BISHOP HILL COLONY BISHOP HILL Colony came in 1846-7. It was entirely a religious movement-- a rebellion against religious intolerance and bigotry. It is a singular fact in the history of mankind that there is hardly an exception, no, not one, where a people, after much suffering for religion's sake, long and cruel persecutions, and many suffering death rather than renounce the right of freedom of opinions, and often great communities driven from their native land--fleeing and skulking fugitives, or extirpated by the sword and fagot, yet when their religious ideas have taken hold and gathered converts and became strong, fearless and conquering, then those martyrs to the freedom of religious opinion invariably are ready to turn and inflict upon others who do not adopt their worship the same stern and cruel persecutions that they themselves had suffered from. Martin Luther's rebellion against the Catholic Church took complete possession of Sweden, and the Holy Lutheran church became the State religion; and when once in power it ruled that country with an iron hand. The Church and State were one, and that one was the Church, -- keen-eyed, vigilant and sleepless in the hunt of those who dared to think that they were not God's appointed guardians of all men's bodies and souls. Their entire idea of religious freedom of opinion was to present to every one the Church creed, and with the presentation there was no alternative except the manacles and the dungeon. Thus have worked out in the long time inevitable growths of Luther's religious rebellion. He fought religious intolerance, stood ready to die for the freedom of opinion, and the moment he was enabled to seize the power he was just as earnest and determined as had ever been the most bigoted Catholic to restrict all liberty of thought in the blind submission to his narrow creeds. Eric Jansen was the founder of the sect that constituted the Bishop Hill Colony. In his native Sweden, when a young man, his mind began to find many and strong objections to the Lutheran Church. He abdicated the faith--preached a new doctrine; was bitterly persecuted by the bishops, the ruling power in Sweden, and, like every new religion the world has ever known, "the blood of the martyr is the end of the Church; " he gathered rapidly about him converts and fellow sufferers. In three brief years after he had commenced proclaiming the new faith he had gathered over 1,100 followers. His first convert and ablest lieutenant was mr. Hedine. Jansen and Hedline went to prison together, and many times had they been consigned to the gloomy dungeons, where they could only peep out upon the free air and distant sunshine through iron grates. Every visitation from the Church authorities became more and more severe, until finally Jansen became a fugitive from his native country and in disguise fled to America. When his converts found he had fled to this country, that here all men could enjoy freedom of conscience and speech, a colony was organized consisting of about 700 members, and they came as soon as they could to this country and selected their future homes in township 14, range 3. This point was fixed upon by Olef Olson, who had come in advance and made the selection.. These immigrants came to Henry County in 1847. They were very poor and for a long time lived in miserable tents and rude caves dug in the sides of the hills, with but scant and innutritious food; they presented a scene of squalor and suffering. The majority of them were ignorant in their own country, belonging to the enslaved peasant class, and when suddenly dumped in such a great drove into a new hemisphere--a new and strange world indeed to them--with even less of the necessities of life than they had in their old homes, it is not strange that here their sufferings were extremely severe. The few who had possessed property and were better trained to care for their physical wants, had precipitately fled from the land of oppression, leaving their property or selling at such sacrifices as soon made them as poor as their poor companions, and whose sufferings were intensified by the greater change in their lives. But one or two in the colony understood or could speak a word of English, and hence, as they knew nothing of the language of the country, the climate, soil or its agriculture, commerce, wants, or its diseases and remedies, they were as completely lost to all these things that are imperative to a people to know as if they had been suddenly transported to one of the distant planets. In their favor was the fact that the Swedes are a people trained through generations to the practice of pinching frugality and untiring industry. They are docile, moral and law-abiding; accustomed to severe taskmasters, they plod in silence, and bow in humblest respect to those in authority. Their country of rigorous climate; their long line of tyrants and cruel rulers have through many generations affected the whole people physically and mentally, and the sudden transplanting of a large body of such people to this genial climate and yet more gentle and genial government, with no previous preparation for the change, was like overfeeding the shipwrecked and starving when found ready to die of hunger and thirst. Therefore, of the great change, the squalor and ignorance of the colonists, came sickness and death, stalking the fold in horrid carnival. This certainly is no overdrawn picture of the sad condition of the colonists when the cholera broke out among them in 1849. The scythe of death then literally mowed a fat harvest. Strong men and women were stricken, and in a few hours were in their coffinless graves. So swiftly did the grim reaper work, that no effort was made to procure coffins or boxes for the dead; relays of men were night and day digging shallow graves, in which the bodies, wrapped in a blanket or scanty cloth, were thrown and in solemn silence covered. A one-horse cart was the hearse that was used to gather the bodies, singly and in numbers, and haul them to the graveyard. For many weeks this horse was not unhitched for a moment from his vehicle, night or day; and it is a well authenticated fact that two men dug their own graves--working hard in the forenoon in the very graves in which they were sleeping peacefully and forever in the afternoon! Here was the sad reality, the hideous carnival of death, surpassing in horrors the imaginings of the painter, when with a free hand he caused to stand out upon the canvas that startling and repulsive picture, "The Dance of Death." Another incident in the history of the colony, not so horrible in its aspects, yet more lasting in its effects, occurred in 1850. Eric Jansen was shot to death by John Root, in May, 1850. Eric Jansen, "the Prophet, " was the founder of the new religion, the head of the Colony Church, and their supreme ruler in temporal as well as spiritual affairs. He was a man of courage and strong convictions. He ruled his people absolutely, and he did not delegate or divide his power with any of his subalterns. The designation of "Eric Johnson, the Prophet," is a key to his character as a leader--a religious enthusiast, stern, inflexible and bigoted. Had he lived in the days of the crusades he would have organized his army, and led them, if necessary, into the jaws of death, and with his flashing sword have literally hewn his way to the Holy Sepulcher. One of the tenets of Jansen's new faith was that all property should be held in common, and was subject always to the rule of the Church leader only, and that the Prophet should protect all the female of the order. Root, the man who killed Jansen, came from Stockholm and joined the colony in 1848. He married a cousin of Eric Jansen. The key to the tragedy that followed this marriage is given by the solemn and curious marriage contract that Jansen had the parties enter into. It provided that if Root should ever leave the colony he should go alone, leaving the wife to enjoy in the colony all the rights and immunities of the church and colony. What would any intelligent man in this day and age think if his intended preacher presented him such a marriage contract to sign? But Jansen the first and supreme thing in temporal matters was to secure every right of his Church, and before these--the interests of his close church corporation--even the solemn and sacred rights of the marriage state must give way. Thus, before Root and Jansen's cousin were married, there was a way provided for their separation. The command, "Whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder." was provisionally provided for, and under the cruel words of that contract--words that would eat, like the tightening irons into the victim's flesh, and become an endless torture that could only be cured by the sufferer being set free and his marriage shackles stricken from him. It was thus this foolish couple entered into the bonds of marriage. After a short time he tired of Jansen's religion, and his rigid iron rule, and Jansen was as soon, probably, tired of Root's presence in the flock over which he kept guard. Jansen evidently regarded Root with disfavor, and this grew to be mutual between the two men. Root abjured the faith and left the community. He returned in a short time and claimed his wife and newly born child. The wife objected to going with him, and the Church peremptorily objected to her going. Root at one time got her into a wagon and was fleeing when he was overtaken, and the woman and child were taken from him by force and carried back to the colony. Again he got her away and took her to Chicago, and Jansen's men brought her back. Root talked to all who would listen to him, and told his story that Jansen had kidnapped his wife--had separated them. Rot evidently brooded over the matter, and made up his mind to wreak a terrible revenge for his real or imagined wrongs, and he prepared himself and came to Cambridge at the commencement of the May term of Court in 1850, and just as Court adjourned for noon, he walked up to Jansen and without a word shot him down, --firing two shots, but one taking effect, the first, and Jansen fell dead. Root was arrested, took a change of venue to Knox County, was there tried, convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to the penitentiary for the term of two years. He was pardoned by the Govenor and returned to the county, and went to Rock Island, and then to Chicago, where he died. Jansen was an impracticable fanatic, very religious and severe and unrelenting; and his death freed the Colony from his rule and also from his Utopian ideas of the rights of property and government. Root was both a foolish and a vicious man, and the shot that killed Jansen wrecked his own life--wrecked it to that degree that the grave must have come to him in the prime of life as a welcome refuge from this breathing world. We have told of this tragedy simply to indicate its great effects upon the Swedes who composed Jansen's Colony. Soon after Jansen's death there was an improvement in the credit and sanding of those people; property no longer was held in common, and gradually the people became as other citizens, each practicing his chosen religion without let or hindrance, and the process of becoming real and valuable Americans characterized the whole membership of the Colony, until now their neighbors in the county willingly testify that they constitute a body of our best citizens and are noted for less of the baneful, clannish spirit than probably any other body of foreign people in the country. The Colonists first settled along the south bank of the South Edward's Creek. The site was a beautiful one. It was covered sparsely with a small growth of oak timber. In 1849 they erected a four story brick building 100 x 45 feet. This was a colony-house, and here the afflicted and helpless were more comfortably housed then they had been in the mud caves and ragged tents. A large frame building was soon after erected for a church. Such was their religious zeal that a house of God was to be provided before they had made shelters for themselves. To the credit of the people it must be stated that they established an English school as early as January, 1847, thus showing that they came to America to be Americans. A Presbyterian clergyman, Rev. Talbot, taught some 35 scholars in a mud cave from January to July. At times he was assisted by his daughter, Mrs. Pollock, afterwards the wife of Eric Jansen and now his widow. Talbot taught the second school, and Nelson Simmons, M.D., was employed about one year as their third schoolmaster. The progress of improvement was steady, and on a grist-mill on a small scale was soon in operation on the Edwards Creek, at the Hill. Two saw mills were also soon under way on the same stream. One of them they purchased. The construction of a steam grist-mill was commenced in 849, under the direction of Eric Jansen, but not completed till after his death. The high moral conduct of these people soon convinced those living nearest them that nothing was to be apprehended from them, as their creed was essentially harmless to all outsiders. And in the hour of need the Colonists found fast friends in the majority of those near them. By the year 851 they had grown and strengthened, and had built a first-class steam flouring-mill, which turned out a large surplus of flour beyond the wants of the Colony. From living in such poor habitation at first, and from being unaccustomed to the climate, great numbers sickened and died. Especially among the children was the mortality fearful. From the terrible mortally caused by cholera and the leaving of those in fear of the disease, the Colony was at one time reduced to 414 souls. These survived the plague and had the hardihood to remain. At the time Mr. Jansen was murdered, in May, 1850 (an account of which is given elsewhere), they were suffering from sickness, desertion and death; and the fact that these had the fortitude to remain amid such a multiplicity of discouragements, was proof conclusive of the earnestness of their conviction that they were called to suffer, and, if need be, to die in demonstrating the true methods of Christian fellowship. In erecting the large buildings for dwellings, in the manufacture of cloth, in the erection of large mills, in their frugal industry, and in their honest endeavors to promote their welfare, spiritually and temporally, during all these trials of poverty, sickness, death, desertion and strangers in a strange land, a lesson of commendable zeal may be learned and an example of fortitude which has few equals in the history of the country. By the year 1853 or '54 affairs were brightening and prospects grew better. Other emigrants came, other buildings were erected and the hopes of the earl Colonists began to be realized. Brick buildings, capable of accommodating from eight to double that number of families, were erected. In these each family had one or more rooms. All worked together, and at meal time repaired to the large dining-rooms and partook of food provided for all. Each one was required to labor, and after receiving sufficient clothing and food from the products, the remainder was used to purchase more land or erect additional buildings. Human nature is the same in all ages and among all people, and here, as well as elsewhere, were those who would not perform their share of the labor or provide for the common good. By the year 1860 it was found that the theories of Mr. Jansen would not prevail in practical life, and a division occurred. By this year all the large brick buildings spoken of were erected. At this time they were divided into two parties, known as the Johnson (Jansen) and Olson parties. The former being more numerous, obtained about two-thirds of the property; the latter the remainder. No serious difficulties arose from this division, and the individual affairs were conducted on the same plan heretofore pursued. The following year the Olson party were divided into three divisions or parts, and the Johnson party made an individual distribution of their lands and town property. It was soon found that it was better for all to be thrown upon an individual responsibility, and a distribution of all property belonging to this party was made. To every person, male or female, that had attained the age of 35 years, 22 acres of land, one timber lot (nearly two acres), one town lot, and an equal part in all barns, horses, cattle, hogs, sheep, or other domestic animals, and all farming implements and household utensils were given. All under this age received a share corresponding in amount and value to the age of the individual, no discrimination being shown to either sex. The smallest share was about 8 acres of land, a correspondingly small town and timber lot, and part of the personal property. The same year, in April, the town was laid out by the Trustees, Olef Johnson, Jonas Erickson, Swan Swanson, Jonas Olson, Jonas Kronberg, Olef Stenberg and Jacob Jacobson. In 1861 the Olson party, being divided into three factions, continued to prosecute their labors under the colony system. One year's trial, however, convinced them of the results. These fractions were known as Olson, Stoneberg, and (Martin) Johnson divisions, which, at the close of the year 1861, divided their property to the individuals comprising each faction, on the basis adopted by the Johnson party in 1860. The shares were, however, not quite so large. The large brick building are now principally owned by the old settlers. AFter the establishment of the colony the schoolroom was removed from the cave to any vacant room which could be utilized for that purpose. The school-room was therefore constantly changing until the erection of the large frame building spoken of, when the upper room in it was occupied for a number of years. In 1858 or '59 a school-house was erected. It contains four rooms for school purposes. Page 816-820 Portrait & Biographical Album of Henry Co., Illinois