Oakland, Illinois

City: Oakland

County: Coles

State: Illinois

Lat/Long: 39.6500, -88.0167

Oakland is a town in Coles County, Illinois, located thirteen miles northeast of Charleston and approximately twenty miles northwest of Paris. The U.S. Post Office Department established a post office in July 1833. Gideon M. Ashmore, owner of the land on which Oakland would sit, surveyed and platted the land in 1835, founding a village he named Independence. In February 1855, the Illinois General Assembly incorporated the village as a town and changed the name to Oakland.

The History of Coles County, Illinois (Chicago: Wm. Le Baron, Jr., 1879), 452; James N. Adams, comp., Illinois Place Names (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Society, 1989), 459; Edward Callary, Place Names of Illinois (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 253; Newton Bateman and Paul Selby, eds., Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois and History of Coles County, ed. by Charles Edward Wilson (Chicago: Munsell, 1906), 704; "An Act to Change the Name of the Town of Independence, in the County of Coles," 9 February 1855, Private Laws of Illinois (1855), 703.