Virgil Cemetery
Photo added by Robert Cline

Virgil Cemetery

Avon, Fulton County, Illinois, USA

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  • Get directions Avon, Illinois, USA
    Coordinates: 40.62750, -90.39420
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Virgil, like a lot of other settlements in the early 1830's and 1840's was a prairie village. Unlike most it was never the dream of a man or group to have a platted city.
A few pioneers settled here on the rolling prairie for the purpose of religion, agriculture, protection and togetherness.
As the population of the small towns of Canton and Lewistown began to spread out, one by one the settlement of Virgil grew.
Some of the first families here were the Hendryx, Curtis, Scofield, Cates, Cole and Dunbar.
The cabins were scattered along a small creek and they farmed the rolling hills with timber down the different draws.
Ellisville was five miles east where lumber and some supplies could be bought; Canton where their surplus could be sold.
At one time I would say there were upward of 100 people here but as railroads came and towns along them grew Virgil, like other bypassed towns, gradually returned to the soil.

In their passing one thing is almost always left, their cemeteries. Some of them are gone through the neglect of the last few generations, some through the greed for more farmland.
Some, through fore-sight and generosity of a few people, are good, well-kept plots, such as Virgil Cemetery.
The land for the cemetery was donated by a Mr. Scofield about 1837 as the first burials were at that time.
Burials increased between 1850 and 1865, the peak period, then dropped off with very few after 1890, although burials have continued to the present.

by Eugene Suydam
*Taken from Cemetery Inscriptions of Fulton County, Illinois, Vol. 10, p. 44, c. October 1985, Fulton County Historical & Genealogical Society..













Virgil, like a lot of other settlements in the early 1830's and 1840's was a prairie village. Unlike most it was never the dream of a man or group to have a platted city.
A few pioneers settled here on the rolling prairie for the purpose of religion, agriculture, protection and togetherness.
As the population of the small towns of Canton and Lewistown began to spread out, one by one the settlement of Virgil grew.
Some of the first families here were the Hendryx, Curtis, Scofield, Cates, Cole and Dunbar.
The cabins were scattered along a small creek and they farmed the rolling hills with timber down the different draws.
Ellisville was five miles east where lumber and some supplies could be bought; Canton where their surplus could be sold.
At one time I would say there were upward of 100 people here but as railroads came and towns along them grew Virgil, like other bypassed towns, gradually returned to the soil.

In their passing one thing is almost always left, their cemeteries. Some of them are gone through the neglect of the last few generations, some through the greed for more farmland.
Some, through fore-sight and generosity of a few people, are good, well-kept plots, such as Virgil Cemetery.
The land for the cemetery was donated by a Mr. Scofield about 1837 as the first burials were at that time.
Burials increased between 1850 and 1865, the peak period, then dropped off with very few after 1890, although burials have continued to the present.

by Eugene Suydam
*Taken from Cemetery Inscriptions of Fulton County, Illinois, Vol. 10, p. 44, c. October 1985, Fulton County Historical & Genealogical Society..













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