Ebenezer Morgan and his creek are reminders of Kendall’s pioneer days

It’s interesting driving down Route 71 these days and watching the progress on the highway widening project between Orchard Road and Route 126. The view has been cleared so we can get a good look at the topography along that stretch of road.

And that includes the Morgan Creek bridge. The newly cleared area offers a rare look at the usually hidden creek itself. Named after Ebenezer Morgan, one of the county’s earliest settlers, the small, sluggish creek originally drained an extensive wetland that divided Specie Grove and AuSable Grove. The remnant of an Ice Age lake, it was called The Big Slough by the area’s early settlers, and had been a wildlife haven for thousands of years. In fact, when The Big Slough was drained by dredging and channelizing Morgan Creek back in 1908, crews dug up an ancient Mastodon skeleton. After the old slough dried out, it proved a prime area to find the stone projectile points crafted by the region’s Native People they’d lost while hunting.

Morgan and his friend and neighbor Earl Adams had came west to Illinois from Chautauqua County, New York looking for likely land to settle on in 1831. The two were of an age, Adams born in August 1799 and Morgan in February 1800, and both had the initial cash to pay for their prospecting trip west.

They traveled from Chautauqua County to the Ohio River and then downstream, probably by steamboat, to the Mississippi and then upstream to St. Louis. There they bought horses, ferried over to the Mississippi’s east bank and rode upstream to the mouth of the Illinois River. They followed the Illinois upstream all the way to Ottawa and the mouth of the Fox River. Then their prospecting route took them up the Fox as they surveyed the rich Fox River Valley.

Adams staked his claim – by treaty with the local Native People the land was unavailable for purchase – on a hill overlooking the river. That hill later became Yorkville’s Courthouse Hill where Kendall County’s beautifully restored Historic Courthouse is located these days. Morgan, on the other hand, continued up the river’s east bank a few miles farther to the mouth of a small creek, which he followed upstream eventually coming to Specie Grove, the Big Slough and the rich prairies adjoining them. There, he staked his own claim of around 1,000 acres.

Having found what they hoped would be their new homes, the pair turned their horses northeast to Chicago, where they sold their rides, and headed back to Chautauqua County via the Great Lakes, fully intending to bring their families out the next year.

But that was not to be. In the spring of 1832, the Sauk warrior Black Sparrow Hawk and the band of Sauk, Fox, and other tribespeople who followed him, numbering some 1,500, crossed the Mississippi River into northern Illinois with the intention of living with friendly Ho-Chunk people. The action panicked settlers, politicians, and military officials and led to the brief, tragic Black Hawk War.

The war news persuaded Morgan and Adams to wait to move west until things settled down. By the next year, not only were hostilities ended, but the year dawned favorably for westbound settlers. Forever after called the Year of the Early Spring, 1833 began dry and clear, with the primitive roads of the era – nothing more than dirt traces across the prairie – drying out and grass greening up earlier than most could remember.

Morgan, with his two sons, and the Adams family came west by wagon, with Morgan driving a team of horses pulling the wagon with Adams’ wife and children and his two sons in it, and Adams driving a more powerful but slower yoke of oxen pulling the heavily laden wagon hauling the family’s tools and possessions. Reaching Detroit, they took the old Territorial Road west to Chicago, and then headed west across the prairie to the Fox River. They stayed a day with William Wilson’s family, the first settlers at Oswego, before heading downstream, Morgan and his sons to his huge claim and Adams and his family to hill on the other side of the river.

Morgan and his sons immediately got to work building a snug cabin for the family and getting things ready so Morgan could go back to New York in the spring and bring the rest of his family west the next year.

A couple years later, Adams moved his family to a claim in the AuSable Grove near Morgan before finally moving down to Big Grove Township where he lived and farmed the rest of his life.

Morgan was primarily a farmer, but he also had good business instincts. Noting that lumber was a scarce commodity out on the Illinois prairie, he and his sons dammed up the creek that was soon named after him and built a sawmill. With Specie and AuSable groves right at the mill’s doorstep, there was no danger of running out of raw materials. The mill operated until the U.S. Army’s canal through the sandbar at the mouth of the Chicago River opened the port of Chicago to cheap lumber from Wisconsin and Michigan shortly afterwards. Morgan may also have run a gristmill at the site as well.

Morgan was apparently well off and well thought of by his neighbors. He was named to Kane County’s first Board of County Commissioners in 1836 before Oswego Township was split off to create Kendall County in 1841. Then when the Illinois General Assembly voted to allow the formation of township governments in 1850, he also served on the first Kendall County Board of Supervisors.

Morgan remained active in local politics his entire life, and also was an active member of the Kendall County Anti-Slavery Society.

Ebenezer Morgan died on March 9, 1873, and was buried in Cowdrey Cemetery not far from his namesake creek. His wife, Lydia Ashley Morgan, followed him in death 10 years later. His friend and exploring partner, Earl Adams, followed him in death two years later. With their deaths, another bit of Kendall County’s pioneer era ended.

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