Getting to Grand Prairie: One Hundred Londoners and their Quest for Land in Frontier Illinois

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In nineteenth-century London, Will Clipson runs a betting house. When his customers accuse him of cheating, and the threats become dangerous, he decides a move is in order. After all, his friend Henry Jones left England for America three years ago. Henry Jones is a successful gas fitter who has lit the lamps of London parks, theaters, and shops. But he is ready for a change, and there is promise of much opportunity across the Atlantic. Will joins Henry and other English families-the Puzeys, the Bentleys, and the Churches and their friends and extended families-who have crossed the dangerous Atlantic Ocean to New York, and then made the eight hundred-mile journey inland to central Illinois to a place they know as Grand Prairie. It's a story history has forgotten: how this determined group settles in, and perhaps overwhelms, what becomes the township of Catlin. Henry's wealth earned in London allows him to relish his new situation as he buys up swaths of land. The Puzeys, Churches, Bentleys, and their friends also accumulate land, build houses, and break the tough, matted prairie soil. Will gathers land too, perhaps with ill-gotten gain. A few years after their arrival, the escalating Civil War threatens to take the immigrants' sons. What surprises lie around the corner? Discover the true narratives of these strong families' struggles, failures, and successes, in an immigration experience that has been waiting one hundred fifty years to be told.