African American Community at Brushy Fork

Through a detailed social history of the Black community at Brush Fork, this article demonstrates that the Ohio Valley borderland of the Antebellum Era extended further north, into Coles County, Illinois, than many historians have heretofore understood. In the first half of the nineteenth century, attitudes of whites in Illinois and legal support of slavery made life in central Illinois often hostile for its Black residents as whites often took steps to limit or end Blacks’ freedom. However, Brushy Fork’s remoteness, far from county centers or railroad hubs, offered its African American residents personal security that neither Illinois law or most white citizens of the state were willing to provide.