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The Two Faces of Homer
Stacey Jones The railroad has long played an important part in the hisfory of Homer. Homer was founded on the banks of the Salt Fork River in 1837 by M. D. Coffeen and Samuel Groendyke. The name Homer came from the Greek philosopher and author of the Iliad. Homer soon became a prosperous town complete with grist mill, saw mill, and a general sfore. In 1854 the talk of surveyors coming through the county looking to map out land for the Great Western Railroad excited Coffeen. He was disappointed when the railroad missed his town by a mere mile and a half and he began to make plans either to start a new town or to move Homer to the railroad. Eventually, he proposed a move to the townspeople. He told them that they would get an even exchange of land, and they would be living on the railroad. This proposition was accepted by nearly all. The townspeople began looking ahead to the part the railroad would play in their lives by transporting their grain, livestock, and products to market and bringing in supplies from the outside world. They looked forward to their new homes on the prairie with its rich black soil to plant and harvest. Coffeen and the rest of Old Homer then began to make plans for the big move. They were all anxiously awaiting a large snowfall. Villagers made skids to put under the houses in order to slide the houses to their new destination. Farmers made plans to use their cattle and oxen to pull the houses to the railroad. Once all plans were perfected, everyone waited for the snow. Finally, in January 1855 the snow came, and the actual work of transporting the town began. The entire community pitched in on the effort to move the nearly one hundred buildings. Among those moving was the grandmother of Clell Clutter, a lifelong resident of Homer. Clutter retold the legend that grandmother Clutter helped load the Clutter cabin onto the skids. Then she went back inside to straighten up a bit. The next time she came out, so the story goes, she was in new Homer and had cherry pie and cookies ready for the men. Other people also prepared and ate meals in their cabins as the oxen plodded on towards the railroad. Moving was not very expensive for the residents; it was five dollars per house. The railroad itself came through newly relocated Homer in the summer of 1855. The residents soon realized they had made a good move. The new Homer soon prospered. People erected flour mills and elevafors to take care of the grain and to ship to other markets by means of the railroad that ran from Danville to Springfield. Other businesses soon popped up and Homer became a boom town. Farmers poured in from the eastern states, and the old settlers began giving up the prairie to live in Homer. Old Homer soon became a memory. There is little to show that a village once thrived on the Salt Fork before the present Homer. Some of the older people who could point out the location of the cider mill and the icehouse passed this knowledge on to their survivors, but it is secondhand knowledge now. Only a mute reminder of life in early Homer—the Old Homer Cemetery on the southern bank of the river—remains. Buried there are Moses Thomas, who came to the area in 1829 and operated the first grist mill and was the first county judge; Rev. John Fox, a Methodist minister who came to Illinois in 1827; and Homer's founder, M. D. Coffeen and his family. Today Homer is still on the railroad, although it is now called the Wabash instead of the Great Western. The grain elevator is serviced daily by trains that whiz through town many times every day. The railroad has made Homer a prosperous town.—[From Stanley A. Changnon, America's Rural Hub; Lois Stauter, Dear Edna; C. J. Tinkham, "Ye Long Ago Reminiscences."]
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