of Menard and Mason Counties
By T.G. Onstott
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CHAPTER XXXVIII Page 355 There never was such a plague or misfortune ever happened to the settlers of Mason county as the sand burr, or caused so much annoyance to the farmers, and a little history of how they came here might be interesting to some of the people of this country. It was in the fall of 1830 while O.M. Ross was living in his log cabin on the bank of the Illinois river just above the ferry landing that a traveler with two horses and a wagon drove up to his cabin one evening and asked if he could get to camp near by for the night, that he was moving from the state of Ohio and wanted to cross the river in the morning. Ross showed him a camping place a few rods north of the house. He drove there and unhitched his horses and tied them to the back of the wagon and took three sheaves of oats and fed them to his horses. The next morning he crossed the river. The next spring there came up a patch of grass about ten feet square that resembled young timothy grass and when it grew twelve or fifteen inches high and got ripe there appeared upon every spear of the grass a bunch of burrs. They grew to about the size of a pea and were as sharp as needles. Nothing was thought of the bunch of grass at the time or it could all have been dug out and destroyed in a short time, but the horses and cattle would come and graze and lie there and the burrs would get in their tails and in the wool of the sheep and was carried that way and was finally scattered over the county. It was no use, how poor and sandy the land was where the seed was dropped, they would always grow and when they got in the grain fields with the wheat and oats they were a terrible annoyance to the farmers for the grain could not be bound without the workmen wearing a thick pair of gloves. When O.M. Ross first settled in Havana there was also found growing on the side of the bluff about half way from the hotel and the river a patch of prickly pears covering about half an acre. They grew from one to two feet high and were a great curiosity to many people and when a steamer landed the passengers would go out to see them, but like the sand burr they soon got scattered over the county.
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