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· 10 · 2 The children [of Grove City] were taught to call the elder townspeople “Aunt and Uncle.” One Taylorville man who became associated with the community returned to Taylorville to say, “You don’t dare talk about anyone over there because they’re all related.” And in a way they were—with common bonds of family devotion, religion, and hard work in a community where life was good. —Delores Mahan, “The Death of a Small Town: Progress, Time Take Their Toll” To call it ordinary is not to imply Taylorville was an unappealing place—quite the opposite, really, for it had its fair share of neat streets, modest clapboard homes, well-tended yards and gardens, four schools, and several churches. in all aspects, it was the typical American town of its day—a place of friendly, upstanding citizens going diligently about their business, raising their families, working hard to make ends meet. Day in and day out, with few complaints. For that was the American way. And in 1882, Taylorville, illinois, was as good a place as any to call home. of the area’s many thoroughfares, two crisscrossed diagonally through the county and intersected in Taylorville. Thus, on a map the town appeared to be a hub. residents could hitch up their wagons, head northwest, and be in springfield, the state’s capital, in half a day or less, a trip of only thirty miles. Decatur, another decent-sized town, sat to the northeast and could be reached in a similar amount of time. so could Hillsboro, to the southwest. The smaller town of Pana sat a little closer—sixteen miles southeast. Taylorville was luckier than most small communities, because it was served by two rail lines. The Baltimore, ohio & mississippi ran straight through the heart of town and offered the easiest means of travel to springfield or Pana. its modest depot sat a block and a half north of the square. The other line, the Decatur -st. Louis railroad (also called the Wabash), was the busier of the two. Any man with a couple of bills in his pocket could catch a train bound for Decatur and from there make his way to the great metropolis of Chicago, two hundred miles to the north. or he could ride in the opposite direction to the southwest, and within four hours, give or take, he could be in st. Louis—gateway to the West. For all its traffic, the Wabash depot was unremarkable, and it was situated an inconvenient half-mile south of the square, on the outskirts of town. the crime and the investigation · 11 The town square, of course, was the heart and soul of the community, just as it was in many other American settlements. merchants sought to establish their shops and trades on its perimeter, with their doorways and windows facing the town’s centerpiece. in some towns, that centerpiece might be a circular bandstand in the middle of a bucolic park. But in the case of a county seat, it was invariably the courthouse. As with most county seats in the heartland, Taylorville’s future was further secured by the fertile earth that surrounded it. That earth supported the local farmers who came to the town square to buy, sell, and barter goods. more often than not, the town’s merchants would sell them on credit the necessities for feeding and clothing their large families and for running their farms. And, as the county’s name implied, the families in this area were all good Christians, sprung from honest, hard-working, God-fearing stock. For this reason alone, Taylorville’s merchants had no qualms about granting their customers a little leeway; they knew that just as soon as the autumn harvest was in, farmers would stop by to settle their debts. The arc of land north of Taylorville was an especially fine expanse of prairie. An occasional stand of trees—oak for the most part—peppered the landscape. Here and there, farm houses broke the monotony. in early summer, the fields became a two-toned patchwork for as far as the eye could see. Dense winter wheat begging to be mowed stood in stark contrast to the rising stalks of green corn, reaching toward the sky. in a good year, the late June corn might easily surpass the “knee-high by the Fourth of July” benchmark. The dirt lane running due north out of Taylorville was called the mt. Auburn road, simply because that’s...
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