Prairie Living

•November 4, 2026•

by Janet Roney

Most of the earliest settlers in Moultrie County in the late 1820s and 1830s had never seen a prairie before arriving in Illinois. Their former homes in Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky had nothing like the vast prairie grass lands they found here. Thus, they had no idea about what to do with it and settled in the timber-covered land along the Kaskaskia and West Okaw Rivers first.  

Judge W. G. Cochran described the prairie when he first arrived in the Lovington area in 1849 in an old Lovington Reporter newspaper. “...while the soil was there, it was one vast flower garden, in the springtime, yet uncultivated. Wild grass in great abundance, lakes, ponds, frogs, snakes, wild fowls, green head flies, and Rosin weeds. No roads or trees, just one vast expanse of prairie extending east and west and to the northeast almost as far as Champaign. The land could be bought for $1.25 per acre ($48/acre in today’s money) and some people said it was not worth even that. Alas, how little we know of God’s great wealth. Before the (Civil) war a few venturesome men had occupied a few of the higher locations.”  

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