First County Seat of Logan County

Postville, an Illinois frontier settlement, was founded in 1835 by Russell Post. In 1839, the Illinois General Assembly chartered a new county from territory undergoing settlement, and named the new county Logan. The first county commissioners chose Postville, located close to the center of the new county, as the county seat.

On July 16, 1853, a month before a lawyer named Abraham Lincoln would christen a Logan County town named after him, construction began on the Rock Island Bridge between Rock Island, Illinois, and Davenport, Iowa. The bridge would be the first railroad span across the Mississippi, uniting the East Coast with the Western territories.