Traveling on the Springfield Road (part 2)

•November 12, 2025•

by Janet Roney

The time is 1837. Young Mary Parkinson’s family is traveling across the prairie in Douglas County in a group with two other families (26 people in all) and seven loaded wagons. Her letters to her sister back in Vermont, printed in a 1909 issue of the Journal of American History, are the earliest account I have found of traveling on the old Springfield Road that went across the northern part of Moultrie County.

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