Shawneetown, Illinois: The Town That Kept Building the Wall Higher

Shawneetown, Illinois was laid out in 1810, which makes it one of the oldest towns in the state. Before

Illinois was a state, this was already a place. Two things put it on the map: salt from the works nearby,

back when no household or smokehouse could run without it, and the Ohio River, which in 1810 was the

interstate. If you were moving people or freight through the middle of the country you moved them on that

water, and Shawneetown was a place you had to stop. In 1816 the first bank in the Illinois Territory was

chartered there, run by a man named John Marshall out of his own log cabin and then the brick house he

built, which is still standing.

Then the river started coming for it. From eighteen eighty-four through nineteen thirty-seven, the town

kept building its wall higher. In eighteen eighty-four, the river passed through a gap in an unfinished

levee. In 1898 a finished one let go on a Sunday afternoon and drowned twenty-five people. In 1913 the

town put another hundred and thirty thousand dollars into making it taller. By the mid-1930s the wall was

built to hold back a sixty-foot river. Sixty feet of river, held off by packed earth, by people who had

three floods in living memory and nothing bigger than that to imagine.

Timeline of Events

1810: Shawneetown is laid out on the Ohio River, one of the oldest towns in Illinois.

1812: It becomes the seat of Gallatin County, loses the seat to Equality in 1826, and takes a quarter

century to get it back.

1816: The first bank in the Illinois Territory is chartered at Shawneetown.

1839 to 1841: The town breaks ground on a Greek Revival bank building reported to cost eighty thousand

dollars.

February 1884: The Ohio comes up and goes straight through the gap in an unfinished levee.

April 1898: A ten-foot section of the finished levee gives way onto Market Street on a Sunday afternoon,

and the break opens to nearly half a mile. Twenty-five people drown, including Sheriff Charles Galloway's

wife Sylvester and his daughters Dora and Mary, nineteen and twelve. About 143 houses are wrecked or float

off and more than a thousand people end up in state tents.

1913: Another flood, another round of damage, and another $130,000 into the levee.

January 24, 1937: A steamboat comes up from Memphis and takes more than five hundred people off, with the

river inches under the top of the wall.

January 1937: The Ohio crests at Shawneetown at 65.6 feet, about five and a half feet over the top of the

wall.

Historical Significance

There is a thing a river wall does that nobody puts in the county history. When it gets tall enough you

cannot see the river anymore. It is right there, a couple hundred yards off, and gone from your day. Kids

grow up on the Ohio and have to climb something to look at it. The wall stops being a defense, starts being

scenery, and then stops being anything at all. In 1937 the water came over the top and kept coming, and the

town, which sits low behind that wall, went under about fifteen feet. The bank stayed up; water climbed

two stories on it and left a mark on those columns you can still find today. Shawneetown had roughly four

hundred homes. When the water pulled back weeks later, twenty of them were fit to live in. The streets

were still there and the lots were still there. Nineteen houses out of every twenty standing on them were

beyond living in.

Sources

WPA Guide to Illinois

Hanneman Archive accounts of the 1898 levee break

Gallatin County historical records

National Register of Historic Places documentation, Shawneetown Bank

U.S. Geological Survey Ohio River gauge records

If you liked this: Episode 170, Ottawa, Illinois. Another Illinois town where the industry that built it

decided what its people were worth.

Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs,

and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode at

mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history

Episode 211 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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