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The stagecoach left daily after breakfast from the Belleville House on the Public Square. Bound for St. Louis, then stations west, it took 25 days to reach San Francisco.
A private night watchman stood guard over downtown. Pleased by his efforts, businessmen thanked "the German" with a wool overcoat for Christmas.
A pair of imported breeding pigs sold for $50 each, though a dollar would buy 9 yards of print fabric.
The post office was open for an hour on Sundays, but when the Mississippi River flooded in June, it put the mail-coach deliveries on hold for a couple days.
The St. Clair County jail had 19 inmates in February, including horse thieves, a boot stealer and a trio who killed a man by throwing him onto railroad tracks outside town.
For six days in June, all Free School (public) students took an assessment exam for the first time.
Welcome to Belleville. The year is 1858 and the city is already four decades old, well-established as the new seat of St. Clair County and incorporated as a city since 1850.
It's the same year the forerunner of the News-Democrat, the Belleville Democrat, came into existence and began vying for readers along with the Belleville Advocate and the German-language Belleviller Zeitung. It made for a lively amount of news, opinion and advertising for residents, who could purchase these weekly newspapers on Wednesday (Advocate), Thursday (Zeitung) and Saturday (Democrat).
On the Public Square, the building of a new courthouse -- a four-story brick structure with massive marble columns -- will get under way before the year is out. It will take three years to complete.
Commerce bustles around the square, offering residents -- among necessities such as shoe leather, buttons and sewing needles -- many luxuries: hand-rolled cigars, bone china from England, soda fountain drinks, a telegraph office and three weekly newspapers.
Main thoroughfares have just been laid with macadam (small broken stones combined with tar), but heavy rains in the spring muck up side streets enough that residents complain in the newspaper about losing boots and the embarassement of pretty skirt hems becoming dirty and weighed down.
On the western periphery of town, breweries thrive near Richland Creek, as does the Belleville Gas & Coke Co., which has begun laying gas lines under the city. In 1856, 35 gas streetlamps light up downtown for the first time. Homes will be online within a couple of years and the sale of lamp oil with plummet.
Thriving city
Workers take home pay from factories and businesses that make vinegar, wool, soda water, beer, wagons, farm equipment and milled flour.
Small-businessmen and artisans craft boots, furniture, cabinets, harnesses, mattresses -- even candy.
They run saloons, hotels, boarding houses, meat markets, livery stables, book stores and a 10-pin alley.
They take photographs, bury the dead, dispense medicine and drive the public omnibuses, multiseated coaches that were the forerunner of the horse-drawn trolley.
Women who have to make a living outside the home are dressmakers, seamstresses, milliners or schoolteachers. At the lower end of the economic strata, they clerk in stores, take in laundry and toil as housekeepers and maids.
Professional men deal in real estate, philanthropy and politics. There are physicians, dentists, a school commissioner, a justice of the peace and lawyers.
Children attend public school in about a dozen rented spaces around town. But a major change is in the air: The state has just enacted a law that will put a tax on real estate to fund education and the building of public schools.
By the numbers
Record keeping was a bit iffy in 1858, but several sources put the population of Belleville at about 2,500. About another 1,900 lived in West Belleville, a separate town with a reputation of being less civil and restrained, inhabited in part by day laborers and coal miners who resided near the factories and mines that dotted the west end. (West Belleville become part of Belleville in 1882.)
It wasn't until the 1830s that the German population in Belleville soared. Before that decade, descendants of French and English families were prominent in town. But many of the German immigrants, fleeing repression and a failed revolution in their homeland, were equally, if not better, educated and skilled. Ready to start a new life in a new land and make their mark.
By 1860, the city had issued for $1.50 per copy its first directory of households and businesses. From the first pages, German names fill the book: Abend, Amlung, Bach, Bunsen, Dintelmann, Eckert.
They became the city's leaders and promoters, taking a vigilant anti-slavery stand, gathering their own vast collection of books for the first lending library in the state, starting a German-language newspaper, the Belleviller Zeitung, and urging free education for all children.
The first mayor of Belleville in 1850 was a German, Theodore J. Krafft. Mayors served one-year terms, so he was replaced by city's most prominent real estate dealer, Edward Abend in 1852. Abend was so popular that he returned as mayor in 1857 and 1858.
Sources:
St. Clair County Historical Society
Belleville Labor & Industry Museum
Belleville City Directory and Business Mirror, 1860
St. Clair County Genealogical Society
Belleville Advocate 1858
Bellevillle Democrat 1858
New York Times archives
www.retro-gram.com/telegramhistory
150th anniversary: Belleville in 1858