Illinois Trails & Traces
Portraits and Stories Along the State's Historic Routes

Gary Marx (Author), Daniel Overturf (Author), Dick Durbin (Foreword by)

9780809338481

Paperback / softback, published 14 November 2022

294 pages, 113 illustrations
21 x 27 x 1.3 cm, 1.021 kg

Trails & Traces partners the deft writing of Gary Marx with vivid photography by Daniel Overturf to illuminate ever evolving patterns of travel and settlement. Taking the reader on a journey down early buffalo traces and Native American trails, this book shows how these paths evolved into wagon roads and paved highways. Marx and Overturf explore historic routes ranging from Route 66 to the Underground Railroad, all the way back to post-Ice Age animal migration trails followed by Paleo-Indian people. The authors also examine how rivers, canals, and railroads spurred the rapid rise of Illinois as a modern state.

In this book, Marx and Overturf bring history into the present by including over forty photographic portraits and written profiles of individuals who live along these routes today. Many of the people you will meet on these pages work to preserve and honor the history of these passages. Others profiled here embody the spirit of the old roads and provide a vivid link between past and present. Through this journey, we discover that we’ve all been traveling the same road all along.

• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. The Road In
• 2. Trails Through the Wilderness
• 3. Twin Canoes
• 4. Paths of War
• 5. Up from the Ohio
• 6. The Lincoln Way
• 7. Stagecoach to Canal Boat
• 8. The Railroad Era
• 9. Out of the Mud
• 10. Waves of Humanity
• Afterword
• Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index