you will arrive at the location of the pen home of Amasa and Susannah Stout, first dwelling in our area. Continue on this road for a distance just over two miles, turn left and go east and northeast two miles, and before you cross the Panther Creek bridge you can see the old cemetery a hundred yards to the north. At its northeast corner lived James and Mary Carroll in the Gabetown settlement. If you continue on east and then south and east through Section thirty-four, you have followed the general location of these early cabins on upper Panther Creek.

The Palestine Township pioneers also settled along the streams for wood and water. They built their cabins along the lower Panther Creek and in the Mackinaw timber, near where the creek flows into that river. These settlers were in what became southwestern Palestine and northern Kansas Townships.

The little town of Bowling Green is described elsewhere in this work. On November 6, 1836, John G. Mohr came to the north half of Section three where he built his cabin and reared ten children. He was the first settler in northern Palestine, and his great grandson Clyde Mohr still lives here. The next year Allen and Lucy Willis Hart moved up from near Hudson and built on the south line of Section twenty-seven, the same year Ephraim and Elizabeth Hedrick Potter settled on Section twenty-one. The next spring John and Margaret Shepard Van Scyoc and their son Anderson built their cabin on Section twenty-eight.

While these settlers were not too far from the mill and the stores of Gabetown and Bowling Green, one can only wonder where those early shopkeepers found the merchandise they carried in stock. Peoria, or Fort Clark, had been rebuilt in 1814 and Bloomington was building its first store buildings in 1831. Did these early merchants get such items as knitting needles, spinning wheels and axes from flat boats at Peoria and Pekin, or were their stocks homemade tools, homespun cloth, knitted mittens, homemade maple sugar, handmade plows and cradles? One can only guess. Farther south in the old towns such as Jacksonville, Springfield and Quincy, some articles of merchandise were available, but in the newer settlements for miles around our area it would seem many supplies must have been purchased wholesale elsewhere and shipped to our more inland towns.

Until 1859 Kansas Township was a part of Palestine. Her pioneer settlers, Samuel and Robert Phillips, came in 1828, the same year as the Stouts. They were relatives of the McCords and possibly of the Patricks, most of whom had stopped a year or two in the groves of McLean County. Other early arrivals in Kansas Township included Samuel Kirkpatrick, Sr., who came to the county in 1831 and to White Oak Grove in 1832, Lewis Stephens who arrived the same year, and John, William and James Benson who came in 1831 or 1832. Zachary Brown and his wife Elizabeth came up from Tennessee in 1831, and

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