The Rest of the StorySpoon River Anthology also brought about much negative reaction. Even Edgar Lee Masters’s obituary in the New York Times in 1950 stated “The opposition called his work a travesty on poetry…a collection of sketches of doubtful morality, a hodge-podge of slander and a mere cheap sensation which took hold only because of its striking form.” Fellow poet, Amy Lowell, was offended by Masters’s depiction of America and wrote “One wonders, if life in our little Western cities is a bad as this, why everyone does not commit suicide.”

The instant sensation created by Spoon River Anthology was perhaps felt most acutely in the author’s boyhood homes of Lewistown and Petersburg, Illinois where it was met with little enthusiasm. Local people immediately recognized that the “fictional” town of “Spoon River” was not so fictional and that many of the Anthology characters were recognizable as their friends, neighbors, relatives, and even themselves. People in Lewistown were furious with “that scoundrel Masters” who had exposed their secrets to the world. The book was immediately banned from town, including the schools and library. Masters’s mother was a librarian at the Lewistown library when the board voted to ban it from the shelves.

In his autobiography, Across Spoon River (1936), Edgar Lee Masters reported that he started writing the poems of the Anthology after talking over former days with his mother, who visited her lawyer-who-wished-to-be-poet son in Chicago in May of 1914. In a New York Times interview Masters said that “ It came to me. I don’t know how, last Spring to write a few sketches, and thus began the Anthology…”

Those initial sketches were submitted as a series of poems to Reedy’s Mirror in 1914 and 1915 using the pseudonym Webster Ford. Encouraged by William Marlon Reedy, the editor, Masters initiated a characteristic style and subject choice that improved with succeeding poems.

In 1915, Spoon River Anthology was first published as a stand-alone volume with a total of two-hundred and nine poems. Masters added thirty-five new poems in the 1916 addition, expanding on new characters with connections to some of the originals.

The Real Spoon RiverSpoon River Anthology drew upon settings, people, and stories that Masters remembered from his youth in Petersburg and Lewistown, and the surrounding countryside. These were undoubtedly supplemented with stories from the Blacksmith shop, one of the Lewistown’s favorite gossip spots that Masters frequented. Other material probably came from files while reading law at his father’s law office. Masters used the epitaphs to illustrate cultural and political differences between and within the two communities and the effect these differences had on the townspeople, his family, and himself. As a result, the good characters in the anthology were mostly from Petersburg and the bad characters from Lewistown. However, this is simply the way Masters perceived it.

Spoon River Anthology: An Annotated Edition (1992), by John E. Hallwas argues “that Masters’s view of both communities where he had lived was highly subjective. Petersburg was not as harmonious and Lewistown was not as conflict-ridden as his prose recollections and Anthology poems suggest. They merely seemed so to the poet.” There were aspects of each community that he both loved and hated. Masters simply perceived his formative years in Petersburg as less filled with conflict and stressful family relationships.

When I wrote these first pieces, and scrawled at the top of the page “Spoon River Anthology,” I sat back

and laughed at what seemed to me the most preposterous title known to the realm of books. – Edgar Lee

Masters, 1933. The Genesis of Spoon River in The American Mercury.

And now you know the rest of the story.

Over the years, time has healed the wounds created by the Anthology and the occasional confrontations with those who dared to explore “Spoon River” for themselves have all but ceased. The banning of the Anthology from the schools and library was lifted in the mid-1970s.

Today Masters and Spoon River Anthology is celebrated and people from around the world visit Lewistown to see “The Hill” (Lewistown’s Oak Hill Cemetery), and other Masters sites. Oak Hill Cemetery was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995.

Few local people recognized the literary achievement of Spoon River Anthology or realized that the same expose’ could be written about multitudes of other small towns across America.

For decades, much of the Lewistown populace would not speak of Masters or his family. Masters sites and characters from the Anthology were, at best, discussed in whispers. However, a few people maintained connections with Masters through all of the local uproar.

One local woman told a newspaper reporter “I would rather not talk about Spoon River at all, but if you want to find out anything about it you might talk to Doctor Strode. Doctor and Mrs. Strode were more friendly to Mr. Masters and to his family and probably it would be more fair to get your information from him.”

Anthology PlacesSeveral places referenced by Spoon River Anthology still exist and can be viewed in Lewistown today. Masters’s “The Hill” is, of course, Lewistown’s Oak Hill Cemetery. Masters also described the “Lincoln Pillars” of the third courthouse that “Silas Dement” torched that now stand in the cemetery as part of the Civil War monument.

Masters’s “Bindles (Beadles) Opera House”, still stands on the north side of the courthouse square, complete with its “clumsy bust of Shakespeare.” Masters presented his High School graduation oration in this building. Across the street in the courthouse east courtyard sits the cannon that once sat in the yard of the home of Lewis Ross, member of Lewistown’s founding family and namesake. Masters referred to that family as “McNeely.”

Directly across Main Street from the courthouse is the Presbyterian Church that Masters tells us the sanctimonious banker “Rhodes”

ran as well as the bank. Further south on Main Street stands the Rasmussen Blacksmith Shop Museum, a former gossip center frequented by Masters.

A little further south on Main Street at the corner of Avenue D is one of the Lewistown boyhood homes of Edgar Lee Masters. After arriving in Lewistown in 1880, the Masters family rented at least three other homes before his father purchased this home in 1883. He lived there until 1892 when he moved to Chicago.

In 1895, Hardin Masters, Edgar’s father purchased the home located at the corner of West Milton Avenue and North Adams Street. Edgar Lee visited there frequently and may have produced some of his writings there. Hardin Masters’s law office was located on the second floor of the building that still stands at the corner of Milton Avenue and Main Street.

The Real CharactersShortly after the Anthology was published, gossip and speculation on the true identity of the characters was widespread, people secretly keep copies of the book and created lists attempting to identify the characters. These lists still exist in the memories of some local folks.

By Masters’s own account 66 of the Anthology characters were buried in Lewistown’s Oak Hill Cemetery. Some of the characters used real-life names while others were combinations of real and fictitious names and people. Other names were drawn from the Illinois Constitution and other sources. Today, only 41 of the characters have been identified. The graves of those former Lewistown residents are part of an Oak Hill Cemetery walking tour detailed in the brochure available below, at Oak Hill Cemetery, Lewistown City Hall, The Lewistown and Fulton County Visitors Center, and online at the City of Lewistown web site.

The Lewistown home of the Masters family, located on South Main Street.

Lewistown resident Opie Lambert and friend of Edgar Lee Masters shown at the soda fountain at the

Lewistown drug store. Lambert maintained his friendship with Masters and regularly exchanged letters.

Dr. William Strode, Lewistown physician and naturalist, was a friend of Edgar Lee Masters.

Masters enjoyed visiting Strode and both were members of the Fulton County Scientific

Association. Strode was the model for Masters’s “William Jones” in Spoon River Anthology.

Anthology places visible today in Lewistown. (upper left to right) Oak Hill Cemetery, Civil War Monument at Oak Hill Cemetery, Beadles Opera House, Presbyterian Church. (lower left to right) Rasmussen Blacksmith Shop Museum, Edgar Lee Masters boyhood home, Hardin W. Masters home.