Researcher claims Sugar Creek is a little muddy
John Mack Faragher’s Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie got Springfieldian and selftrained historian David Brady, a retired blacksmith and laborer, interested in history. He wanted to learn more, so he read the books and publications Faragher researched to write Sugar Creek, and then read others. The result, he says, was learning that Faragher made errors and important omissions.
Brady has researched and written booklets about the history of Divernon (where he grew up), Sangamon County’s first white settler, and the financial panic of 1819. The last two are available through the Sangamon County Historical Society. An enthusiastic and avid researcher, Brady has traveled throughout Illinois and Kentucky to research these topics and others related to local and state history. What he’s found differs in some ways from Faragher’s and others’ accounts about early central Illinois history.
Faragher’s errors include stating that Edwardsville was once the state’s capital and placing an incident at our county’s Sugar Creek when it happened at another Sugar Creek in the state. But Brady thinks one of his biggest mistakes is one other historians have made. They say the first white settlers came here because of our fertile land, but Brady says it’s because the land was free.
“The people who came here lost all their money and homes in Kentucky and Tennessee,” he says. “They came up here to survive because they were running from debtors’ prison or pushed off their property for failure of payment because all the state banks had closed” as a result of the nation’s depressed economy. I tried to answer the question of why people came all the way from Edwardsville to here. In Illinois history one person settled next to another, but that trend stopped and (the county’s early settlers) came up here 70 miles to the middle of nowhere. Early historians say it was because of the area’s rich land. But the settlers aren’t going to say, ‘It’s because I lost my farm in Kentucky and I was going to be in prison because I owed debt.’ If you go to the Kentucky records you find these people running from the law.”
They came here, Brady theorizes, because the land wasn’t yet surveyed or sold by the federal government, so they could live here for free. Brady spent three days researching at Kentucky’s state archives and found that one early Sangamon County settler had already moved here, according to John Carroll Power’s History of the Early Settlers of Sangamon County, by the time an official served him papers related to debt at his Kentucky home.
Brady hopes to write a book about Illinois‘ frontier period, “correcting the things that are wrong in Sugar Creek and other books, and talking about the things that were glossed over.” –Tara McAndrew
