Newman, IL

Newman is a city in Douglas County, set in the prairie country of east-central Illinois. The 2020 census counted 778 residents. The town was laid out in December 1857 by the I.D. and S. Railway and named for B. Newman, one of the proprietors and a son-in-law of the itinerant preacher Peter Cartwright. Douglas County was formed in 1859, but the railroad did not arrive until 1872, so Newman spent its early years waiting for the connection that would shape its growth.

ATTRTichnor Brothers, Publisher / Public domain

Newman incorporated in 1876, and its old center still follows the logic of a railroad town: Broadway storefronts, a community center that houses city offices, the Newman Regional Library, and public parks at the center and east edge. The surrounding township was described in the nineteenth century as nearly all prairie, with timber along Brushy Fork, a landscape that still gives the city its compact shape. Newman is small, but the name, the street plan, and the surviving civic buildings all point back to the long-delayed railroad that brought the town into the wider county.