Please Don't Quote Me By Caralee Aschenbrenner Everyone wants waterfront propertynow and in the past. The French were especially desirous of access to rivers in the French tradition. Each of the cultures which came from Europe had their own pattern of settlement. The Spanish marked out their ranches in irregular rectangular units, apparently choosing the more positive aspects of potentials.

The English claimed smaller units according to an ancient system of "metes and bounds" with which we may still be familiar. A description of the 'm & b' is regularly given in periodically published plat books ... "Tracts of lands starting at a given point" running so many feet a certain direction, so many feet another direction, etc. back to the beginning.

To locate a tract of land from the metes and bounds description, start at the point of the beginning: do not read it backwards as in the case of a rectangular description. This method often started from a blazed tree or prominent rock.

The French, among the earliest of Illinois' settlers "invented" a land measurement called the "long lot" which was a narrow frontage on a watercourse which stretched at right angles into the interior for a long distance unlike the precise squares into which townships are done today ... A township contains 36 squares one mile of land square or 640 acres. The French land measurements, the long lot, was called an arpent but which is approximate to our acre ... A Gaulish arpent is one half acre.

As early as the opening years of the 1700s, yes, French settlement sprang up along the Wabash River in Illinois and on the Mississippi below St. Louis, at present day Kaskaskia and Cahokia, where French traders, voyageurs and missionaries set up among the Indians in their ancient villages and lived in compatible commingling throughout. Maps from the early 1800s show varying long strips of property reaching back from the rivers in somewhat awkward-looking plots off to the side of French settlements and their "common grazing fields." Rivers gave easy access to exporting/importing because the interior was untouched by those civilizing influences, roads.

Steadily growing population at the two main villages (named above), mostly French, grew in importance with their trade and culture dominating society which became comfortable in goods. They were content in their spirituality because of useful lives.

After several years the capitol of the fur trade, Quebec, Canada switched nearer the nucleus of the trade, New Orleans, which took on the dominance and prestige undreamed of just a few years before. Although it was a strategic port at the mouth of the Mississippi, it was chronically short of foodstuffs and other trade goods for the insatiable appetite of a rapidly expanding nation. The American Bottoms near St. Louis became the "breadbasket" for the Gulf because of its unbelievably rich, fertile bottom lands, soils reaching back from the imposing cliffs and palisades, the eastern sides of which were topped with forests of multitudes and various woods. The "Bottoms" became an idyll.

The French, however, built Ft. Chartres in 1720, thinking practically that some country would soon see the wealth which they controlled in the bottom lands. Too, they wanted to further their plans for imperialismcontrol of the Mississippi Valley, north to the Great Lakes; the fur trade, etc. and any thoughts of encroachment by the British.

By the 1750's the French settlements in Illinois decided it needed a more formidable fort so in 1753 began a massive stone fortress to replace the log one. Historians believe it to have been the best/most important on the Continent. Some of it remains as an historical site. It was not impervious to bombardment, however, though there were four "arrow-like" bastions at each corner, one of which still stands with the magazine or powder house extant. Gates and walls have been reconstructed because most of theme had crumbled or fallen into the Mississippi River during flood times.

Later stone was hauled away to be used for neighborhood barns, houses, etc. It stands as testimony to the excellence of architectural expertise and craftsmanship in the lonely primitive wilderness.

Alas! The French occupied it for only six more years when Quebec fell to the British and the American-French properties were ceded to the Crown. It was a time of changearpent to acres; that in 1763 when British rule began.

At that time an English cartographer, Thomas Hutchins, the topographical officer at Ft. Cavendish, the successor name of Ft. Chartres, began the survey of the "Old Northwest" starting by running the principle meridian on which the grid system of township and ranges depend.

Reference suggests that past and present Illinois property owners should consider May 20, 1785 a landmark day, figuratively and literally, because it was then that the Continental Congress adopted the orderly system of rectangular surveys used in a majority of states.

North-south, east-west lines make up a grid based on townships, six miles square with 36 sections equalling six hundred forty acres, as before mentioned. Those sections are divided into squares or rectangles so that any field can be exactly located by that universal plan devised by Hutchins.

Congress declared surveys must be completed before sale of any public lands, township by township, "to solidify settlement" within each township. A section would be dedicated to support public schools (usually Section 16). Half of tracts were to be sold in sections, half townships at one dollar per acre only after land was purchased from Indian ownership!

Series of revisions came in succeeding years as history demanded, the most calls being for smaller tracts because less money would have to be put up. Cash money being very short.

Transactions were held at scattered land offices where settlement occurred, the first being at Kaskaskia in Illinois in 1804 with intrepid surveyors enduring unimaginable privations in their coming westward from the Atlantic seaboard.

Their stories alone could fill an exciting book (or TV series)!

Galena was the northernmost land office - 1835 to 1840 to give some order to lead miners and unexpectedly, farmers. Yes, the hills and dales were arable. Due to the influence of John Dixon, however, the land office was moved to Dixon; Ferry in 1840 to make it more convenient for the hundreds of prospective land owners pouring into the prairies south of the lead mines. It existed till 1855.

For generations the French had considered their holdings of little worth. Any sales were bargain-priced until statehood in 1818. Speculators, prominent men of increasing wealth and a significant number of political influences took advantage of opportunity to make thousands through exchanging property.

An east-west baseline begun in Ohio ran across this state's lower part now encompassing about twenty-two counties. Hutchins, the surveyor-cartographer, placed the third principle meridian in almost the exact center of Illinois. ... A shortened fourth principle meridian bisects the "hump" in western Illinois. In our area signs marking the meridian can be seen in Lee, Ogle and Winnebago as well as naming of roads there.

Many "Easterners" and "Southerners" trekked through Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee in search of adventure, new beginnings, even an idyll. Some found it near the Wabash River where a representation of land laid out in arpents is shown here. Others continued on to the American Bottoms or near to, on the Mississippi where the earlier French settlers were not all that welcoming. The newcomers found French land had been deliberately inflated to point up the non welcome. Ethic and religious intolerance after generations of deeply seated conviction and habit inhibited friendly new settlement.

French domination of the region had ended by 1760 when British rule succeeded their own. It was many years before the French influence waned however. These French outposts were not so much ruled by the distant mother country but by their mission priests who fiercely dominated the territory by day-to-day control.

The British didn't have particular interest in this remote wilderness as they did for those more near the coast where trade could more easily flourish. The French culture thus persisted longer than it otherwise might have. Today, still many French celebrations continue there.

Little by little the French moved on, mostly across the Mississippi to settle at St. Genevieve, Missouri and environs. That charming community evokes that earlier time and so does the restored home of Pierre Menard near Chester, Illinois, an historical site of early architecture and lifestyle. He was Illinois' first lieutenant governor and a worthy leader. Prairie du Rocher nearby exhibits a few of the oldest buildings in Illinois French Style, as well as two significant ones at Cahokia also.

Aerial and satellite photos of Cahokia still reveal the southeastward slant of the old, old delineation of the arpent lines now overlaid by the more modern grid system ... Those arpent divisions of the original settlers. Well, not the very first originals they being the native American who gathered in settlement in pre-written history and built Monk's Mound leaving behind a treasure of archeological relic and mysteries yet to be solved and discovered. Three hundred years of written history has succeeded it by now.

As late as the opening days of 1800, proof of actual ownership remained to be verified. Squatters had to have been there for nearly thirty years in settlements and to prove ownership which reveals many names that became the early settlers of Northwest Illinois, another fascinating tale though most of those weren't of French ancestry!

Frenchmen, however, were the first Europeans to penetrate this region. Little of that remains here except in dusty tomes with but one stone marker. We've had an article about French architecture, the latter day and repeat this column from 2003 to tell just how early the French influence has been in Illinois. We'll go local in future.

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