HISTORICAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ILLINOIS.
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they had made more than forty years before. He died at Kaskaskia, in 1832. Edgar County, in the eastern part of the State, was named in honor of General Edgar. He was Worshipful Master of the first Lodge of Ancient Free and Accepted Masons in Illinois, constituted at Kaskaskia in 1806.
EDGAR COUNTY, one of the middle tier of counties from north to south, lying on the eastern border of the State; was organized in 1823, and named for General Edgar, an early citizen of Kaskaskia. It contains 630 square miles, with a population (1900) of 28,273. The county is nearly square, well watered and wooded. Most of the acreage is under cultivation, grain-growing and stock-raising being the principal industries. Generally, the soil is black to a considerable depth, though at some points-especially adjoining the timber lands in the east-the soft, brown clay of the subsoil comes to the surface. Beds of the drift period, one hundred feet deep, are found in the northern portion, and some twenty-five years ago a nearly perfect skeleton of a mastodon was exhumed. A bed of limestone, twenty-five feet thick, crops out near Baldwinsville and runs along Brouillet's creek to the State line. Paris, the county-seat, is a railroad center, and has a population of over 6,000. Vermilion and Dudley are prominent shipping points, while Chrisman, which was an unbroken prairie in 1872, was credited with a population of 900 in 1900.
EDINBURG, a village of Christian County, on the Baltimore & Ohio Southwestern Railway, 18 miles southeast of Springfield; has two banks and one newspaper. The region is agricultural, though some coal is mined here. Population (1880), 551; (1890), 806; (1900), 1,071.
EDS ALL, James Kirtland, former Attorney General, was born at Windham, Greene County, N. Y., May 10, 1831. After passing through the common-schools, he attended an academy at Prattsville, N.Y., supporting himself, meanwhile, by working upon a farm. He read law at Prattsville and Catskill, and was admitted to the bar at Albany in 1852. The next two years he spent in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and, in 1854, removed to Leavenworth, Kan. He was elected to the Legislature of that State in 1855, being a member of the Topeka (free-soil) body when it was broken up by United States troops in 1856. In August, 1856, he settled at Dixon, Ill., and at once engaged in practice. In 1863 he was e
