Illinois

French explorers Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette traveled the Illinois River in 1673, and Illinois entered the Union in 1818 as the twenty-first state, with its capital first at Kaskaskia, then Vandalia, then Springfield after 1837. The U.S. Army built Fort Dearborn at the mouth of the Chicago River in 1803; the Potawatomi and allied nations destroyed it in 1812, and it was rebuilt in 1816. Chicago incorporated as a town in 1833 and as a city in 1837, and the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871 burned roughly three and a half square miles before the rebuilding that raised the Loop, named for the cable-car and later elevated-train turning loop finished in 1897. Joseph Smith founded Nauvoo on the Mississippi in 1839, and the Latter Day Saints departed after his 1844 murder in nearby Carthage. Abraham Lincoln practiced law in Springfield from 1837 and was elected president there in 1860. Route 66 was commissioned in 1926 with its eastern terminus in Chicago.