History
The Kankakee Swamp wetlands were the home of many beaver and other fur-bearing mammals, which led to the nearby locality being incorporated as the municipality of Beaverville. The nearby towns of Chebanse and St. Anne pay tribute to the area's French-Canadian fur-trading heritage.
During the great drainage of the Kankakee Swamp, starting in the late 19th century, ditches were dug all over eastern Iroquois County to drain the outwash plain. While most of the ditched land became fertile farmland, the sands of far-northeastern Iroquois County resisted profitable farming activity.
In 1944 a predecessor agency of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) began to acquire the land of the future Iroquois County State Wildlife Area. The population of the greater prairie chicken had crashed in Illinois, and the state hoped the flagship species could be induced to rebuild a breeding poulation in the new sanctuary.
Read more about this topic: Iroquois County State Wildlife Area
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification of the spirit.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)