Illinois: Towns the Rivers Took Back

Introduction

Illinois breaks the pattern of every other chapter here. There is no copper, no iron range, no coal camp worth the drive. What Illinois has is rivers, and its lost towns were lost to them — by flood, by a river changing its mind, and by the long economic drowning that follows when the traffic stops coming.

⭐ THE FINDING THAT ORGANISES ILLINOIS: these are not towns that ran out of a resource. They are towns that were in the wrong place once the water or the commerce moved. That gives the state a very different feel from Michigan’s emptied mining camps — the buildings are grander, the streets are wider, and the scale of what was abandoned is much larger.

Everything worth going for is in the southern tip, in and around the Shawnee National Forest, between the Ohio and the Mississippi.

8.1 Cairo — Alexander County

Access: roadside, and go carefully — this is a living town.

At the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi. A booming river port through the 1800s, with steamboats docking constantly, carrying cargo and passengers between North and South. Still booming in the 1920s and 1930s.

Then: over 15,000 people. Now: fewer than 2,000. The Depression started it and it never recovered.

🔴 Cairo is not a ghost town and should not be treated as one. People live there. It appears on abandoned-places lists because whole commercial blocks stand empty, and photographers turn up to shoot the decay in front of the houses of people who still live on the street. Drive it, look, be quiet about it, and do not photograph anyone’s home. The access note on this entry is about courtesy at least as much as law.

8.2 Old Shawneetown — Gallatin County

Access: roadside; state historic site.

Established 1748 on the Ohio River — one of the oldest communities in Illinois, and once a serious hub of trade and banking.

🔴 It was ended by a single number. In 1937 the Ohio River rose 15 feet above 60-foot levees. The survivors did not rebuild; they founded New Shawneetown inland, and left the old town where it was.

⭐ What makes it worth the stop is the mismatch. The old bank building is a Greek Revival temple with enormous columns, built for a town that expected to become the commercial capital of the region — standing in a near-empty floodplain. It is the single most photogenic abandoned thing in Illinois.

8.3 Kaskaskia — Randolph County

Access: roadside. Illinois’s first state capital, founded by the French in the early 1700s and a major Mississippi port.

🔴 The river did something to Kaskaskia it has done to nowhere else on these lists: in an 1881 flood the Mississippi changed course and cut the town off from the rest of Illinois. Kaskaskia now sits on the Missouri side of the river, reachable from Illinois only by going around through another state. Fewer than 20 people live there — the smallest incorporated town in Illinois.

⭐ This is the only destination in this project where the state line, not the town, is the ghost. The town is still there. Illinois moved.

8.4 Garden of the Gods — Shawnee National Forest, Saline County

Access: walk in. Not a ghost town — included because it is the reason to build a trip around southern Illinois at all, and because it is where you will camp.

Sandstone bluffs and rock formations in the middle of a quarter-million acres of forest, with 12 non-electric campsites at the recreation area itself and easy access to the trails. Indian Point, from the backpackers’ parking lot, is a 2-mile loop popular for dispersed camping.

8.5 Where to sleep in Illinois

The Shawnee National Forest covers more than a quarter-million acres across nine counties in the southernmost part of the state, hemmed in by the Ohio and Mississippi. Nine campgrounds, two with electric, plus dispersed camping in several areas.

🔴 The Shawnee’s dispersed rule is a list of exclusions, and the exclusions are where you would want to camp. Primitive camping is allowed throughout the forest except in recreation areas, natural areas, along lake shores, near streams, or on trails.

⚠ Read that against the whole point of southern Illinois. The scenery here is water and bluffs; the rule specifically removes the water. As in Ohio and Indiana, the good site and the legal site are not the same site, and you have to choose the legal one.

8.6 What Illinois is actually for

A two-day loop, not a week. Old Shawneetown for the bank, Cairo for the confluence and the scale of the emptiness, Garden of the Gods to sleep. Kaskaskia only if the detour through Missouri appeals as its own joke.

🔴 And it is a long way for a rig set up for two-tracks. There is no Michigan-style forest-road network here to link the sites. This is a highway trip with three stops and one good campground, and it is worth knowing that before loading the truck for it.