ABOUT ME
Questions I get often are “Who are you?” and “What are your ties to Pisgah?”, so let me start there. My name is Mike Smith, but I was born Mike Witham. My Witham family, made up of mostly farmers, moved from Kentucky to Morgan County, IL starting in 1911 to look for farm work. My family settled in and around the Pisgah area. My grandpa grew up in the big, white farm house located right across the highway from the elevator. I’m one of my family historians and it’s my family history work that led me to research Pisgah so I could find out more about the place where my family grew up.
ABOUT OUR PROJECT
In exploring my family history, I tried to gather some information about Pisgah, its store, its school, its grain elevator, its church, its people, and its history. Most of the prominent buildings and businesses in Pisgah are no longer standing and finding information about them was proving difficult. So, I created a Facebook group, hoping to network with other folks who were interested in Pisgah, IL., so we could share photos, stories, and other Pisgah resources, and gather them together in one place for everyone to enjoy. Well, thanks to my cousins, Mary Beth Doolin Kruzan and Jeff Dixon, we quickly added a large group of Pisgah folks to our Facebook group. My cousins have ties in the area and they knew just who to add to make our group grow quickly.
The group proved to be a big success right from the start. One person had a photo of the school, another had a photo of the church, someone else had some information about the store, etc… We just pooled our collective resources and before you knew it, we had a nice little collection of Pisgah information. All the stuff I had difficulty trying to locate was suddenly in front of me. Instead of just imagining it, I could now see the one-room schoolhouse where my grandpa went to school. I could see the church where he was a member. I could read stories about Pisgah from the memoirs of those who came before me. I knew I had to do something to preserve all this information, now that we had it all in one place. So, we started an unofficial Pisgah preservation project. I then contacted the Jacksonville Area Genealogical and Historical Society to ask them if they had any interest in our project once we were done with it. They said they would love to have a copy of our information, so our unofficial Pisgah preservation project became official.
This website is just an extension of our project. We will not only share a hard copy of our work with JAGHS (Jacksonville Area Genealogical and Historical Society), but we will also add it here, for the online public to enjoy.
ABOUT US
We are the friends of Pisgah. We’re a group made up of folks who are interested in preserving the history of Pisgah, Illinois. Some of us were born and raised in Pisgah. Others may have lived in Pisgah for a period of time. Still others may have had family who lived there or have other ties to Pisgah and are just interested in keeping up with its history.
If you have information to add to our project, please don’t hesitate to contact me here: Mike@PisgahILHistory.com
Thank you,
Mike