Wenona, IL

Wenona grew up where rail lines crossed open prairie. The Illinois Central laid out the town in 1855, after track crews, a depot, freight house, and post office had appeared on the site. The line turned the settlement into a shipping point for grain and a trading stop for surrounding farms. Wenona later developed East Wenona as a separate municipality before the two communities were brought together. Its early civic life included a seminary, churches, a union fair, and gatherings for Civil War veterans.

Coal gave Wenona a second, more industrial chapter. The Wenona Coal Company opened a mine in 1882, and at its busiest it employed about 550 miners; during the mining years and World War I, the town reached 1,892 people. The mine closed in 1924. Decades later, the old slag pile rose above town as a Cold War radar station, watching air traffic for the Chicago Air Defense System. The station lasted only from 1958 to 1959, but the mound remains part of Wenona’s landscape, now marked by trees and the memory of the coal era.