Scope and Contents:
This collection contains a series of Prairie Settlers articles written by Marvin Soloman and Barbara Lawrence in 1980 about Gershom and Willard Flagg, members of the Flagg family of Madison County, Illinois. The articles were created for the University News Services at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville (SIU-E).
Gershom Flagg (1792-1857) was born in Vermont and moved to Madison County, Illinois in 1818, where he worked as a farmer and postmaster. He also served as a representative to the Illinois General Assembly in 1846 and a delegate to the Illinois Constitutional Convention in 1847. Willard Flagg (1829-1878), the son of Gershom, graduated from Yale College and helped his father on the family farm. He served as a member of the first Board of Trustees for the institution that became the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he worked as an Illinois State Senator from 1869-1873.
The collection of 33 articles includes quotations from the letters and journals of Gershom and Willard Flagg which are located at SIU-E. They cover the period of time from Gershom's decision to move west from Vermont in 1816 to Willard's attendance at Yale in the 1850s. The articles relate the family members to developments on the local, state, and national levels. They were written by Marvin Soloman of the Lovejoy Library at SIU-E and Barbara Lawrence, who also co-edited The Flagg Correspondence: Selected Letters, 1816-1854 which includes many of the letters referenced by the articles.
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