Great River Road, 2016

St. Jacob

December 15, 2017

Last modified: January 26, 2018

St. Jacob is a township and village in Madison County. The township was first settled by Americans in 1810, and in the early 1850s the village of St. Jacob began as a group of houses and establishments built at a crossroads. The town was given its name for three prominent residents with the name Jacob: Jacob Schultz who built the first house in the area and sold whisky by the barrel; Jacob Schroth who operated a store, saloon, and tavern called the St. Jacob House; and Jacob Willi, a farmer and blacksmith. Louis Schiele laid out the town in 1866.1 The village of St. Jacob was incorporated September 8, 1875.2 By 1880, the village of St. Jacob had a population of 461.3 As of the 2010 census, the village of St. Jacob as a population of 1,098.4

St. Jacob in 2017
From the Maps & Plats GIS Division of the Madison County Chief County Assessment Office

To access the village of St. Jacob’s website, follow this link.

Endnotes   [ + ]

1. W. T. Norton, ed., Centennial History of Madison County, Illinois, and Its People, 1812 to 1912. (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1912), 597 and 599.
2. Flagg, James S., editor, Our 150 Years, 1812-1962. (Edwardsville: East 10 Publishing, 1962.), 61.
3. Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1883), 139.
4. Illinois: 2010, Summary Population and Housing Characteristics, 2010 Census of Population and Housing (Washington: Bureau of the Census, 2012), 64
Cite this article: Ben Ostermeier, "St. Jacob," Madison Historical: The Online Encyclopedia and Digital Archive for Madison County, Illinois, last modified January 26, 2018, https://madison-historical.siue.edu/encyclopedia/st-jacob/.
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