Excerpt from Address of S. V. White Delivered at Chautauqua, Ill, July 19, 1900: Reminiscences of Jersey County, Ill, From 1835 to 1850

How long ago can I remember? Well, I don't know. I remember falling in the fire and being taken out, as was supposed, "burned-to-a-crisp, " in December, 1833, but that incident, perhaps, was burned into my memory. I remember Dr. Silas Hamilton coming to see our fever-stricken household in the summer of 1834, and a few weeks or months afterward I remember being told that the good doctor who had come to save our lives had yielded up his own. I remember with absolute reality all the incidents connected with opening the quarry and quarrying the stone in the summer of 1835 out of which the Hamilton primary school-house was built. I remember as a political incident the presidential election of 1836, and that my father voted for Daniel Webster. Commencing with the year 1837, and extending through the rest of the two decades, every material incident of American history is as plainly in my mind as is the campaign of 1896.

Before taking up the serious consideration of my theme it may be well to hastily recur to the history of our country far enough to determine under what governments Jersey County has been since there has been a recorded history of America. By the Treaty of 1763, at the close of the French and Indian War, the territory now embraced in the State of Illinois was ceded to Great Britain, and so remained until the time of the Revolutionary War. During the period of the Revolutionary War Colonel George Rogers Clarke of Virginia, as bold and intrepid a patriot as any named on the lists of fame at that time, raised a company of Virginians, crossed from Kentucky into Illinois, and on the 4th of July, 1778, captured Fort Gage and Kaskaskia, the British capital of the territory of Illinois, and turned over this country to the Colony of Virginia.

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