CHAMBER: It’s all in the name (2025)

Mattoon-ites are very protective of their city’s given name, and with good reason. Mattoon has a long and rich history, a hospitable and caring population, and it is the place we call home. Like any community, as years pass and times change, the fortunes of Mattoon have ebbed and waned, but Mattoon continues to roll with the punches and move forward due to, in no small part, the resilience and determination of its people.

Like a couple of bickering siblings, we sometimes disagree, but for the most part we are congenial and good natured and welcoming — until you mispronounce our name. Nothing strikes a nerve in us as much as hearing someone call us “Muh-toon.”

Oh, we will still embrace those miscreants of articulation, but make no mistake, we will correct them. One long-standing Mattoon tradition is that Mattoon residents once corrected the president of the United States who, while visiting our community, happened to mispronounce our name, which tells you that we are serious about getting it right. (It was most likely then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, who stopped in Mattoon on the campaign trail in 1980.)

At a recent meeting with Alswinn Kieboom, president of Kingspan Insulated Panels North America, whose company will be opening a plant in Mattoon in January, told us that when he met with their new plant manager, a local man, he was schooled on how to pronounce Mattoon.

So, what is in the name Mattoon, and how did it get here?

The City of Mattoon was established in 1855. After rumors of a proposed crossing of the Illinois Central Railroad (running north and south) and the Terre Haute & Alton Railroad (running east and west) on open prairie land 10 miles west of Charleston was confirmed in the summer of 1854, several prominent businessmen and land owners began to make plans to plat the site around the proposed crossing and subdivide the land.

In December 1854, the Coles County surveyor, John Meadows, surveyed land east of and adjacent to the north-south Illinois Central route in Township 12N, Range 7E, Section 13 and mapped out a town. The land was subdivided and marked with pegs— earning the burgeoning new community the nickname of “Pegtown”— and sold at a public auction. The plat map was filed at ameeting at the Bunnell House in Charleston on May 15, 1855.

There are three stories as to how Mattoon came by its name, with one thing in common: they all tie back to a man named William Bradley Mattoon, the chief construction officer of the Terre Haute & Alton Railroad. William Mattoon, born in Vienna, New York, in 1814, and later made his home in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1843, he became a partner in the company of Phelps, Mattoon & Barnes, which built the Terre Haute & Alton.

One story, which comes from the "History of the Illinois Central Railroad" by John F. Stover (1975), says naming rights were part of a contest between the engineer-in-chief of the Illinois Central Railroad, Colonel Roswell B. Mason, and the chief construction officer for the Terre Haute & Alton Railroad, William B. Mattoon. It was already determined the first railroad to reach the crossing point at what would become Mattoon would not have to pay to maintain the crossing in the future, and with both men feeling pressure to complete the laying of the railroad, William Mattoon challenged Mason to wager on which railroad would reach a crossing point. Mason, being a temperate man, refused to wager money, but supposedly agreed to naming rights for the winner. Stover said Mason won the contest, reaching the crossing on June 25, 1855, but was so grateful to his rival for providing the incentive for Mason’s men to work faster that he named the station “Mattoon.”

The second story has it that William “Big Bill” Mattoon, a gambling man, proposed a game of poker called “Seven-Up,” with the stakes being the naming of the town where the railroads intersected. With Mason being a temperate man, as mentioned in the "History of the Illinois Central Railroad," it seems improbable that he would gamble. However, in 1939, the Works Progress Administration Federal Writers Project announced it had found an early narrative while researching in Shelbyville that backed up the story of the game of poker, with William Mattoon emerging as the winner to announce, “This thriving and beautiful metropolis shall be called Mattoon.” (This story was in newspapers all across the United States that year.)

The third story, as outlined in the book, “Mattoon, A Pictorial History” by Jean Johnston, Alice Larrabee, Gail Lumpkin and Marianne Thiel (1988), was offered by Daniel Messer, the proprietor of the Essex House in Mattoon (train depot and hotel) from 1869-79. Messer reported that the aforementioned businessmen and land owners who platted the town and filed the map at the meeting at the Bunnell House in Charleston on May 15, 1855, also voted to name the town Mattoon in honor of William B. Mattoon that same day. The thought was that these city founders hoped that in honoring Mattoon they could appeal to his business sense and he would invest in the new town. William Mattoon did invest in town’s first hotel, the Mattoon Hotel.

All three stories are fabulous pieces of local lore, and like most tales, each might bear a little bit of truth in them, although the third story seems the most likely. Maybe the real story is an amalgamation of all three.

However we got here, we are very proud to carry the name Mattoon today. And when we meet with people and businesses in at the Mattoon Chamber of Commerce who are interested in becoming part of the community and in getting to know the people, one of the first things we do is tell them, “Make that Mat-toon.”