Abingdon, IL

Abingdon is a Knox County city in west-central Illinois, about 50 miles west of Peoria. The 2020 census counted 2,951 residents. Abraham Davis Swarts laid out the town in 1836 after the settlement began in 1828, naming it for Abingdon, Maryland. Education shaped Abingdon early: Hedding College opened in 1855 on land associated with Swarts’s original vision for the town, and the college’s former site later became Hedding Grade School. That history gives the city an unusual through-line from nineteenth-century college town to present-day school community.

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Today Hedding Grade School serves students through fifth grade, while Abingdon-Avon High School ties the city to the surrounding Avon area in Community Unit School District 276. The John Mosser Public Library carries the local reading, genealogy, and meeting-room side of civic life, and the city park occupies ground used for an early schoolhouse. Illinois Route 41 runs through town, pointing north toward Galesburg and south toward Bushnell. Abingdon is small enough that old college stories still sit close to current school routines, but its daily map is practical: school, library, churches, park, Route 41, and the farms around Knox County.