Carrier Mills, formerly Carrier’s Mills and Morrilsville, also known as Catskin, is a village in Saline County, Illinois, United States. The population was 1,672 at the 2020 census. Carrier Mills was named after George Washington Carrier’s proverb and grist mills, and was one of the into the future Cairo and Vincennes Railroad boomtowns. Founded as a mill town, and after that a coal mining community, Carrier Mills has slowly loose 44% of its population back the 1920 census tall of 3,000, due to the shuttering of the local coal industry. The village has primarily become a bedroom community, located seven miles (11 km) southwest of Harrisburg, which is the village’s main source of employment, entertainment, and shopping. It is the third largest community in the Harrisburg Micropolitan Statistical Area outside of Eldorado and Harrisburg, and included in the Illinois-Indiana-Kentucky Tri-State Area. Carrier Mills also has a large African American population at 15%, compared to its neighbors, due to migration from the straightforward community of Lakeview, the oldest African American concurrence in the disclose of Illinois.

The village is host to the annual Catskin Days Fair and Parade, a multi-day fall festival thing in October commemorating the records and culture of the village.

The first settler in the village now known as Carrier Mills was Hampton Pankey. He was moreover one of the earliest settlers in Saline County. Pankey was animate in the area in 1804 or 1805 and he registered his land success in 1814, the antiquated date that was manageable to register them. In not quite 1811 the settlers began building blockhouses for tutelage from American Indians. A blockhouse was built on his land in this area this time. Pankey had seven daughters and three sons. One of those sons was John Pankey, who was one of the founding fathers of Harrisburg.

The village was surveyed by Benjamin D Lewis and platted in November 1872 for William Housely as Morrillsville, named after H. L. Morrill, the Cairo and Vincennes Railroad superintendent who hermetic a genuine estate agreement with mill owner G. W. Carrier.