The Trail of Tears
3240 State Forest Road, Jonesboro, IL 62952
Historic Sites
The Trail of Tears through southern Illinois stretches nearly sixty miles long. Original route segments exist as State Highway 146, lesser traveled county roads, and abandoned road cuts that run through forested areas.
As part of The Indian Removal Act of 1830, eleven Cherokee detachments left their homelands during the fall of 1838 and set out toward Oklahoma territory along what is now referred to as the Northern Route of the Trail of Tears. Part of this route included a nearly sixty-mile (96 km) trek across southern Illinois along the Golconda-Cape Girardeau Trace, from the Ohio River at Golconda to the Mississippi River west of present-day Ware, Illinois.
Illinois 250
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