"There seems to have been considerable travel westward during the first half of the nineteenth century. Many Americans at that time apparently felt that the unlimited space and inexhaustible resources of the west promised them a life of greater dignity and abundance. Evidently the Barklow family shared this western dream. In 1845 they loaded their few belongings into a light wooden wagon drawn by a blind horse and began a journey that was to take them across Ohio and Indiana to the fertile farmlands of northern Illinois.
The journey must have been long and treacherous, for at one point in the trip their old blind horse was lost in a prairie fire. Once in Illinois, they bypassed Chicago which looked to them like an unattractive mud hole, and continued on to Stephenson County (EST 1845). Here, in Loran Township, some twelve miles west of Freeport, they found what they were looking for - a live spring of cool sparkling water with wood not too far away. Two miles north was a grist mill, a country store, a post office and a blacksmith shop. It was an ideal location for the future Barklow homestead."
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In the early 1840s, the village of Yellow Creek was established in southwest Stephenson County, Illinois on a creek also named Yellow Creek. Anson Andrews built a grain mill which used the power from the creek, and others soon settled near and around the mill, giving way to a small settlement. In the 1850s, the village had expanded to a size warranting its own post office, a significant addition to small Midwestern settlements of the time.
