Griggsville was literally born with her boots on, more a transplant than the product of pioneering. Like a movie set she sprung to life almost ready made, complete with New England school marms. Unlike Kentucky's "dark and bloody ground" her log-cabin, coon-skin cap days were few. Forerunners in the 1820's such as the Boones, Elledges, Scholls, Phillipses, Sacketts and Batemans it is true, skinned a few bears and shot some wolves; but when the floodgates of migration opened in the 1830's frame dwellings, stores and shops sprang up like mushrooms. There were Theodore Dickinson's boarding house and blacksmith shop (1833), Jesse G. Crawford's dwelling and carpentry shop (1834), Uriah Brown's house (1833). the "old post office" built as a store (1834) by John Crow, who was succeeded by I. A. Hatch & Co., Stanford, Jones and Griggs store (1833) , Ayres and Lombard store and bank (1834), the Weagley House hotel built by Wm. Lippincott (1834), C. F. Gibbs tailor shop (1835), Sterne & Alexander store (1836), a female and a male academy (1836), Congregational and Methodist churches (1837), Lynde & Woodward store (1837), Parsons & Edwards store (1837), George W. Purkett's drug store (1837), Charles V. Perkins saddle and harness shop (1837), a warehouse at Griggsville landing (1836), and numerous dwellings including eight laid out by Capt. James A. Collins on five-acre lots west of town and built in 1840.

Important to this building boom was a Kentucky carpenter, Jesse G. Crawford, who left a remarkable shop record for the years 1834-78. Peleg Gardner of Maine and Henry Phillips of North Carolina were other early builders. Early on there were saw mills on Blue Creek and McGee Creek, and some homes were framed with walnut such as Ayres, Hatch and Lasbury, but at an early date white pine lumber was coming down from the north by the lake-river route. A canal from Lake Michigan to the Illinois River was completed in 1847. Invention of the circle saw brought about standardized lumber sizes and balloon framing, which speeded construction. James McWilliams enhanced his sizeable fortune with a lumber yard at Griggsville Landing.

As a frontier boom town, Griggsville was a rival of Chicago, then a struggling settlement in the swamps on Lake Michigan. The rivals were both in Pike County before Pike was split up. The first industries were pork packing and flour milling. Freye's Mill on Blue Creek under the partnership of Freye & Stanford, which had started in 1824 as Garret Van Dusen's "little corn cracker," did a flourishing business, shipping flour to Boston by way of Now Orleans. By 1842 Big Blue Hollow had three flour mills, a saw mill and a store. At Griggsville Landing in 1844, Captain Samuel Rider designed and built the Olittippa, a paddle­wheel boat of shallow draft (10") powered by horses on deck. The Timelian. and Prairie State, steam-powered, also designed by Captain Rider, were built in 1847, the letter by Ayres & Lombard. Banking was carried on by Ayres & Lombard in their store as early as the late 1830’s under the name of the Bank of Pike County. A photograph of the store is in Memoirs of Griggsville. This bank, like many State "wild catters" of the times issued "green back" currency, a specimen of which, a $3 bill, is preserved in a Nebraska museum. A cashier, Robert McK Ludlow, was brought in from New York City in the early 1850's. Subsequently Griggsville National Bank was founded with James McWilliams, president, and Benjamin Newman, vice president.

Griggsville was never a raw frontier town built around a saloon and brothel. As early as 1833 there was a Union Sabbath School and by 1834 A Lyceum Temperance Society. Actually there wasn't much call for a saloon with whiskey 20 cents per gallon and on tap free in the grocery stores. When the James McWilliams family arrived in 1834, Father Shinn was holding Methodist services in the Shinn Meeting House one mile east of town. Most of the people came in families, and Griggsville was full of children with an estimated 85 babies born in the 1830's. By 1832 there was a log-cabin school before the town was laid out. Professional people came with the tide: Dr. J. M. Higgins in 1834, Dr. Reuben Batch in 1836 and Dr. James Petrie in 1837. First lawyers were J. P. Jordan, 1837, followed by James A. McDougall, later a California attorney general and senator. A Masonic Lodge was chartered in 1837 and an IOOF Lodge in 1850. By 1855 Griggsville was humming with 1, 116 people and 400 dwellings and stores; Pittsfield's population 950, Barry's 655 and Perry's 628. The Illinois Valley Fair, sponsored by the Pike County Agricultural Society, had it's beginning in 1852 and the first newspaper, the Independent in 1853.

Out on the wild frontier how was it that Griggsville escaped the travail of pioneering? It was due to three simultaneous historic events about 1830: completion of the great canals linking the rivers and Great Lakes into a water-way all the way from Boston and New York to Griggsville Lauding; the coming into its own of the river steamboat following its invention by Fulton in 1807; and evacuation of the Indiana after the Black Hawk War of 1832. The floodgates of migration were suddenly opened, and handbooks recommended the new states of Indiana (1816) and Illinois (1818), advising that the best Kentucky lands were sold out.

The great Erie Canal, 365 miles long, completed in 1827, linked the Hudson River with Lake Erie at Buffalo; the Ohio & Erie Canal (1830) took the passenger from Lake Erie at Cleveland to the Ohio River at Portsmouth; and a canal at Louisville, Kentucky, circumvented the rapids on the Ohio River where river pirates had been such a bane to flatboatmen, The route continued down the Ohio and up the Mississippi and Illinois to Griggsville Landing. What had been a torturous land route over the Appalachians was now a pleasant boat ride by river, lake and canal with plenty of room for household and farming equipment. Lycurgus Eastman took this water route from Boston to Griggsville in 1834 at a cost of $119.11, covering 2, 154 miles in forty days. Before leaving Boston he visited David R. Griggs, who had helped lay out Griggsville the year before, at his place or business at No. 22 Commercial Wharf, Boston. Perhaps Griggs' had taken this route himself. When he left Griggsville Landing after erecting a sign pointing east and reading “4 miles to Griggsville." he might have gone home to Boston by the lake-river-canal route or he might have gone down the Mississippi to Now Orleans and from there taken the sea route.

Likewise, English immigrants bound for Griggsville could go all the way by water. In 1831, Rebecca Burlend with her husband, John, and five small children were two months and a few days sailing from Liverpool to New Orleans and about 12 days by river steamboat to Phillips Ferry (Griggsville Landing). Some came by land. The National Road, authorized by Congress and President Thomas Jefferson in 1806 to extend from Baltimore to St. Louis was completed as far as Vandalia, Illinois, in the 1830's. And there were combinations of land and water routes using embarkation points on the Ohio River such as Pittsburgh.

River steamboats, stern-wheelers and side-wheelers, were ready when the canal-lake-rivers linkage was completed in the early 1830's. Since Fulton's invention in 1807 these boats bad become efficient and popular. Pilots had learned to "read the water" and "run the rivers." By 1827 the Illinois River had its first steamboat, the Mechanic.

Hostile Indiana were not a factor in the Griggsville boom. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was interpreted by President Jackson to be an order for their departure. In 1832 the Sauk were driven from their Illinois villages and across the Mississippi in a pathetic series of events known as the Black Hawk War, in which Abraham. Lincoln served as a militiaman. Interestingly, an early Griggsville stalwart, Leonard Butterfield, a friend of the Cherokees traveled with them on their "trail of tears” before settling with his fellow New Hampshire Baptists in Griggsville.

The flood of immigrants come from three sources: "Westerners," so-called, from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Tennessee, about 45%; "Easterners" from the New England States, New York, New Jersey and Delaware about 31% and English families, many from Yorkshire, about 12%. The remainder were southerners from Virginia and the Carolinas, about 5%, Irish about 3 1/2 % and several Swiss and German families. John McWilliams in his Recollections of Griggsville describes them this way: "Western" men wore a garment they called a "wamus" made of red flannel which came down to a point in front, leaving strings of flannel long enough to go around the waist and tie. It was a convenient garment to work in and warm. They threshed wheat by leading horses over the grain to "trample it out." The "Easterners" wore guernsey frocks made of a coarse material--"pepper and salt." They threshed wheat by hand with a flail. How the little English immigrant boys loved to mimic the down east Yankees with their quaint manners and nasal colloquialisms. The three groups, distinctly different but without a language barrier, got along famously from the start, and present-day Griggsville descendents are products of their intermarriages.

The "Westerners" came first, most of them steamboating down the Ohio and up the Mississippi and Illinois. They included, besides the earlier Boones, Elledges, Scholls, Phillipses and Batemans, George Yates (to Naples, 1823), George W. Hinman (1829), Josias Wade (1830), Daniel Cadwell (1830), Jesse G. Crawford (1833), James Shinn (1832), Daniel Shinn, Benjamin Newman, Robert Allen, and John Orr. Many of these ‘Westerners" were descendants of the Scotch-Irish and Scotch who immigrated in vast numbers before the Revolutionary War, settling in the hardscrabble Piedmont because the tidewater was taken up and just waiting in the Appalachians for rich new country to open up. The Scotch-Irish, having spent 150 years in the bogs of Northern Ireland were the only immigrants to come to America with pre-pioneering experience. They are the people who gave us our folkways, ballads and frontier traditions. Scotch and Scotch-Irish who helped to build Griggsville were the McWilliams, Lairds, McLaughlins, Kenneys, Williamsons and others.

The "Easterners" were David R. Griggs, Joshua R. Stanford and Nathan N. Jones, who laid out Griggsville in 1832-33, Theodore Dickinson (1831), blacksmith, Dr. Reuben Hatch (1834), E. G. Farrand (1838), the Riders of Cape Cod, Ayres, Lombards, Hoyts, Lawtons, J. K. Moore, Bloods, Butterfields, Tylers, Petries, Winns and others.

The English included many Yorkshire families: Bickerdykes (1828), Burlends (1831), Wartons (1833), Simpkins (1836), Turnbulls (1839), Cravens, Georges, Mirfields, Steads (1856). From other English counties came the Wilsons (1831), Shawls (1831), Penstones (1849), Lasburys, Harveys, Balls, Sleights, Bashfords, and Hopkins. By 1846 the Burlends has prospered sufficiently for Rebecca to return to Yorkshire for a visit and to bring back her daughter, Mary Yelliott and husband. Her book, A True Picture of Emigration, published in England in 1848, sold 2, 000 copies in Leeds alone. Also returning to Yorkshire for a visit was Thomas Simpkins, "the land king," who had seven farm hands living in his household (1860 census) and had introduced white-faced Herfords. These visits and Rebecca's book in­duced other immigrants from England; in fact, James Farrand related that he saw an early edition of Rebecca's book in England which gave the names of a number of families who came to Pike County in consequence of her visit and book.

To early settlers the knoll which became "Griggsville Knoll" was irresistible with its long waving prairie grass, its gigantic elms(some say the largest in the world), its rich soil and its proximity to the Illinois River yet back from the flood area. It had been known as Sacketts Harbor and Bateman's Gap*. When the three New Englanders, Griggs, Jones and Stanford laid out the town in 1832-33, they found five "Westerners" in possession of the site and vicinity: Daniel Cadwell, Andrew Phillips (son of Nimrod who owned the ferry), Marshall Key, George Hinman and Henry Bateman. The founders bought up part of these holdings north and south of Quincy Avenue and took over the cabin (still standing in 1987) of Daniel Cadwell. This log-cabin, across Stanford Street from the Dix/Skinner House and now weather-boarded over the logs, was used as the first store, boarding house and post office. The first town lot was bought by Dr. Nathan Phillips for $75. Griggs stayed only a year or two before returning to his lucrative flour business on the Boston water­front. It was there that Lycurgus Eastman consulted him in 1834 about going west. Probably others did too. One wonders if Griggs in Boston traded in the hard-wheat flour coming out of the Freye-Stanford mill a few years later under the brand name, "Queen of the West." Stanford and Jones honored Griggs by giving his name to the town because he had helped them financially and because no other town in the world had the name, nor has any since. Jones and Stanford stayed on, employed in selling lots, merchandizing and other business; Jones becoming the first post master. Frame buildings started springing up, as already related.

So much for the transplanting of Griggsville to the Illinois wilderness. It was a composite of three distinct but congenial peoples: the Scotch, Scotch-Irish from the hill country, the "down east" Yankees and the old-country English.

*Later Griggsville acquired the nickname of "Shinnville" because of so many Shinns. Perry was known as Booneville because of the many Boones from Kentucky.