to say that they were provisional representations of what the city was to be as planned by the Holbrook administration, from 1836 to 1846. They are interesting for a number of reasons, chiefly, perhaps, for showing the line of the state's Illinois Central Railroad under the act of February 27, 1837. Long's topographical map of July, 1850, is but one of the four which were on file in the War Department at Washington. The other three could not be found. I regret very much I was not able to get trace of the one which showed the full and complete plan of the city as laid out by Long in 1850. It no doubt differed very materially from the official map of the Trustees filed at the court house December 10, 1853. The topographical map shows what the city of Cairo was when it came into possession of the Trustees of the Cairo City Property. Long was here at work two or three years before Col. Taylor came. One of his letters to Taylor & Davis at Philadelphia is numbered 149 and is dated October 10, 1854. The map shows the old hotel nearest the point, the post-office and stores, the foundation of the great warehouse, sometimes called the London warehouse, the machine shop, the saw-mills, the foundry, the brickyards, the taverns and the groceries, and the cottages of the company standing back somewhat from the Ohio levee. I need not go further. The map speaks for itself. You see the small space of cleared land and the wide extended and dense woods; the three levees of 12,320 feet, 4,789 feet and 8,670 feet, respectively, the latter built by Judge Gilbert in 1843, all inclosing 778.75 acres of land; also the crevasse in the Mississippi levee of the length of 1,675 feet, made by the great flood of March, 1849, of which Editor Sanders speaks in his Cairo newspaper, " The Cairo Delta," of March 20, 1849. THE PICTURE OF CAIRO IN 1841—This picture is the earliest representation of what is set forth in Long's map of July, 1850. It is taken from " The Valley of the Mississippi Illustrated," December number 1841, published at St. Louis, Missouri, by J. C. Wild, at the Republican Printing Office. This publication was in magazine form and contained from time to time series of views of the principal cities, towns, public buildings and picturesque scenery on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The literary department was under the charge of Mr. Lewis F. Thomas and the drawing and lithographing under that of Mr. J. C. Wild. Mr. S. R. A. Holbrook, of Boston, sent this particular number to Mr. M. Easterday some years ago, and to the latter I am indebted for its use here. This number contains three other fine cuts, a splendid river view at Grand Tower, a view of Selma, Missouri, and one of Prairie Du Rocher and Darbeau's Creek where it enters the Mississippi in Illinois. The picture shows most of the buildings as they appear on Long's map. It also shows that few changes had taken place from December, 1841, to the time Long made his map. In both the picture and map are seen the old and noted hotel at the point spoken of by Mr. D. S. Crumb as being there May 29, 1836; then above, the postoffice building and stores; the large long house fronting the Ohio, no doubt Holbrook's, or erected by him; then the low cottages; next the three-story machine shop, which Judge Gilbert defended so strongly against Cairo's first mob; then the saw-mills with their slanting log-ways to the river; then the large foundry; then in the picture, the steamboat "Tennessee Valley," built the latter part of 1841 and early in 1842, and enrolled at the New Orleans custom house April 23, 1842. This vessel was built and equipped at Cairo, the timbers furnished directly from the saw-mills and the machinery from the foundry, there and nearby. The owner and Captain, Samuel G. Patton and M. W. Irwin, lived at Florence, Alabama. (See the certificate from the Bureau of Navigation at Washington, dated the 3d day of February, 1910.) This steamboat was on the ways, as seen in the picture, or had but left them a short time before Charles Dickens arrived at Cairo on the steamboat "The Fulton," Saturday, April 9, 1842. He undoubtedly saw what is seen in the picture, except possibly the steamboat. Almost everything seen in the picture was there when Long made his map. There was indeed not much of a city here in April, 1842; but Dickens' representation as to what he saw is so far from the truth that it cannot be accounted for on any other theory than that he did not want to state the situation as he actually saw it for the hour or two he was here. The other cuts, pictures and representations in the book so fully explain themselves that I need not say anything in reference thereto. I take the liberty of suggesting to the purchasers of this book the careful preservation of the maps. Some of them can be easily torn in the folding and the unfolding. They are very important and valuable parts of the history because they show the actual situation and condition of things at the various times they were made. They set forth clearly and fully a great deal in the city's history that could not be so well presented by merely written descriptions. To remove them from the book would leave it in many respects very incomplete. Additional Comments: Extracted from: A HISTORY OF THE CITY OF CAIRO ILLINOIS BY JOHN M. LANSDEN WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS CHICAGO R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS COMPANY 1910 COPYRIGHTED, 1910 BY JOHN M. LANSDEN The Lakeside Press R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS COMPANY CHICAGO File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/il/alexander/history/1910/ahistory/chapterx127gms.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/ilfiles/ File size: 16.3 Kb