The Ottawa Free Trader

The Fox River Country.

On our recent visit to Kane county, we travelled through this beautiful country for the first time. For farming as well as for manufacturing purposes, it is certainly the most desirable portion of this fertile state. The enterprising spirit of its intelligent inhabitants is rapidly converting it into the garden spot of America. The river is from four to five hundred feet wide, about two feet deep from shore to shore for 70 or 80 miles, with a current so rapid that an immense water power is afforded every few miles. In a very few years the shores of this river must present a continuous chain of thriving villages, towns, and manufacturing cities—nothing can prevent it. Even now we meet with a flourishing village every few miles, with mills that would do credit to the oldest states, all the work of a few years, and years of pecuniary embarrassment. In St. Charles there are two grist mills, one double saw mill, an oil mill, a paper mill, carding machines, &c.: and in Geneva there are three mills; and these two villages are only one mile and a half apart. At Elgin, ten miles above, a large woollen factory and several mills are going up. The same spirit of improvement is manifested at Aurora, 10 miles below, where there are several mills in operation, one of which is of the largest class. The population of the latter place is about 1000, and in 1837 there were but one or two houses in the neighborhood. The land is beautifully undulating the whole length of the river, for many miles in width. The soil and climate cannot be surpassed for wheat; and there is an abundance of timber. Thousands of springs, by which the river is fed, are gushing from the hill sides—indeed, the river is but little less than a mighty body of spring water, rolling for ninety miles over a channel of gravel. Kane county appears to be the very heart of this lovely country, and is within a day's drive of Chicago, as good a market for wheat as is in the west. The population of the Fox river country is enterprising and industrious. Many of the farmers are entering largely into the wool growing business and others extensively into the cultivation of wheat. The truth is, nature has done more for the northern than the middle and southern portions of Illinois, and it must become, at no distant day, the most flourishing and most densely populated part of the state, with or without the completion of the canal. The completion would promote the interest of this portion of the state more than the northern. The farmers of the north have a market near at hand without the canal—with it we could transport our pork and wheat to the best markets with but a trifling expense. Complete the canal, and our produce will command almost as good prices here in cash as at Chicago.—Springfield Register.