AN EPIC OF WESTERN adventure was the coming of the Rosses. Over 1800 miles of trail, 1200 miles by water and 600
miles by land, 250 miles over the rude cart and wagon trails through the scarcely broken wilderness of early Illinois,
they had come from the old settlements of the east to found a new settlement in the west. Try as we may, we can
but dimly appreciate the rigors and hardships of such a journey in those wilderness days.
From Charles S. Sellon's 1859 interviews with Col. William Ross, some idea of that journey is to be had. In the
late spring of 1820, our western adventurers set out from Pittsfield, in western Massachusetts, passed through
New York state and to the headwaters of the Allegheny, where they secured flatboats and rafts, on which they loaded
their wagon trains, thence floated down the Allegheny, to its confluence with the Ohio at Pittsburgh, and then
down the Ohio to Shawneetown, ancient settlement of Illinois Territory. It took them 15 days to reach Pittsburgh
after embarking on the Allegheny, and several weeks more to cover the more than 900 miles of waterway from Pittsburgh
to Shawneetown. In the Allegheny, the water was so low in places that the men had to get out into the stream and,
with pries, lift their stranded boats off the mudbars and various obstructions, a laborious task that often left
them wet through from foot to head.
Reaching Shawneetown — so remote from civilization that missionaries who visited it in 1815 said not a single Bible
could be bought in the place — they set out, after replenishing their stock of provisions, for the long trek over
wilderness trails, at times being guided by three notches in the bark of trees which denoted a wagon trail, as
two notches signified a bridle path and one a footpath. From Shawneetown to Kaskaskia was a fairly worn trail.
At the lower end of the American Bottom, at Kaskaskia, the little band entered the most historic section of the
state where, before recorded history began, was the cradle of a highly developed Indian culture that has left as
its monuments the impressive mounds that dot the region.
Here, in the American Bottom, the gift of the Missouri river, our pioneers trod one of the most fertile areas of
North America, in which "nature had painted a primeval scene of tropical prodigality; ponds covered with gorgeous
water lilies and fringed with tall grasses; trees matted with grapevines; forests made impassable by the wealth
of undergrowth; luxuriance and fertility inviting man to indolence and repose." The Mission of the Immaculate
Conception, founded among the Kaskaskia by the gentle Father Marquette in 1674 when the Kaskaskia occupied a village
near modern Utica, high up on the Illinois river, and which was moved by Father Gravier to Peoria when Tonti built
the new Fort St. Louis there, was in September, 1700, moved to the lower end of the American Bottom, near the Kaskaskia
river and thus romantic Kaskaskia, first a mission and then a parish, was established and here centered the early
French life of the state instead of in the valley of the Illinois, as LaSalle had intended.
Here, then, at Kaskaskia, was a settlement founded in 1700, in which centered the history of the state for over
a hundred years and where was written the romance of early Illinois and enacted scenes that marked the passing
of empires.
From Kaskaskia to Edwardsville was also a fairly open trail. From Edwardsville to Upper Alton, the going was rough.
From that point on the ways were such as Jesse Walker, circuit-riding preacher of early Illinois, described as
"narrow, winding horsepaths, sometimes scarcely perceptible, and frequently for miles no path at all amid
tangled brushwood, over fallen timber, rocky glens, mountainous precipices; through swamps and low grounds, overflowed
or saturated for miles together with water."
It was in te late summer or early autumn of 1820 that our pioneers at last reached trail's end. On the site of
future Atlas, they built rude log cabins and by the time the great American winter set in, everything was in readiness
for the habitation of their families. Captain Leonard Ross remained at the settlement that winter. The others returned
to the settlement at Upper Alton, where their families had been left. The following February, they returned to
the log settlement, bringing the families with them.
Meantime a petition had been circulated by the settlers then in the region, petitioned the second legislature in
session at Vandalia that winter (1820-21) for a county to be erected upon the bounty lands. Leonard Ross, then
the only Ross in the region, the others being away at Upper Alton, was a signer of this petition. The 51 other
signatures were mostly of settlers then located in the south half of what is now Calhoun.
The new settlement, first known as Ross's Settlement, was, as noted in former chapters, laid out in March, 1823
by William Ross and Rufus Brown, and selected as the seat of justice by a legislative commission, was named Atlas
by that commission at the suggestion of William Ross, who later, in 1833, also named the third county seat "Pittsfield,"
after his Massachusetts home.
The original Pike county Rosses included four brothers: Leonard, a captain in the War of 1812; William, an ensign-lieutenant
in that war; Henry J., a physician, and Clarendon. They were sons of Micah Ross, a man of limited means but of
sterling worth. These men, seeking their fortunes on the bounty lands, were all married men, and with them to the
new land they brought the women and children of their families.
With the name of William Ross were associated many of the first things in Pike county. He it was who built the
first brick house in the county at Atlas in 1821, which he afterward greatly enlarged. He built the first grist
mill, a band mill, at Atlas, which was a boon to the early settlers, although the sandstone burrs used in the mill
caused them to declare that in every bushel of meal was a peck of limestone dust. He built the first home-owned
store at Atlas in 1826, a hewed log building 16 feet square. Prior to that there had been a trading post there.
In the Ross home was organized, prior to 1830, the first church in the county, the Congregational. In his home,
in the early 1820s, was heard the first sermon preached within the present borders of Pike county, delivered by
the world-renowned and eccentric Lorenzo Dow. Col. Ross informed Charles Sellon in an interview in 1859 that Dow
on that occasion remained seated in his chair during the delivery of his sermon.
Upstairs, in the Ross mansion at Atlas, sometime between 1830 and 1834, the first Masonic lodge in the county was
held. The gavel, squared compass and trowel on this occasion passed in later years from Col. Ross to his son Marcellus,
and from Marcellus to the latter's son Frank, by whom they were transmitted some years ago to the keeping of the
Illinois state lodge.
Colonel Ross held the first political meeting in Pike county, in Montezuma township, in 1834, when he was a candidate
for the state legislature. About 50 voters were present, besides boys. Col. Ross made a speech at this rally. Col.
Benjamin Barney, a candidate for county commissioner, who was with Ross at the meeting, was attacked for being
a Universalist, someone in the audience declaring he would not vote for him on that ground.
Col. Ross and Col. James M. Seeley, who came to Atlas shortly after the Rosses, raised the first wheat in the county
which, according to Chapman's history, was also the first wheat ground within the limits of the county and made
into biscuits, the flour being bolted through book muslin.
Ross not only built the oldest house now standing in Atlas but also was the builder of the second oldest house
now standing in Pittsfield, the home of former mayor Herbert H. Vertrees and his sister, Lillia, built in the year
1835. The old Ross mansion on East Washington street in Pittsfield also became a monument to his success as a builder.
In the summer of 1821, following the arrival of the families in the new settlement, the Rosses and others of their
little company were victims of that terrible scourge of the pioneers, the malaria germ-bearing mosquito. "Fever
and ague" menaced every member of the settlement, and quinine became a daily diet. The prevalence of malaria
caused all the prairie states to acquire a reputation for unhealthfulness. The disease was ascribed to the "poisonous
miasmas" which issued from the prairie sod in the late summer and fall.
In Chapman's 1880 History of Pike County occurs the following graphic account of the "sickly season"
of 1821 at Atlas:
"Scarcely a family but followed some of its members to the newly-made cemetery, until over one-half the entire
population was numbered with the dead. The prevailing cause of the visitation of such a calamity to the settlers
was the malaria emanating from the vegetable decay of the newly broken prairie and the decomposition of immense
quantities of fish in the ponds below the town. The victims of this dreadful malady were laid in coffins made from
basswood puncheons, hollowed out and consigned to earth in a graveyard near Franklin's first location, and about
400 yards west of Shinn's The bones and dust of eighty persons now lie buried there, and at present there is not
a stone or head-board or any signs whatever of its being a cemetery."
It should not be understood that the eighty persons buried in this early burying ground were all victims of the
sickly season of 1821. Many who died in subsequent years were buried there. This burial plot was but a short distance
east of present Atlas and not far from federal highway No. 54.
Clarendon Ross, one of the original company, died in the miasmic plague of 1821, his death being among the earliest
in the Atlas settlement. During the same memorable epidemic, Mrs. William Ross went to her grave in the new land.
Bereft of wife and brother, William Ross returned later to the east and there married Miss Edna Adams, bringing
her to the frontier settlement. Early in 1823, Ross laid out a town, the first to be laid out within the present
bounds of the county, and bestowed upon it the name of Atlas, which name was confirmed by a legislative commission
as that of the new permanent county seat of Pike county, a distinction the new settlement was to enjoy, but not
without challenge, for a period of ten years.
Captain Leonard Ross was the towering figure of the early community. Elected second sheriff of the county in 1822,
he served in that capacity as late as 1829. Already past middle life when he came to the west, he was for a number
of years the most influential and widely known citizen in the territory that is now Pike. His name and the name
of his great antagonist, John Shaw, dot the early county records as do no others of their time. Leonard Ross and
John Shaw were in no small degree the makers of our earliest history.
As Leonard Ross began to yield to advancing age, his younger brother William, later the Col. William Ross of blessed
memory, began to take his place and assume the burdens laid down by the elder brother. William grew rapidly in
political favor and to his early mansion in Atlas, now occupied (1935) by the Misses Maggie and Laura Adams, came
the greatest men of early Illinois to counsel with the mansion's tenant Nicholas Hansen, Morris Birkbeck, Daniel
Pope Cook, John Reynolds, Samuel D. Lockwood, James Turney, Elias Kent Kane and David Blackwell - and, at a later
date, at the close of the Black Hawk war, young Abe Lincoln.
Of the first Rosses at Atlas, Clarendon died in the 1821 epidemic. Captain Leonard and Dr. Henry J. remained residents
of the settlement for a period of 16 years. Records of Judge Merrill E. Rattan's early probate court in Pittsfield
show, by affidavits of record in the administration of the Ross estates, that Captain Leonard Ross and Dr. Henry
J. Ross both died the same day, August 6, 1836. From that tme until his death in 1873, William was the sole survivor
of the original four Rosses who settled Atlas.
"Aunt" Roby Ross, remembered with affection by some of the older residents of the county, was the widow
of Captain Leonard Ross. Born in Rensselaer county, New York, September 27, 1789, she came to the early settlement
at Atlas as the wife of Clarendon Ross. Later, after Clarendon's death, she married his brother Leonard. "Aunt"
Roby's house was a famed seat of hospitality in the early day. She fed as many as a hundred in a day. An early
writer tells that she would arrange out of doors tables made of clapboards placed upon sticks, supported by stakes
driven in the ground. In that day they had an abundance of wild meat, vegetables, and sometimes fried cakes and
crabapple sauce. Her son Schuyler, by her first husband, Clarendon Ross, died at the age of 20 in 1832 at Atlas.
"Aunt" Roby died at Barry, September 18, 1880, lacking but nine days of being 91 years of age.
On May 1, 1822, in the Ross mansion at Atlas (then Ross's Settlement), there was born to William and Edna Adams
Ross a daughter, Nancy, who so far as disclosed by the records was the first girl child born in the territory that
is now Pike. Little Nancy died on November 18 that same year and is buried near the ancient mansion in which she
was born. Her grave has been marked by the Nancy Ross Chapter of the D. A. R., a chapter named in commemoration
of that Pike county baby of the long ago.
William Ross, writing in 1823 to a friend in the east, tells of the first Fourth of July celebration in the Military
Tract, held in the new county seat town of Atlas that year, as follows:
"July 4, 1823, the first celebration of the Fourth of July was held in Atlas, Pike county, Ill. Oration delivered
by Nicholas Hansen of Albany, N. Y. The Declaration of Independence was read. There was an audience of about fifty
persons, who afterward partook of an excellent dinner by Rufus Brown at his tavern. The audience marched in procession
after dinner. A jolly good time was had drinking toasts, etc., and ‘all went merry as a marriage bell,' this being
the first celebration ever held in Pike county, or in this Military Tract."
The Rufus Brown above mentioned is the county commissioners of 1825, who at the beginning of 1826, moved to the
new town of Quincy and built a log tavern on the south side of the square there. Later he moved farther west and
died somewhere in the western country.
William Ross, founder of Atlas, like John Wood, founder of Quincy, came to this western country a poor man, but
by diligence, perseverance and foresight he soon acquired a competence and became one of the most prosperous men
of his day. To him, in 1833, when a new county seat was being established, the county commissioners were compelled
to turn for the $200 needed to enter the 160 acres of land upon which the county seat was to be erected. Col. Ross
generously supplied the money in spite of the fact that the new town was taking the seat of government from his
own town of Atlas. Later, in 1854, in Pittsfield, Col. Ross in partnership with Marshall Ayers of Jacksonville
launched the first regular bank in Pike county, known as the banking house of Ross & Company.
From the virgin soil at Atlas, William Ross wrested the beginnings of his fortune. He engaged extensively in raising
and shipping livestock. In 1826 he built a keel-boat called "The Basket," which was hauled down to the
Sny and launched. Chapman's History is authority for the statement that this keel-boat would hold about 50 tons,
and in this craft the Colonel shipped the produce of the neighborhood, such as beef, pork, and hides. He used to
pack about 400 head of cattle every season.
Dressed beef was only two and a half cents a pound. Dealers had the hide and tallow as their reward for killing
and dressing. They sold their beef in the south, New Orleans generally, for five dollars a barrel, tallow ten cents
a pound, dry hides five cents, and green hides two and a half cents a pound. To get their boats over sand-bars,
they would unload the barrels, roll them over the bars and then reload. On one trip it took a whole day to cover
a distance of twelve miles.
An early historian relates that the summer of 1827 was marked by heavy rains, the streams rising higher than they
ever did afterward until 1851. The Sny Carte became navigable for the early steamboats as far up as Atlas, as Colonel
Ross proved to the astonishment of many. He had then three steamboats in his service, and one of them in particular,
the "Mechanic," came up to a point directly opposite Atlas, its arrival being announced by the firing
of guns.