PEORIA  , a

city, port of entry, and the county-seat of Peoria county, Illinois, U.S.A., in the north central part of the state, on the lower end of Lake Peoria, an expansion of the Illinois river, and about 15o m . S.W. of Chicago . Pop . (1900) 56,1oo; (Iglo) 66,95o . It is served by 13 railways, of which the most important are the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific, the Chicago & Alton, the Illinois Central, the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St Louis, and the Chicago & North-Western . The Illinois river is navigable to its mouth, and at La Salle, above Peoria, connects with the Illinois &" breed " traders, trappers and farmers, had been established about 11 m. above the foot of the lake, on its west shore . This village was practically deserted during the later years (1781-1783) of the War of Independence, and when its inhabitants returned after the peace they settled in a village which had been established about 1778, on the present site of Peoria, by Jean Baptiste Maillet '(d . 18o1), and was at first called La Ville de Maillet . It is probable that Jean Baptiste Point de Saible, believed to have been a Santo Domingan negro, and jocularly spoken of "as the first white set:'_er in Chicago," lived in the " old village " of Peoria as early as 1973—0r six years before he settled on the present site of Chicago—and again about 1783 . In November 1812 about half of the town was burned by a company of Illinois militia who had been sent thither to build a fort, and whose captain asserted that his boats had been fired upon at night by the villagers . In the following year a fort, named Fort Clark in honour of George Rogers Clark, was erected on the site of the old village; it was evacuated in 1818, and soon afterwards was burned by the Indians . After the town was burned there was no serious attempt to rebuild until 1819 .

Michigan Canal extending to Chicago . The river is spanned at Peoria was incorporated as a town in 1835 and was chartered Peoria by two railway bridges and a wagon bridge . The as a city in 1845 . In 1900 North Peoria was annexed . residential portion of the city is situated on bluffs overlooking See David McCulloch, Early Days of Peoria and Chicago, an address read before the Chicago Historical Society in 1904, and published by that society, (n.d.), and " Old Peoria," by the same author, in publication No . 6 of the Illinois State Historical Society Trans-actions (Springfield, Ill . Igor); also Historical Encyclopaedia of Illinois (Chicago, 'goo), ed. by Newton Bateman and Paul Selby; History of Peoria County,`:,Ill . (Chicago, 188o) ; and C . Ballance, History of Peoria (Peoria, 187o) .