The Illinois Central Railroad Company offers for sale over 1,500,000 acres selected farming and wood lands, in tracts of forty acres and upwards, to suit purchasers, on long credits and a low rates of interest, situated on each side of their railroad, extending all the way from the extreme North to the South of the state of Illinois.

Chicago: Illinois Central Rail Road Office, 1857. 8vo. 80 pp., plus [4] pp. of Illinois Central RR promotional ads printed on lavender-coloured paper promoting passage to St. Louis, Kansas Nebraska, the Michigan central Railway Line, the Niagara Falls suspension bridge, and St. Paul, Minnesota via steamer and railroad line. With frontisp. maps (1 double-page) of Illinois RR lands, a bucolic farm scene in Illinois, text woodcut engravings, tables. Light tan printed & illustrated softcovers, cover art of “typical” Illinois farm (minor chipping head & foot of spine, minor wear & bumping to corners, faint soiling, ex-library stamp on verso of title), still G copy. First edition of this illustrated land promotion for Illinois extolling the advantages for prospective homesteaders and settlers for settling in Illinois rather than further west. The promotional work extolls the quality of the soil, the advantages for buying land with direct access to the newly built railroads, with pricing information on fuel, fencing, and other products. Selling the lands granted to them became a preoccupation of railroad companies as they pushed West, with mixed strategies. Some the Illinois Central mortgaged to provide capital construction revenues, while other lands were sold stipulating that the homesteaders, or settlers needed to cultivate and occupy the land before sale in order to delay the amount of taxes owed by the Railroad. There were two different issues of this 1857 land promotion, with one printed in Boston, and the other scarcer version in Chicago. Ante-Fire Imprints, 263; See: John Hall, Patrimonialism in America: The Public Domain in the Making of Modernity, In: Charrad & Adams, Patrimonial Capitalism and Empire (2015), pp. 29-39.