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Just as the Grand PrairieIllinois' namesake landscape-was the heart of the continent's "Prairie Peninsula," so the Headwaters area of east central Illinois is the heart of the Grand Prairie. It is one of the flattest parts of the state and is characterized by glacial topography, with the flat areas separated by glacial moraines that serve as drainage divides. This causes water to flow downhill in most directions, giving rise to six major streamsthe Vermilion, Embarras, Sangamon, Mackinaw, Kaskaskia, and Little Vermilion rivers-that together drain almost a third of the state. As used here, the "Headwaters" refers to an area centered in Champaign, Ford, and Vermilion counties, and sprawling across parts of seven other counties. As noted nature writer John Madson once observed, this part of eastern Illinois was the place (with western Indiana) where the plow replaced the ax as the symbol of Euro-American conquest of the continent. Most of Illinois is suited to agriculture, but few parts of Illinois are as well suited as is the Headwaters to a particular kind of agriculture-in this case, intensive production of row-crops like corn or soybeans. In recent decades, corn and bean yields in Champaign and Ford counties have led the state that leads the world. Champaign and Ford counties are among the five Illinois counties with the highest percentage of their land in agriculture. In some river sub-basins within the Headwaters - Kerr Creek, Bean Creek, Flatville branch, among others-8 8 % of the surface area is planted in row crops. If the Headwaters is a place where presettlement Illinois has been most changed, it is also one of the places where presettlement Illinois survives most gloriously in the form of the Middle Fork of the Vermilion, the first Illinois river to be included in the National Wild and Scenic River System. In that contrast between the nearly perfectly realized humanized landscape and the nearly perfectly preserved natural one, the Headwaters embodies much of Illinois' complex relationship to its own natural history. |
