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Modern Madison County, which stretches east from the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, has been a hub for migration and trade for millennia. The prehistoric city of Cahokia, the largest pre-Columbian city north of modern-day Mexico, was a hub for wide-ranging movements of people and goods. In later centuries, the confluence of North America’s great rivers remained a zone of contact and conflict as indigenous nations, Spanish, French, and English colonists vied for control of the vital region. Under US control, Madison County remained a central hub for people and goods flowing through the heart of the continent. Waves of German, Irish, and Italian immigrants settled in the area during the mid-nineteenth century.
On the border between north and south, east and west, Madison County was also a site where slavery and freedom were hotly contested in the nineteenth century. Formerly enslaved African Americans sought freedom in and through Madison County, finding shelter and safe passage on the Underground Railroad. In 1855, for instance, Mary Meachum led a group of freedom-seekers across the Mississippi River from St. Louis into Madison County; some were caught, but others made their way to freedom. Yet freedom in Illinois was not a given: early white American settlers defied the Northwest Ordinance by using indentured servitude as a de facto form of slavery. Madison County was a site of struggle, and figures like Edward James Coles, James Madison’s secretary, and Elijah Lovejoy, martyred radical abolitionist, came to the county to fight for the freedom of enslaved people.
At the turn of the twentieth century, industrialization brought a new wave of migrants to the county. Coal mines, steel mills, and glass factories attracted immigrants from southern United States and from southern and Eastern Europe seeking high wages and new opportunities. Granite City, Illinois, created by a steel company, became the largest center of Bulgarian immigrants in the United States. More recently, immigrants from Latin America have settled in communities such as Fairmont City, where they live in the shadow of the ancient migrants who built Cahokia a millennium ago. With this expansive view of migration, this hybrid exhibit invites you to see yourself and your family’s history as part of a longer, transnational saga of mobility and adaptation.
Immigration by the Numbers: What Can the Census Tell Us?
Lived Experiences: Recovering Stories of Immigration through the Archive
Sources like the census are deliberately anonymous. While they can help us identify high-level patterns in immigration (with some important caveats!), they don’t give us any access to individual and local experiences of migration and immigration. On this website, you’ll find storymaps that explore the lives of four individuals who immigrated to Madison County. Use the timeline to browse the storymaps.