Jacksonville is a city in Morgan County, Illinois, United States. The population was 19,446 at the 2010 census. It is the county chair of Morgan County. It is home to Illinois College, Illinois School for the Deaf, and the Illinois School for the Visually Impaired. Jacksonville is the principal city of the Jacksonville Micropolitan Statistical Area, which includes anything of Morgan and Scott counties.

Jacksonville was normal by European Americans on a 160-acre tract of home in the middle of Morgan County in 1825, two years after the county was founded. The founders of Jacksonville, Illinois were settlers from New England. These people were “Yankee” settlers, that is to say they were descended from the English Puritans who arranged New England in the 1600s. They were part of a acceptance of New England farmers who headed west into what was next the wilds of the Northwest Territory during the ahead of time 1800s. Most of them arrived hence of the execution of the Erie Canal and the halt of the Black Hawk War. The Yankee migration to Illinois was a outcome of several factors, one of which was the overpopulation of New England. The old buildup Yankee population had large families, often bearing up to ten children in one household. Most people were expected to have their own piece of land to farm, and due to the huge and nonstop population boom, land in New England became rare as every son claimed his own farmstead. As a result, there was not enough land for every family to have a self-sustaining farm, and Yankee settlers began desertion New England for the Midwestern United States. When they arrived in what is now Jacksonville there was nothing but dense virgin reforest and wild prairie, the “Yankee” New Englanders laid out farms, constructed roads, erected organization buildings and received post routes. They brought similar to them many of their Yankee New England values, such as a passion for education, establishing many schools as well as staunch maintain for abolitionism. They were mostly members of the Congregationalist Church though some were Episcopalian. Due to the second Great Awakening some of them had converted to Methodism and Presbyterianism even though some others became Baptist, before upsetting to what is now Jacksonville. Jacksonville, like some extra parts of Illinois, would be culturally definitely continuous following early New England culture for most of its forward history.

The town was laid out on a treeless prairie and along a own up road that ran from Springfield to the Illinois River.

The town grew at a rude rate, and a town square was quickly developed. In 1829, the Presbyterian Reverend John M. Ellis worked to found a new “seminary of learning” in the other state of Illinois. A charity of Congregational students at Yale College heard just about his plans and headed westward to insist the supplementary school. These students were a part of the famous “Yale Bands,” groups of students who normal several colleges in the frontier, what is now the Midwest. Illinois College was one of the first institutions of progressive learning in the Midwest. A further courthouse was built on the square, churches were constructed, railroads were planned, and stores and taverns were built. By 1834, Jacksonville had the largest population of any city in the come clean of Illinois, vastly outnumbering Chicago (only founded the year before). In the 1830s, the town was on the pathway of Native Americans who were innate forcibly removed by the federal meting out to west of the Mississippi. The Potawatomi passed through here in 1838 on what they called their Trail of Death as they were motivated from their customary homelands to the teetotal and barren Indian Territory to the west.