ANDALUSIA TOWNSHIP

 

These notes were taken from Home on the River which was compiled and edited by Mary Slovar. Her sources included: Past and Present of Rock Island County, 1877, Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois, Vols. I and II, and the History of Rock Island County, 1914.

From the time the white man settled in Rock Island County until the Civil War the white man was a neighbor to the Indian. Whites settled in the area which is now the town of Andalusia, originally a "paper city" called Rockport, while the Indians used the area west of Andalusia for hunting and fishing. Eventually the struggle for supremacy ensued. The white man won and remained; the Indians lost and vacated.

At the end of the Black Hawk War in 1832 Captain Benjamin W. Clark of Virgina arrived in Andalusia and built a log house near the mouth of West Creek. It was the only house between Joshua VanDruff's on VanDruff's Island and Erastus Dannison's at the Upper Yellow Banks, now New Boston. Erastus Dannison established a ferry service across the Mississippi, the most important one north of St. Louis at the time.

Other cabins were soon built south of the Rock River: Hockley Sams at the mineral (white sulpher) springs; John Vanatta, east of Andalusia; Jonathan Mosher had a farm east of Vanatta's property; and James Rabrion built near the southwest township line.

In 1841 Jonathan Buffum built a grist mill on Fancy Creek. Its capacity was 50 bushels of corn, wheat, or buckwheat per day. No toll was taken for grinding this grain as the patrons' horses turned the wheel.

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Illinois Ancestors