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Archaeologist-historian Robert Mazrim has uncovered physical evidence of old French Peoria and the Edwards Trace, a precursor of I-55 that goes back to at least 1700. I covered both in the Reader (May 31, 2002, and June 6, 2003), but he’s his own best scribe, as you can see in his new book The Sangamo Frontier: History & Archaeology in the Shadow of Lincoln. (His Under the Prairie Museum is just off I-55 in downtown Elkhart, Illinois.)
Mazrim’s book is all about those moments when you glimpse the past. At the long-forgotten site of Sangamo Town, now a farm field eight miles upstream from Springfield, he found an old hand-dug pit, four feet wide, eight feet long, and three feet deep, lined up with the platted streets of the old village. One end still showed the marks of a shovel that had cut into the clay during the early 1830s.
