Around 10,000 years ago, the last glacier retreated from the Fairbury area. The glacier leveled the farmland and left excellent soil. The downside of the flat land was there was no easy way for water to drain from the fields. As a result, about half the farmland was either swampland or slough. The swampy farmland was one of the reasons that Livingston County was the last part of Illinois to be settled.

Standing water leads to vast populations of mosquitoes. These mosquitoes transmitted malaria to the early Fairbury area settlers.

Francis Townsend was born and grew up on his father's farm just east of Fairbury. Later in life, Francis led a national movement to implement an old-age national pension plan. The Townsend Movement helped convince President Franklin Roosevelt to implement the Social Security program we have today. Francis Townsend is still referred to as the father of the Social Security system.

In his autobiography, Francis recounted that he was in poor health the whole time he grew up in Fairbury. The symptoms he described are typical of a person who had contracted malaria. The Townsend farm also periodically flooded because there was no place for the rainwater to drain away.

Drainage has been a problem for flatlands for thousands of years. One age-old solution is to dig drainage ditches to drain the soil. Trenches alone still do not provide optimum drainage for crop production.

In Europe, farmers studied the habits of animals to see if they could help solve the drainage problem. The farmers studied beavers and moles. One inventor decided to create the mole plow that would dig hollow tunnels in the soil like moles. Mole plows are still sold and used in England today. In England, new mole tunnels are made each farming season.

Fairbury area farmers tried the mole plows. They work the best when there is some clay in the soil to help retain the tunnel shape. Mole plows did not work in Livingston County because there are several feet of black silt loam topsoil with very little clay content. The tunnels quickly collapsed because of a lack of clay content. Area farmers then tried nailing two boards together and placed the inverted V shape in their fields. The wood quickly deteriorated, and this solution did not work either.

One of the first recorded uses of fired clay tile was in 1875. Various sizes of tile were shipped from Bushnell to Chatsworth. The pipe was priced at a dollar value per thousand feet of tile. The two-inch tile cost $50, the four-inch was $110, and the ten-inch was $410 per thousand feet. Farmer John Reinford bought 800 ten-inch tiles and installed them in his field. In today's dollars, the $410 cost would be equivalent to $9,673.

Word spread quickly that the clay drainage tile successfully solved the drainage problem. Tile factories were established in Odell, Dwight and Cornell.

Two Fairbury farmers set up large tile factories on their farms. These included Rufus C. Straight and James McDowell. Mr. Straight's tile factory was built in 1881 and was located where the Dos Fuentes restaurant is now located on the south side of Route 24, west of Fairbury. Mr. McDowell's tile factory was in Section 22 of Avoca Township. Beautiful illustrations of Fairbury's two tile factories are shown in the 1888 book Portrait and Biographical Album of Livingston County by the Chapman Brothers.

In the 1880s, there was no electricity available to power these tile factories. A horse team was attached to an arm, and they walked in a fixed circle. The output from this system powered a rotating shaft. This shaft operated a big plunger that forced the clay through a tile die, forming a continuous clay tube.

The clay tube was then cut into about one-foot lengths and loaded onto a wheelbarrow. The workers moved the loaded wheelbarrow to a drying shed. The workers lifted the clay tubes from the wheelbarrow and set them onto a slatted floor to dry. They were stacked into an updraft square kiln when they were dry and fired for about three days and nights. The tile then cooled down for about three days. At that point, the tile was hardened and ready to be installed in a farmer's field.

Mr. Straight's tile factory used coal mined in Fairbury as the heat source to fire his tile. Because his factory was so large, he was a significant customer of Fairbury coal mines.

The first couple of years of tile usage in Fairbury were wet seasons, and farmers were impressed by how well the new tile drained their fields and increased their crop production. Then a dry season occurred. Some farmers panicked and ripped out their new field tiles. Other farmers plugged their tile outlets, trying to keep the moisture in their parched fields. One pessimist even said that anyone might have known that tiling was all wrong because if the tile were needed, God would have put them in the ground in the beginning.

Some reactionaries forgot that the drain tile destroyed the breeding places of the mosquito and completely blotted out the chills and fever of malaria. The frog choruses of spring and summer evenings became a forgotten amusement.

As the years went by, tiling became an accepted practice on Fairbury area farms. By 1890, Livingston County set a record for the most grain production ever obtained. The average productivity of area farms was at least doubled with the implementation of clay tile. The price of tiled farmland increased dramatically compared to land with no drainage.

The installation of clay drainage tiles was a revolutionary event for Fairbury area farms. The tile converted worthless swampy land into some of the most productive farmland on the planet. Tiling also dramatically improved the quality of life for Fairbury residents because it eliminated the constant threat of contracting malaria.