Encounters
''loam'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜encounter｜ENC｜20260904134559-27-•
The town’s mud was notorious. When wet, the black loam of central Illinois became knee-deep “prairie gumbo.” A woman from the East declared that nobody “can know the definition of ‘Mud’ until they come to Springfield. I think scrapers and mats must be fast selling articles here.” The family of Elizabeth Capps, who called Springfield “a low, muddy place where it was a common thing for carriages and horses to mire in the mud around the public square,” left the city for high and dry Mt. Pulaski. Mud rendered the sidewalks, such as they were, impassable. The streets were even worse; in foul weather they “approached the condition of a quagmire with dangerous sink-holes where the boatmen’s phrase ‘no bottom’ furnished the only description.” Not until 1870 was the town square paved, finally making its thoroughfares passable for wagon teams in winter. Garbage and refuse made the muddy streets even more repellant. The streets became “the dumping ground for the community rubbish so that the gutters were filled with manure, discarded clothing and all kinds of trash, threatening the public health with their noxious effluvium.” Roaming livestock compounded matters. Throughout the antebellum period, hogs and cattle roamed freely throughout the town. The hogs rubbed against fences and house corners, leaving them filthy.
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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