Bob Read
docbob@jayco.net

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Franklin, Illinois has a grip on my memory over a half century after I shook its dust off my shoes. In those days a town well anchored the southeast corner of the Village Park. It was said "if you drink the hard, hard water from that well, your soul can never leave Franklin". Believe it friends, believe it.

Franklin is situated in flat, loam-rich Morgan County west of Springfield and east of the Illinois River. Jacksonville is the County Seat, home of two small colleges, state schools for the blind and deaf, now called hearing and sight impaired to be politically correct, and in the time of these stories, a state hospital for the insane. Today Morgan County boasts several industrial establishments, but in my memory, the county is "farming country". It was believed that planting corn in Morgan County was dangerous because the seeds may sprout and grow so rapidly that the unwary may not get out of the way of burgeoning spikes.

In the mid 1930s Franklin obtained its first all season, mud- proof connection to Jacksonville when the concrete strip of state route 104 wandered the necessary thirteen miles and then drifted east to Waverly. But that will be a story for later.

The stories that follow are memories of the decades of the thirties and forties when we, like many friends, had no automobile and Jacksonville was an impossible thirteen miles away. Franklin was the social, shopping, and worshiping center for a close circle of folks who knew each other well and were often kin, close or a bit removed.

What follows is not intended to be a documented history, nor are the stories ordered in sequence of happening, rather as they keep my memory company. These are impressions, which contain a different, perhaps a deeper truth. Memories, which I hope, will conjure a vision of tiny Franklin Illinois, population 500, as it was in a time of hardship and innocence.

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