Washburn, IL

Washburn is a village mostly in Woodford County, Illinois, with a small portion extending north into Marshall County. Hiram Echols founded the settlement in 1850 as Uniontown, and the name became Washburn in 1857. That early change sits at the center of the village story, which grew from a town site into an agricultural community in the north-central Illinois countryside.

ATTRJoe Mabel / CC BY-SA 3.0

Snag Creek runs through Washburn on its way toward the Illinois River near Chillicothe, giving the village a water route beneath its farm-road geography. The Peoria metropolitan area is the larger regional reference point, but Washburn keeps its own compact center and cross-county edge. The village's location is easy to picture: fields and drainage channels opening in every direction, the Illinois River country nearby, and a named town site that has held its place since the middle of the nineteenth century. Washburn is a small Illinois community whose story is written in Hiram Echols's original plat, a changed name, and the creek that carries its water toward the river.