” Jacksonville, IL USDA Loan”

Jacksonville is a city in Morgan County, Illinois, United States. The population was 17,616 at the 2020 census, down from 19,446 in 2010. It is the county seat of Morgan County. It is home to Illinois College, Illinois School for the Deaf, and the Illinois School for the Visually Impaired. Jacksonville is the principal city of the Jacksonville Micropolitan Statistical Area, which includes all of Morgan and Scott counties.

Jacksonville was established by European Americans on a 160-acre (65 ha) tract of land in the center of Morgan County in 1825, two years after the county was founded. The founders of Jacksonville were settlers from New England. They were descended from the English Puritans who had settled New England in the 1600s and were part of a wave of New England farmers who headed west into what was then the wilds of the Northwest Territory during the early 1800s. Most of them arrived as a result of the completion of the Erie Canal and the end of the Black Hawk War. When they arrived in what is now Jacksonville, there was nothing but dense virgin forest and wild prairie. The “Yankee” New Englanders laid out farms, constructed roads, erected government buildings and established post routes. They brought with them values such as a passion for education, establishing many schools, as well as staunch support for abolitionism. They were mostly members of the Congregationalist Church, though some were Episcopalian. Due to the Second Great Awakening, some of them had converted to Methodism and Presbyterianism, while some others became Baptist, before moving to what is now Jacksonville. Jacksonville, like some other parts of Illinois, would be culturally very continuous with early New England culture for most of its early history.

The town was laid out on a treeless prairie and along a state road that ran from Springfield to the Illinois River.

The town grew at a rapid rate, and a town square was quickly developed. In 1829, the Presbyterian Reverend John M. Ellis worked to found a new “seminary of learning” in the new state of Illinois. A group of Congregational students at Yale College heard about his plans and headed westward to establish the new school. These students were a part of the famous “Yale Bands”, groups of students who established several colleges in the frontier, what is now the Midwest. Illinois College was one of the first institutions of higher learning in the Midwest. A new courthouse was built on the square, churches were constructed, railroads were planned, and stores and taverns were built. By 1834, Jacksonville had the largest population of any city in the state of Illinois, vastly outnumbering Chicago (only founded the year before). In the 1830s, the town was on the path of Native Americans who were being forcibly removed by the federal government to west of the Mississippi. The Potawatomi passed through here in 1838 on what they called their Trail of Death as they were forced from their traditional homelands to the dry and barren Indian Territory to the west.

Jacksonville’s education complex and standing in the state were developed by the establishment of state institutions: the Illinois School for the Deaf and what is now called the Illinois School for the Visually Impaired. The Illinois Conference Female Academy was founded for education for girls; it later developed as MacMurray College. By 1850, Illinois College had issued Illinois’ first college degrees and opened the first medical school in the state. Because of this, Jacksonville earned the nickname of “Athens of the West”.