Drovers march cattle, hogs to market before railroads

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Before railroads were established in Illinois, cattle and hog farmers drove their animals to livestock markets and processing facilities.

“You could raise corn, but it wasn’t economical to transport it vast distances so you would lose more in the process than you would gain in the market,” said Bill Kemp, librarian at the McLean County Museum of History.

“But you could feed that corn to cattle and hogs and then march those animals to market,” he said during a presentation to a group of Illinois Agri-Women members that toured the former county courthouse that became a museum in 1991. “It was called corn on the hoof.”

The first federal surveyors came through east-central Illinois in the early 1820s.

“In the first plat map of McLean County, 90% of the county was tall grass prairie, about 670,000 acres, and only three or four acres of that survive today,” Kemp said. “The other 10% of the land was in timber tracts.”

Locally, the most prominent cattleman was Issac Funk.

“Issac Funk was the cattle king of central Illinois and he comes to McLean County in 1824 and establishes a farmstead near Shirley,” Kemp said.

“Funk and other stockmen would drive cattle and hogs as far as Cincinnati, which was the first meatpacking center of the U.S. before the arise of Chicago,” the librarian explained.

“By the mid-1830s, Chicago was a common destination for Issac Funk and others in the area to drive their swine and cattle to market,” he said.

Although none of Issac Funk’s homes are still standing, the home of his son, Lafayette Funk, located in Funks Grove, is now a museum that is available for tours.

“The gable barn that Lafayette built in 1861 survives today,” Kemp said. “It is one of the largest original barns left in McLean County and it maintains its appearance from the Civil War era.”

Issac’s son, George Washington Funk, was 16 years old when he went on his first cattle and hog drive to Chicago with his dad.

“That was 130 to 140 miles and cattle could generally cover 10 to 12 miles per day,” Kemp said. “And the cattle could be moved in groups of 200 to 300 head.”

According to George Washington Funk, in the early cattle drives, the drovers would take along provisions and camp out as they drove animals to Chicago.

“Later, farmers and innkeepers would set up waysides for the droving parties, including corals to keep the livestock penned for the night,” Kemp said.

“Before the advent of refrigeration, drives were organized in the late fall and early winter to prevent spoilage,” he said. “It’s not until the 1860s that the packing houses have ice-cooled storage facilities.”

During the winter 1830 to 1831, known as the winter of the deep snow, the Funk family organized a hog drive from Funk’s Grove to Galena.

“At the point where they were crossing the Illinois River that was frozen, a group of hogs huddled for warmth and their collective weight collapsed the ice sheet and they lost a large number of hogs,” the librarian said.

This epic drive took 45 days, Kemp said.

“And the hogs that did survive lost more than 100 pounds each,” he said.

On May, 3, 1853, the Galena-Cairo branch of the Illinois Central Railroad reached Bloomington.

“It would be a hard stretch to find a more monumental event in our county’s history than the arrival of the railroad,” Kemp said.

“It changes everything,” he said. “It marks the end of the droving era because there’s no need to march animals anymore because we can load them on the train.”

Kemp spoke about the cattle and hog droving era in the court room of the fourth courthouse in the county’s history, which was completed in 1903.

“In 1977, the county opened the Law and Justice Center, which is the current courthouse,” he said.

The history museum is the only occupant of the building that features four floors of activities and exhibits for visitors to enjoy.

“There are five semi-permanent exhibits that tell the story of not only McLean County, but Illinois in general,” Kemp said.

Those exhibits include: Lincoln in McLean County, A Community in Conflict, Making a Home, Farming the Great Corn Belt, and Working for a Living.

“Lincoln spent more time in Bloomington than anywhere else in his adult life, other than his hometown, Springfield,” Kemp said.

“Lincoln owns property here, he gives important political speeches here and many buildings in the downtown are from Lincoln’s era.”