Charleston is a city in, and the county seat of, Coles County, Illinois, United States. The population was 17,286, as of the 2020 census. The city is house to Eastern Illinois University and has near ties bearing in mind its neighbor, Mattoon. Both are principal cities of the Charleston–Mattoon Micropolitan Statistical Area.

Native Americans lived in the Charleston Place for thousands of years past the first European settlers arrived. With the great tallgrass prairie to the west, beech-maple forests to the east, and the Embarras River and Wabash Rivers between, the Charleston Place provided semi-nomadic Indians admission to a variety of resources. Indians may have deliberately set the “wildfires” which maintained the local mosaic of prairie and oak–hickory forest. Streams gone names such as ‘Indian Creek’ and ‘Kickapoo Creek’ mark the sites of former Indian settlements. One village is said to have been located south of Fox Ridge State Park close a growth of flint.

The in advance history of unity in the Place was marked by uneasy co-existence surrounded by Indians and European settlers. Some settlers lived peacefully with the natives, but fighting arose in the 1810s and 1820s. After Indians allegedly harassed surveying crews, an escalating series of under the weather documented skirmishes occurred along with Indians, settlers, and the Illinois Rangers. Two pitched battles (complete bearing in mind cannon on one side) took place just south of Charleston along “the hills of the Embarrass,” near the retrieve to Lake Charleston park. These conflicts did not slow American settlement, and Indian history in Coles County effectively ended when anything natives were expelled by affect from Illinois after the 1832 Black Hawk War. With the grudging exception of Indian wives, the last natives were driven out by the 1840s.

First contracted by Benjamin Parker in 1826, Charleston was named for Charles Morton, its first postmaster. The city was standard in 1831, but not incorporated until 1865. When Abraham Lincoln’s dad moved to a farm on Goosenest Prairie south of Charleston in 1831, Lincoln helped him move, then left to start his own homestead at New Salem in Sangamon County. Lincoln was a frequent visitor to the Charleston area, though he likely spent more era at the Coles County courthouse than at the house of his father and stepmother. One of the famous Lincoln–Douglas debates was held in Charleston on September 18, 1858, and is now the site of the Coles County fairgrounds and a small museum. Lincoln’s last visit was in 1859, when the forward-looking President visited his stepmother and his father’s grave.