HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL SKETCHES, OF LAKE COUNTY, STATE OF ILLINOIS. IN TWO PARTS. THE FIRST CONSISTING OF GENERAL OBSERVATIONS; THE SECOND, GIVES A MINUTE REVIEW OF EACH TOWNSHIP, IN ITS ORDER

Waukegan, Il.: Published by E.G. Howe, 1852.. 112pp. plus errata leaf and folding frontispiece view of Waukegan. 16mo. Original printed yellow wrappers. Light soiling, minor scattered foxing and staining. Graff bookplate on inside front wrapper. Very good. The Graff copy of the rare first edition of the earliest history of an Illinois county published in book form. This work was authored by noteworthy early Illinois figure Elijah Haines, who moved to Lake County from New York in 1838 (the year before the county was officially established) and later surveyed and incorporated a village there called Hainesville in 1846. He became a lawyer in 1851 and moved to the county seat of Waukegan, writing this pamphlet shortly afterwards. Haines went on to publish several works on midwestern laws, and served in the Illinois House of Representatives for eight separate terms as an anti-slavery and then anti-Radical Reconstruction Republican. He also spent several years as Speaker of the House for Illinois.

The frontispiece is an impressive fold-out view of Waukegan, "taken in the year 1847." The text describes the early history of Lake County in considerable detail, including discussions of many of the legal questions and public works projects which occupied the county government in its infancy. The second part describes each town in the county, when and where it was founded, lists the lakes and rivers found within, names all of the current members of town government, and provides occasional anecdotes from the author's personal experience. The wrappers bear interesting advertisements; the exterior of the rear wrapper advertises publisher Elbridge G. Howe's Waukegan bookstore, selling "Poems, Histories, Lives, Sea tales, Travels...&c. &c.," in addition to "Harper's Magazine...Uncle Tom's Cabin...Violins and other instruments," and "Dr. Somerville's Cedar Plaster." Howe was the publisher of Haines's work, but not the printer; the front wrapper notes that it was produced by Geer's Print of Waukegan, and the inner rear wrapper bears an ad for Geer's WAUKEGAN GAZETTE, as does the inner front wrapper, which shows an illustration of the newspaper office's facade, and describes it as "the place to get all kinds of printing."

This Everett D. Graff copy (with his bookplate on the inner front wrapper) was donated by Graff to the Newberry Library, and was lot 429 in the 1966 Parke Bernet sale of Newberry duplicates (where it sold for $130). That occurrence is the most recent that we find in auction records. The Eberstadts asked $150 for a copy in 1964. A scarce and thorough early Illinois history, with distinguished provenance. GRAFF 1703 (this copy). HOWES H20, "b." BUCK 890. BYRD 1974. BRADFORD 2033. SABIN 29554. EBERSTADT 163:255.