About Illinois

Illinois, «IHL uh NOY», has more people than any other state in the Midwestern region of the United States. About two-thirds of the people of Illinois live in and around Chicago, one of the world's leading industrial and transportation centers. In addition, millions of Illinoisans live in the smaller cities and on the farms that dot the state's gently rolling plains. These plains cover most of Illinois, and have given the state one of its nicknames, the Prairie State.

The people of Illinois also call their state the Land of Lincoln. They are proud of the fact that Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, lived most of his life in their state. He was buried in Springfield, the state capital.

Many other famous people helped make history in Illinois. These people included industrialists Cyrus H. McCormick and George M. Pullman; writers Gwendolyn Brooks and Carl Sandburg; architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright; reformers Jane Addams and Florence Kelley; and political leader Stephen A. Douglas. Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, was born in Tampico, Illinois.

In 1942, Enrico Fermi and other scientists at the University of Chicago made a major advance in the development of the atomic bomb. In laboratories under the university's football stands, they produced the first controlled chain reaction that created nuclear energy. Today, Illinois ranks as an international center for the study of the atom. Scientists from throughout the world come to the state to do research at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. This laboratory, near Chicago, contains one of the largest atom smashers in the world.

The land of Illinois, part of the great Midwestern Corn Belt, has helped make the state rich. Illinois ranks among the leading states in agriculture. And beneath its fertile plains lie the country's largest beds of bituminous (soft) coal. But most Illinois workers are employed in service industries, which include education, health care, and retail trade. Illinois also ranks among the top manufacturing states. Processed foods, chemicals, and machinery are the leading manufactured products in Illinois.

The fur trade with Indians first made Illinois commercially important during the late 1600's. Traders paddled canoes filled with furs down the Chicago River to Lake Michigan. The pelts were then transported in wooden sailing ships. Today, ocean freighters arrive from the Atlantic Ocean through the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes, and carry Illinois products to many parts of the world. Busy river barges transport cargo on the Illinois Waterway, which links with the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.

The first Europeans in the Illinois region were probably the French explorers Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette, who arrived in 1673. The French settlers who came after Jolliet and Marquette named the region for the Illinois, or Illini, Indians. These Indians formed a group of united tribes that lived in the area before the European settlers came. The Indians called themselves Iliniwek (superior men). The name Illinois came from the French settlers' spelling and pronunciation of Iliniwek.

The 10-story Home Insurance Building, often considered the world's first metal-framed skyscraper, was built in Chicago in 1884 and 1885.

Kaskaskia Island is the only part of Illinois that lies west of the Mississippi River.

A practical machine for manufacturing barbed wire was invented in 1874 by Joseph Glidden of De Kalb. It helped to settle the West by allowing farmers to protect crops from grazing cattle.

The Chicago River is known as the river that flows backward. It flowed into Lake Michigan until 1900, when engineers reversed the flow by completing the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. The river now flows from the lake.

The Pullman, the first successful railroad sleeping car, was built by George M. Pullman in Bloomington in 1858. Pullman also introduced a dining car that had its own kitchen, a parlor car, and a vestibule that directly connects railroad cars.

Innovations in farm equipment produced in Illinois made large-scale farming possible. John Deere developed the steel plow in Grand Detour in 1837. Cyrus McCormick began to manufacture mechanical reapers in Chicago in 1847.