Note that Moon Creek is incorrectly depicted as running along the north side of Reading Road. The road that eventually became Rt. 23 ends at Reading Road and there is no road where Rt. 17 runs today. 17 was constructed by chain gangs in the 1920s or 1930s. It's also interesting to note that in this map the railroad line runs straight, nowadays it curves westward just south of Ancona.  The remains of the railroad right of way continuing southwest are plainly visible in the appropriate Terraserver images (Note: I have removed the Terraserver hyperlinks previously in this text because they stopped working. Terraserver is a wonderful resource, I hope this is temporary).
   Out of curiosity I tried tracing the route of the old railroad line on Terraserver as it went southwest of Ancona.  It's a straight shot through beautiful downtown Long Point (named for the long point of timber along appropriately named Long Point Creek).  Just south of Long Point it curves slightly more west, then continues through Dana, turns west through the center of Minonk, turns back southwest again and continues through Benson.  As the streets of Benson are laid out parallel and perpendicular to the tracks instead of N/S, I assume that Benson owes it's existence to the railroad line. The line continues on through Roanoke and then curves into the town of Eureka.  I can't follow it beyond Eureka due to development and terrain.

Graphic adapted from images found at
http://www.cyberdriveillinois.com/ and http://terraserver.microsoft.com

   On the left is the 1830 plat from the Illinois state archive database.  On the right is a Terraserver image shown at approximately the same scale. Moon Point Cemetery is the red box in both pictures.  To help orient the viewer in the satellite picture, I've highlighted Ill. Rt. 23 in white and Ill. Rt. 17 in blue. The Vermillion River is in the upper right-hand (NE) corner, the city of Streator lies on the north side of the river.  The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad tracks are highlighted in yellow.  Between 1936 and 1971 thousands of people rode those very rails going between Chicago and Los Angeles in Santa Fe's famous Super Chief.  Amtrak's Southwest Chief took over the route in 1971. In the 1990s the Southwest Chief was rerouted through Galesburg and no longer passes this way, although this remains a very active freight line.
   About a third of the timber that originally comprised Moon's Point still exists.  The portion to the north of the section line between Sections 2 and 11 became the site of one the coal mines that Coalville grew up around. It later became a gravel quarry and then a dump. Today it's the state-of-the-art Streator Area Landfill #3. 

   L.H. Mallery and his wife are buried in Moon Point.  Coalville today is little more than a handful of houses along the road into Streator.

   The tiny town of Reading lies next to the tracks just north of Rt. 17. Older than Streator by almost 20 years, at one time Reading was considered an up and coming little burg destined for greatness as a major stop on the railroad line to Chicago.  It had a train station (named Moon), hotels, three general stores, and several other businesses.  It was a standing joke in the area during the early part of the 20th century that one could take a train from Streator to the moon. 
   In the latter half of the 1800s, Streator's coal industry synergized with the railroads.  Steam locomotives required water and coal, Streator had both in abundance.  Streator required trains to ship it's coal to Chicago and other markets.  The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 also helped spur the development of Streator.  The rebuilding of the city after the fire created a tremendous demand for the products of Streator's fledgling glass, tile, and brick industries.   Streator's sudden growth eclipsed Reading's development and lured away potential business. 

  David Boyle, mentioned above, was Albert Moon's father-in-law and it's likely that Reading's location arose from the proximity to his daughter's family.  Reading has dwindled in size even my own lifetime.  A large old house (Dr. Hill's??) that used to sit just off the Reading Road was moved about a quarter mile south to face Rt. 17 and a jog that used to be in the Reading Road was straightened sometime in the 1970s.  Reading's long abandoned one room schoolhouse, which was located near the bend in Moon Creek, was torn down about the same time. 
   The small white rectangle almost dead center in the satellite picture is the white gravel parking lot of the Sauder Equipment Company.  The north/south line running next to Sauder is the Ancona road.  If you follow the road south and look very closely you can find Ancona  immediately north of where the road crosses the railroad tracks (about where the tracks curve westward). 

  Caleb Mathis and Jacob Bussard, mentioned in the above accounts, are buried in Moon Point.  To those of us with roots in Reading Township many of the surnames mentioned in these and other early accounts of the area are familiar as the last names of family friends-- Mathis, Loomis, Coe, Defenbaugh, Bradley... 

  Aside from the grain elevator, Ancona's last commercial enterprise was Gabe Carpenter's general store, which stood on the NW corner of the intersection of Wall St. and the Ancona Road.  Although in my family we always referred to the store as "Gade's", I've recently been informed that the store was run by Gerald and Ida Carpenter and that Mr. Carpenter was called "Gabe".  The store resembled something out of an old western movie both inside and out.  Mr. Carpenter kept more than one local farm family afloat during the Great Depression by extending credit when few others were willing to.  His store was also a hangout for the local farmers, which tended to give it a bit of an unsavory reputation as far as their wives were concerned-- If they were shooting the breeze at Gabe's they weren't at home getting their chores done.  Mr. Carpenter (a kindly white-haired gentleman when I knew him in the 1950s) retired some time around 1960 and the building torn down shortly afterwards.  

About all that remains in Ancona today is the picturesque Ancona Church of Christ.  In the 1980s Ancona's post office was (and may still be) located in the garage of one it's residents. 

   These tiny towns may seem laughably quaint as we whiz by them at 55 miles per hour, it's easy for those of us who grew up in an internal combustion powered world to forget the realities of life when horsepower was actually supplied by horses.
   From our family's homestead west of Reading we thought nothing of jumping in the car for the 5 mile trip to Steve's Market in "Number 3" (South Streator) for a gallon of milk or loaf of bread, an errand easily accomplished in less than a half hour. 
   With a horse, though, one doesn't just climb on and start the ignition, it has to be saddled or hitched first.  If the animal is in its stall this might take 10 minutes or so, if it's pastured it might take twice that long just to bring it up.  In western movies you see riders gallop seemingly for miles, in reality this would kill the horse.  It would be a little hard on the rider, too, riding a galloping horse is more strenuous than it looks. 
   Travel by horseback is in practice little faster than walking, slower if the horse is pulling a wagon, figure 3-4 miles per hour on good trails.  That errand to Steve's Market would've taken 3 hours round trip, possibly longer, by horse and buggy.  Something you'd have to plan your day and chores around. 
   When you get to your destination you don't simply park a horse and shut it off, if the journey is of any appreciable distance or duration the horse has to be rested and fed and watered.  Stagecoaches could travel 50 miles per day but they were so named because they stopped every couple hours to recieve a fresh team and thus traveled in stages of 10 miles or so.  Horsedrawn travel was realistically limited to roughly 25 miles per day under the best of conditions, if you expected to sleep in your own bed you stayed within a 10 or 12 mile radius of home. 
   It was of necessity that towns like Reading and Ancona had stores, livery stables, eating establishments, hotels, churches... they were vital centers of commerce and social interaction, at least as important in their heyday as urban shopping malls are today. 

   Woodland School, on the south side of Rt. 17 near the right hand edge of the satellite picture, was built in the 1950s to replace the many one-room schoolhouses in the area. 
   The tiny square highlighted in yellow, left of center and north of Rt. 17 marks the former site of the Distant Early Warning ("DEW Line") training center.  At the height of the Cold War, the DEW line was a string of radar stations placed across the Arctic Circle to watch for incoming Soviet bombers and ICBMs.  Satellites rendered it obsolete by the end of the 1970s.  The center closed circa 1980 and the land sold back to the farmer.  Many of the site's buildings and antennae still remain but the landmark radar sphere was removed in the mid-1980s.
  People from Streator call the intersection of Rt. 23 and Rt. 17 Four Mile Corner because it's four miles south of town.  The people living in Reading township simply call it Four Corners and presently the Four Corners Family Restaurant occupies the SW corner of the intersection.  To the author, though, Four Corners will always be the tiny Shell gas station/short order grill that formerly stood on NE corner. 
   It appeared to have been built in the 1930s, probably about the same time Rt. 17 went through.  In addition to burgers and fried egg breakfasts they offered hand-scooped ice cream cones, a messy and delicious treat on hot summer days and the subject of much lobbying of adult drivers by their younger passengers. 
   It was a place where farmers gathered for morning coffee and to discuss the issue-du-jour, be it the Gub'mint, the antics of hippies, or the (rising) (falling) market price of corn...  On my last visit there, circa 1977, there was a sign behind the counter reading "Don't complain about the farmer with your mouth full".  That local institution was lost in the  late 1970s, torn down to accomodate widening Rt. 23.  The present restaurant went up shortly afterwards.