HARDIN County, IL

Hardin County is a county located in the U.S. state of Illinois. According to the 2020 census, it has a population of 3,649, making it the least populous county in Illinois. Its county seat is Elizabethtown. Hardin County is located in the part of the state known as Little Egypt. Hardin County was named for Hardin County, Kentucky, which was named in honor of Colonel John Hardin, an officer in the American Revolutionary War and the Northwest Indian War.

History

Hardin County was formed in 1839 from Pope County. Additional area was later added from Gallatin County. Hardin County was named for Hardin County, Kentucky, which was named in honor of Colonel John Hardin, an officer in the American Revolutionary War and the Northwest Indian War. Hardin was murdered by Shawnee Indians while he was on a peace mission in 1792 for President George Washington, in what is now Shelby County, Ohio. In the 1790s and early 1800s, the Hardin County area, especially Cave-In-Rock, was notorious as a stronghold used by outlaws, bandits, river pirates, and counterfeiters.

Geography

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of , of which is land and (2.2%) is water. It is the second-smallest county in Illinois by area.

Hicks Dome () is a geological feature in Hardin County. The Hicks Dome is underlain by ultramafic igneous rocks and igneous diatremes or breccia pipes. Most geologists accept the theory that the older rocks at the center of the uplift are a result of this deep-seated igneous activity. This activity may also have provided the fluorine in the fluorspar deposits in the region. Fluorspar, or calcium fluoride, was mined in Hardin County until the early 1990s.

Climate and weather

In recent years, average temperatures in the county seat of Elizabethtown have ranged from a low of in January to a high of in July, although a record low of was recorded in January 1994 and a record high of was recorded in August 2007. Average monthly precipitation ranged from in October to in May.

Adjacent counties

Major highways

National protected area

Demographics

As of the 2010 census, there were 4,320 people, 1,915 households, and 1,234 families residing in the county. The population density was . There were 2,488 housing units at an average density of . The racial makeup of the county was 97.3% white, 0.6% American Indian, 0.5% Asian, 0.3% black or African American, 0.1% Pacific islander, 0.3% from other races, and 0.8% from two or more races. Those of Hispanic or Latino origin made up 1.3% of the population. In terms of ancestry, 26.5% were Irish, 23.8% were German, 10.4% were English, and 4.3% were American.

Of the 1,915 households, 26.0% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 50.9% were married couples living together, 9.2% had a female householder with no husband present, 35.6% were non-families, and 31.7% of all households were made up of individuals. The average household size was 2.25 and the average family size was 2.78. The median age was 46.3 years.

The median income for a household in the county was $27,578 and the median income for a family was $38,576. Males had a median income of $42,955 versus $26,683 for females. The per capita income for the county was $18,515. About 17.4% of families and 22.3% of the population were below the poverty line, including 37.4% of those under age 18 and 14.6% of those age 65 or over.

Communities

City

Villages

Unincorporated communities

Precincts

Ghost towns

Notable people

Politics

In its early history, Hardin County was opposed to the “Yankee” Republican Party and its Civil War against the South – with whom it was closely allied both culturally and economically. It did not vote for a Republican presidential candidate until Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 landslide.

Since 1904, however, Hardin County has turned powerfully Republican. Like the nearby counties of Johnson, Massac and Pope, it managed to remain loyal to William Howard Taft during the 1912 election when the Republican Party was mortally divided. Hardin County would next be carried by a Democratic presidential candidate in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1932 landslide victory, and not after that until Lyndon Johnson in 1964. The county did trend Democratic in the following three decades, actually voting more Democratic than the nation at-large between 1972 and 1996. Nonetheless, since 2000 Hardin County has followed the same political trajectory as Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia and Appalachian regions of adjacent states, whereby the Democratic Party's liberal views on social issues have produced dramatic swings to the Republican Party amongst its almost entirely Southern white population. The past six Presidential elections have observed a swing totalling 79 percentage points to the GOP, with Hillary Clinton in 2016 receiving barely half the proportion of the worst-performing Democrat from before 2010.