Excerpt from Souvenir Edition for 1924, Champaign, Illinois In the year of Eighteen Hundred Seventy A. Ll, Champaign was a small rural community of four thousand inhabitants. As the town was situated in the center of the greatest. Corn producing country in the state, it had a natural advantage as a market and a shipping point for the farmer's products. At this time the State University was permanently located in the county which added a great deal to attract business interests to the little rural community. In the short space of one half a century the httle town grew to be a city of twenty-five thousand - the greatest educational center in the Mississippi Valley and a thriving business community. The remarkable advantages attracted four railroads, that serve the city from all points, bringing into our midst annually thousands of strangers from all parts to visit the university. This influx gains in volume as Champaign becomes the center of the network of paved highways in the state. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.