ALTON  , a

city of Madison county, Illinois, U.S.A., in the W. part of the state, on the Mississippi river, about 10 m. above the mouth of the Missouri, and about 25 M . N. of St Louis, Missouri . Pop . (1890) 10,294; (1900) 14,210, of whom 1638 were foreign-born; (1910) 17,528 . Alton is served by the Chicago & Alton, the Chicago, Peoria & St Louis, the Cleve-land, Cincinnati, Chicago & St Louis, and the Illinois Terminal railways . The river is here spanned by a bridge . The residential portion of the city lies on the river bluffs, some of which rise to a height of 250 ft. above the water level, and the business streets are on the bottom lands of the river . Alton has a public library and a public park . Upper Alton (pop . 2918 in 1910), about r1 m . N.E. of Alton, is the seat of the Western Military Academy (founded in 1879 as Wyman Institute; chartered in 1892), and of Shurtleff College (Baptist, founded in 1827 at Rock Spring, removed to Upper Alton in 1831, and chartered in 1833), which has a college of liberal arts, a divinity school, an academy and a school of music; and the village of Godfrey, 5, M . N. of Alton, is the seat of the Monticello Ladies' Seminary, founded by Benjamin Godfrey, opened in 1838, and chartered in 1841 .

Among the manufactures of Alton are

iron and glass ware, miners' tools, shovels, coal-mine cars, flour, and agricultural implements; and there are a large oil refinery and a large lead smelter . The value of the city's factory products increased from $4,250,389 in 1900 to $8,696,814 in 1905, or 104.6 %: The first settlement on the site of Alton was made in 1807, when a trading post was established by the French . The town was laid out in 1817, was first incorporated in 1821, and in 1827 was made the seat of a state penitentiary, which was later removed to Joliet, the last prisoners being transferred in 186o . Alton was first chartered as a city in 1837 . In 1836 the Rev . Elijah P . Lovejoy (1802-1837), a native of Albion, Maine, removed the Observer, a religious (Presbyterian) periodical of which he was the editor, from St Louis to Alton . He had attracted considerable attention in St Louis by his criticisms of slavery, but though he believed in emancipation, he was not a radical abolitionist . After coming to Alton his anti-slavery views soon became more radical, and in a few months he was an avowed abolitionist . His views were shared by his brother, Owen Lovejoy (181r-1864), a Congregational minister, who also at that time lived in Alton, and who from 1857 until his death was an able anti-slavery member of Congress . Most of the people of southern Illinois were in sympathy with slavery, and consequently the Lovejoys became very unpopular . The press of the Observer was three time destroyed, and on the 7th of .

November 1837 E . P . Lovejoy was killed while attempting to defend against a mob a fourth press which he had recently obtained and which was stored in a warehouse in Alton . His death caused intense excitement throughout the country, and he was everywhere regarded by abolitionists as a martyr to their cause . In 1897 a monument, a granite column surmounted by a bronze statue of Victory, was erected in his honour by the citizens of Alton and by the state . See Henry Tanner, The Martyrdom of Lovejoy (Chicago, 1.881), and " The Alton Tragedy " in S . J . May's Some Recollections of Our Anti-Slavery Conflict (Boston, 1869) .