From the mouth of the Wabash, the roads to Cairo were a bit on the creepy side - Big Barn road heading south from Calico road to Old Shawneetown twisted and turned, and, with the clouds, I got kind of disoriented (I forgot I had a GPS receiver in the car with me), and the "Deliverance" theme started playing in my head. Old Shawneetown had this cool old (if, well, creepy) bank building, across from a biker bar. There were several town dogs poking around in the middle of Main Street in Old Shawneetown, which is at the western end of a big old bridge across the Ohio from Kentucky.
Old Shawneetown, IL
I got to Cairo after dark, and what I saw was quite sad. The courthouse and the customs house, both antebellum, were nicely preserved, and there was a ritzy neighborhood ("Millionaire's Row") northwest of the downtown area that still had a bit of charm. But overall, this town is literally falling down. Buildings are collapsing and the only businesses that looked functional in downtown were dimly lit bars. I later found out that the last economically viable industry in town, a soybean processing plant, closed its doors in 2003, leaving the town of Cairo with a dwindling population and little economic base. I was hoping to grab a bite to eat here - it was about 7:30 - but honestly I didn't feel like sticking around long enough to eat. Sorry, Cairo Chamber of Commerce.
anybody home in Cairo?
But I did have a mission in Cairo, and that was to get to the end of Fort Defiance State Park - the very southern tip of Illinois...
last sale for the Bass brothers
I was looking forward to seeing Cairo (KAY-roh) - it's got a long history at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Ohio. It was a highly strategic location for U.S. Grant during the Civil War, and it was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Often Cairo was the first "free" place that southern blacks on their way to Chicago experienced, and paranoid whites in the first half of the 20th century did not always welcome them with open arms. Race demonstrations after the "suicide" hanging of a black inmate in the local jail led to reforms in the 1960s, but rather than hiring and serving blacks, the white business owners in Cairo simply closed shop and left town.
cricket, cricket