Weston, Illinois: The Lead Mining Town That Left a Cemetery Behind

01A Name Easily Confused: Which Weston Is This?

Illinois has more than one Weston, and the better-known one is a different place. The famous "ghost town" of that name lies in DuPage County, far from here. A third Weston sits on a railroad line in McLean County. Neither has anything to do with this story.

The Weston described here belongs to Elizabeth Township in Jo Daviess County, in the state's far northwest corner. Its history has to be pieced together from a few fragments: a transcribed county history, a cemetery survey, and some grave records. No founding date, founder, or peak population turned up in any source.

02Otis Bennet and the 1847 Post Office

The clearest evidence that Weston was a living community is postal. A transcription of the 1904 History of Jo Daviess County says Elizabeth Township had two post offices in 1847. One was at Elizabeth, where William Boutwell was postmaster. The other was at Weston, where the postmaster was Otis C. Bennet.

A post office usually meant a cluster of people with mail to send and receive, and in 1847 Weston was one of only two such places in the township. When the office opened and when it closed are not recorded in the sources found.

The same passage says the township had no incorporated city or village, and that "no plat of any village therein has ever been made." The passage does not mention Weston in that sentence. Still, it suggests that Weston, like its neighbors, may never have been formally laid out as a town. It was probably a mining settlement that grew up around the diggings, not on a surveyor's plan.

03What Happened to Weston?

The only explanation for Weston's disappearance comes from the Jo Daviess County ILGenWeb page on Weston Cemetery. It says the burial ground "was part of the old mining town of Weston which was abandoned after the lead was mined out."

That is the whole account, and it rests on a single undated source. It gives no year for the abandonment and no number of residents who left. It does, however, identify the town's industry as lead mining. A town whose reason for existing was a vein of ore had no reason to stay once the vein was exhausted. The sources give no further detail about how long the decline took or how many people were affected.

04What Remains of Weston Today

The one confirmed remnant is Weston Cemetery. It lies in the southwest quarter of the northwest quarter of Section 22, Elizabeth Township, on South Weston Road. The road runs near the junction of Route 20 West and Route 84 heading south. Find a Grave describes the cemetery as right off Route 20 on Route 84. No burials are currently being made there.

The stones have been recorded at least twice. Chester R. Johnson read them in 1966, and Robert Hanson went through them again around 1978. Find a Grave lists burials there, including George Washington Williams (1812–1897) and James Trousdale (1814–1900). Their lifespans fit the era when the town was active, though no source ties either man to the mines.

Whether any foundations, shafts, or other traces of the settlement survive is not documented. Anyone visiting should treat the cemetery as the only established landmark and respect it as a burial ground, not a ruin.