Dubbed "Hell's Half Acre", Decatur is the second most corrupt city in Illinois. It earned its standing as a tough town with more gambling, prostitution and liquor than cities twice its size. Sprawled all around this rotten core were farm towns connected by telegraph and short-hop rail lines. If Decatur was always a wide-open "sin-town", Mt. Zion was always a narrow, isolated back-water where the first settlers died of malaria. Samuel L. Bush was one...
Related Subjects
History