Pittsfield is a city in and the county chair of Pike County, Illinois, United States. The population was 4,576 at the 2010 census, an accrual from 4,211 in 2000.

Pittsfield was initially contracted by settlers from New England. These settlers were of out of date Yankee stock, descended from the English Puritans who had founded and decided New England in the 1600s. A work of settlers from Pittsfield, Massachusetts headed west and fixed this region of Illinois in 1820. When they arrived the Place was a virgin wilderness, they build up farms, roads and paperwork buildings.

As county seat, the town was one of the various places in central Illinois where Abraham Lincoln practiced pretense as part of the circuit court, working upon 34 cases along with 1839 and 1852. One local newspaper, now known as the Pike Press, was next owned by complementary of Lincoln’s superior secretaries, John Nicolay, and featured an editorial containing one of the first known suggestions of Lincoln as the Republican nominee for the presidency. Pittsfield was also home to John Hay, Lincoln’s personal secretary, ambassador to England below President William McKinley, later Secretary of State for Theodore Roosevelt and creator of the Open Door Policy.

Pittsfield is the self-proclaimed “Pork Capital” of the Midwest, owing to the long chronicles of pork production in the region, which fed into the large meat-packing industry of Chicago. Though agriculture in the region is no longer consequently dependent on pork, the town still hosts a yearly “Pig Days” festival.