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Show 1836- 1837] Fl* gg's F* r West 303 The rapidity with which this state has been peopled is wonderful, especially its northern counties. In the year 1821, that section of country embraced within the present limits of Morgan county numbered but twenty families; in 1830 its population was nearly fourteen thousand, and cannot now be estimated at less than seventeen thousand! Many of the settlers are natives of the New- England States; and with them have brought those habits of industrious sobriety for which the North has ever been distinguished. In all the enterprise of the age, professing for its object the amelioration of human condition and the advancement of civilization, religion, and the arts, Morgan county stands in advance of all others in the state. What a wonderful revolution have a few fleeting years of active enterprise induced throughout a region once luxuriating in all the savageness of nature; while the wild prairie- rose " blushed unseen," and the wilder forest- son pursued the deer! Fair villages, [ 49] like spring violets along die meadow, have leaped forth into being, to bless and to gladden the land, and to render even this beautiful portion of God's beautiful world - though for ages a profitless waste - at length the abode of intelligence, virtue, and peace. It was near the close of the day that the extent and frequency of the farms on either side, the more finished structure of the houses, the regularity of enclosures, the multitude of vehicles of every description by which I was encountered, and the dusty, hoof- beaten thoroughfare over which I was travelling, all reminded me that I was drawing nigh to Jacksonville, the principal town in Illinois. Passing " Diamond Grove," a beautiful forest- island of nearly a thousand arces, elevated above the surrounding prairie to which it gives a name, 189 and m Diamond Grove Prairie, five miles in extent, is a fertile district in Morgan County, just south of Jacksonville. Diamond Grove was formerly a beautifully |