The First Sermon in Moultrie County

•March 25, 2026•

by Janey Roney

The year 2028 will be the two-hundredth anniversary of the first Christian sermon preached in Moultrie County. It was delivered at the cabin of Samuel Washington Lindley by Rev. Miles Hart, a Methodist.

Lindley had come with his father-in-law, John Whitley, in the fall of 1826, a part of the first pioneer settlement in Moultrie County. While most of the Whitleys built their cabins along Whitley Creek, Lindley settled a mile south on Linn Creek along the ancient Kaskaskia-Detroit Road (a short distance northeast of the jog in the present Western Avenue Road, four miles east of Illinois Route 32).

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