Haines, Elijah M.:

$2,500 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL SKETCHES, OF LAKE COUNTY, STATE OF ILLINOIS. IN TWO PARTS. THE FIRST CONSISTING OF GENERAL OBSERVATIONS; THE SECOND, GIVES A MINUTE REVIEW OF EACH TOWNSHIP, IN ITS ... The Graff copy of the rare first edition of the earliest history of an Illinois county published in book form. This work was authored by noteworthy early Illinois figure Elijah Haines, who moved to Lake County from New York in 1838 (the year before the county was officially established) and later surveyed and incorporated a village there called Hainesville in 1846. He became a lawyer in 1851 and moved to the county seat of Waukegan, writing this pamphlet shortly afterwards. Haines went on to publish several works on midwestern laws, and served in the Illinois House of Representatives for eight separate terms as an anti-slavery and then anti-Radical Reconstruction Republican. He also spent several years as Speaker of the House for Illinois.The frontispiece is an impressive fold-out view of Waukegan, "taken in the year 1847." The text describes the early history of Lake County in considerable detail, including discussions of many of the legal questions and public works projects which occupied the county government in its infancy. The second part describes each town in the county, when and where it was founded, lists the lakes and rivers found within, names all of the current members of town government, and provides occasional anecdotes from the author's personal experience. The wrappers

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