Excursions were the key to Charles C. Coe’s real estate success. (Undated, unsourced ad from eBay)
Charles C. Coe took an unusual approach to his Springfield real estate business: he tried to get people to leave town.
Coe (1860-1926) worked in central Illinois from about 1901 until 1920, billing himself in city directories as “Real Estate and Immigration Agent for Texas and Central Kansas.” His newspaper advertisement touted land in Texas that, Coe said, was “free from blizzards” and had crops “as good as Illinois”.
Coe owned some of the properties he brokered and had leads on others. His ads claimed he could direct buyers to acreage good for growing rice, sugar cane, corn, tobacco, cotton, vegetables and fruit. Other land he marketed contained resources such as oil, zinc and lead.
Prices ranged from $5 to $15 per acre (in 1902) and could be purchased “on easy terms.”
Coe was born in Connecticut. His wife, Lillian, was born in New York. She died in Springfield in 1918. The couple had at least two children, a son named Edward who served stateside during World War I, and a daughter, Victoria, who worked as a clerk in her father’s office before her marriage. Coe’s offices were located on the north side of what today is the Old Capitol Plaza and later at 422½ E. Washington St.
Undated, unsourced ad (eBay)
To entice buyers, Coe sponsored excursions, leaving Springfield as often as twice a week, during which clients could visit property he had available for sale. Typically, potential buyers took the Chicago & Alton Railroad to St. Louis., where they then boarded the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railway (“the Katy Line”) to Texas. Overnight rail and dining accommodations were $22.50 (about $600 in 2025).
In another ad, Coe reported he had secured a special sleeper car that could take passengers from Springfield directly to San Antonio without changing cars.
If a prospective client didn’t locate land in Texas as good as could be found in Illinois, Coe pledged, he would refund the railroad fare. He also repaid the fare for anyone who bought property after taking one of his trips.
Returning from Texas after one excursion, Coe and Otto Elliott (1873-1952), Coe’s partner, brought back to Springfield several ears of corn grown in the Brazos River Valley of Texas. Samples of the corn, which yielded an average of 1,000 kernels to the ear, were put on display at the Coe & Elliott office.
Illinois State Journal, 1902 (Courtesy State Journal-Register)
Coe didn’t sell only farmland. One 1902 advertisement reported he had access to a “good five-room house, good barn for eight head (of) horses, one good mule team, wagon and implements of all kinds …” on land in southeast Texas’s Dickinson Bayou. The bayou site offered exceptional fishing and productive oyster reefs, the ad said.
In the spring of 1910, Coe took out an ad in the Illinois State Register seeking to trade a city property for land in Colorado. During this period, Coe was also running real estate excursions to Colorado Springs, Denver and Pueblo, Colo. Trips took “30 days going, 30 days returning” with stop-over privileges. He also led real estate excursions to the Dakotas and to northern Minnesota’s Red River Valley.
In between trips elsewhere, Coe also brokered deals back home in central Illinois, according to sales reports published in the Springfield newspapers.
Following Lillian’s death in 1918, Coe took up residence in a boarding house with other widowed men. He appears to have remained active as a real estate broker into the early 1920s, although he no longer led out-of-state excursions.
Coe moved to Meriden, Conn., about 1925 to be closer to his children. He died in Meridian at the age of 66.
Contributor: William Cellini Jr.
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