While leafing through a back issue of the genealogy quarterly of the Montgomery County Genealogical Society, headquartered in Litchfield, a series of letters written by Jacob Cress and Daniel Ludwick in the 1830s caught my attention.
Addressed to family members still living in  Cabarrus County, N.C., the men, who were brothers-in-law, wrote letters encouraging their family to leave the “old wourn out red fields” of North Carolina and come to Illinois, were the land “is as rich and black as you wold want it.”