Cornerstone Festival - The Area

The Cornerstone Festival is held on a 500 acre farm near Bushnell, IL. Where is that, you say? Go to Peoria, IL and head another hour west or go to the Quad Cities and head an hour and half south. As Boom says, "Welcome to the prairie". It is corn and soy beans as far as the eye can see and boy can you see - it is flat. I think the highest elevation I hit was a railroad overpass. Oh yeah, in Galesburg, where we stayed, there was huge train depot. Gotta move that corn somehow...



When Nate and I headed to the Festival everyday, we saw these roads with weird names like 2250 St and 1900 St in the middle of nowhere. When I realized that each "hundred" was a mile, a memory from the deep recesses of my brain came to me - it was Township and Range! This is how the government laid out the West. (http://www.outfitters.com/genealogy/land/twprangemap.html). Thank you to the late, great Dr. Elaine Bosowski for teaching me that in North American Geography at Villanova. Nate's mom and I took that course for fun and I think I may have learned more there than any other class that year.





We drove through 4 little towns every day. Our favorite was St. Augustine (pop 150) which pretty much consisted of a few houses, a post office and a Catholic Church. If it had been a litle closer to Galesburg or I-74, we might have gone to mass there on Sunday.