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HISTORICAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ILLINOIS.
by a coalition of Democrats and Independents. He died while a member of the Senate, Sept. 2, 1877.
EARTHQUAKE OF 1811. A series of the most remarkable earthquakes in the history of the Mississippi Valley began on the night of November 16, 1811, continuing for several months and finally ending with the destruction of Caraccas, Venezuela, in March following. While the center of the earlier disturbance appears to have been in the vicinity of New Madrid, in Southeastern Missouri, its minor effects were felt through a wide extent of country, especially in the settled portions of Illinois. Contemporaneous history states that, in the American Bottom, then the most densely settled portion of Illinois, the results were very perceptible. The walls of a brick house belonging to Mr. Samuel Judy, a pioneer settler in the eastern edge of the bottom, near Edwardsville, Madison County, were cracked by the convulsion, the effects being seen for more than two generations. Gov. John Reynolds, then a young man of 23, living with his father's family in what was called the "Goshen Settlement," near Edwardsville, in his history of "My Own Times," says of it: "Our family were all sleeping in a log-cabin, and my father leaped out of bed, crying out, 'The Indians are on the house. The battle of Tippecanoe had been recently fought, and it was supposed the Indians would attack the settlements. Not one in the family knew at that time it was an earthquake. The next morning another shock made us acquainted with it. .., The cattle came running home bellowing with fear, and all animals were terribly alarmed. Our house cracked and quivered so we were fearful it would fall to the ground. In the American Bottom many chimneys were thrown down, and the church bell at Cahokia was sounded by the agitation of the building. It is said a shock of an earthquake was felt in Kaskaskia in 1804, but I did not perceive it." Owing to the sparseness of the population in Illinois at that time, but little is known of the effect of the convulsion of 1811 elsewhere, but there are numerous "sink-holes" in Union and adjacent counties, between the forks of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, which probably owe their origin to this or some similar disturbance. "On the Kaskaskia River below Athens," says Governor Reynolds in his "Pioneer History," "the water and white sand were thrown up through a fissure of the earth."
EAST DUBUQUE, an incorporated city of Jo Daviess
