The market house when it was on Sixth Street between Washington and Jefferson streets, 1843-1855, showing the location where John Brodie fell to his death (Sangamon Valley Collection)
When residents of early Springfield wanted fresh meat or vegetables, the city market house was the place to go. But you had to get up early.
City fathers decided in 1832 to build a market house, a central point where farmers could sell meat and produce directly to consumers, on the courthouse square. Aldermen spelled out the conditions in an ordinance approved May 8, 1832.
The market would be open on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays year-round. Hours were set as 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. (avoiding the heat of the day) in April through September and 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. the rest of the year.
“(A)ll market articles which shall be brought into the town within the above named days, and which are offered for sale within the market hours, shall be sold at the market house,” the ordinance said. Violators would be fined $5 per infraction.
Anyone who wanted a permanent stall could take out a one-year lease at a price to be determined at auction. Otherwise, stalls in the original market were available for free. But there were rules. Anyone who sold “unsound or unwholesome articles” would be fined. The same went for butchers who didn’t clean up after themselves or anyone else who brought “chaff or filth of any description” within the market house. Animals and wagons had to be kept outside, and smoking was strictly forbidden.
Aldermen appointed Francis Phillips (see below) as the first market master. His job was to administer the market, oversee the stall auction, and enforce the market rules, which also banned drunkenness, profane language “and riots within the market house”. As his compensation, Phillips received the proceeds of the auction, plus one-half of whatever fines he collected.
The city planned to open the market on June 1, 1832, but, unsurprisingly, the work took longer than expected. In late June, a newspaper ad reported that the market house rules would be suspended until Phillips certified that the building was complete. In the end, the stall auction had to be delayed until July 28.
The market house moved in 1843 to Sixth Street between Washington and Jefferson streets – Sixth had to be widened by 10 feet on each side to accommodate the building, according to Paul M. Angle in his Here I Have Lived: The Story of Lincoln’s Springfield. That location was the site of tragedy a year later – local Whigs were using a derrick to erect a campaign pole when a rope broke and the derrick collapsed. Workman John Brodie died, and another man was badly injured.
The market remained on Sixth Street until 1855. In Here I Have Lived, Angle gave a sampling of prices there in 1846: beef cost $2.50 for an entire hindquarter, while chickens went for six to eight cents apiece. Customers could buy game, such as venison and quail, at the market, as well as cornmeal, apples, butter and cheese.
“In its day,” Angle wrote, “the (Sixth Street) market house had been a thing of beauty and a point of pride.” But by 1855, he said, times had changed.
(F)ew farmers used it, and neglect had made of it a nuisance. Finally it became so bad that outspoken visitors made it the object of their choicest vituperation. Why do the people of Springfield let “that miserable abortion of a Market House stand in the middle of one of the principal streets, … a disgusted St. Louisan exclaimed. “Tear it down – take it – hide it – hide it – it is a blot on the face of the city.”
The Sixth Street market house was demolished in 1855. It took until 1860 before a replacement was built. According to Angle, the new market was a 40-by-140-foot brick structure at Fourth and Monroe streets. “(S)pace was provided for the sale of meat, fruit and vegetables, and the basement was fitted up for a public eating room,” he wrote.
In 1870, the city unwisely built a second market house at Fifth and Madison streets. (It became known as the “North Market House”; the Fourth and Monroe building, which continued to operate, became the “South Market House.”) The Illinois State Journal said the second market cost the city $25,000 to build. Among city-owned buildings, only the high school was costlier.
The second market, however, was a financial sinkhole, and in May 1871, the city council repealed the entire market ordinance. According to the Journal:
The market question has claimed considerable attention for several years past, and the last time it was submitted to the people they decided in favor of a market system; and the North Market House was built, which has cost about twenty-five thousand dollars. As almost every one expected who had examined the subject, the rents of this market failed to pay expenses, and required a goodly share of the profits of the South Market to meet the deficiency. …
These markets have cost the city a large sum of money, and it will require remarkable good management to save the city from a heavy loss.
A butcher, Baptiste Franz, and a produce dealer, A.E. Ayers, leased the North Market House until 1876, when the city sold it. The purchaser, electric-power pioneer Albert Ide, paid only $6,500, about a quarter of what it cost to construct the building cost six years earlier.
While the city took a bath on the sale price, aldermen looked at the deal as a way to increase Springfield’s industrial potential – Ide was required to use the old market exclusively as a factory and to install, within six months, $15,000 worth of manufacturing equipment.
From that point of view, the sale was a success. The A.L. Ide Engine Works produced steam pumps, radiators, boilers, steam engines, and much else in the former market for decades afterwards.
The city likewise sold off the South Market House in 1880. Much of that building already had been taken over by a popular entertainment venue, the 800-seat Armory Hall (it wasn’t really an armory, but it was the headquarters of a quasi-military ceremonial group, the Governor’s Guard). The four properties involved in the sale brought in a total of more than $13,000.
Francis Phillips
Springfield’s first market master, Francis Phillips, was born in 1785 in Kentucky and moved to Springfield about 1829. He returned to Kentucky sometime after his wife Margaret died in 1834. Here’s what Springfield historian John Carroll Power said about Phillips in Power’s History of the Early Settlers of Sangamon County, Illinois (1876).
Francis Phillips was something of a genius. Farming and chair making was his main busiess, but he would do any kind of a job of painting, plain or ornamental. A hotel sign painted by him for Archer G. Herndon is remembered by some of the old men, who in their boyhood days regarded it with an awe inspiring reverence that seems not to have left them to the present time. The name of the hotel was the “Indian Queen,” and the sign was the painter’s idea of that imaginary personage.
Power reports that Phillips died on the road while traveling back to Kentucky from a visit to Springfield but gives no date for his death.
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