Sitting outside his antique shop on Route 66 in Lincoln, Ill., last week, Kevin Ritchhart recounted a list of institutions in his town that have closed up for good.
There was the bottle factory, a big employer that shut down in 2019. A Christian university. The plant that made glass windows over on Kickapoo Street. The liberal arts college named after Abraham Lincoln closed in 2022 after 157 years of operation.
Now came word that the state of Illinois had made it official: The women’s prison a few miles away that employed hundreds of people was shuttering too, a loss that felt like more than tiny Lincoln could bear.
“This is going to kill our town,” Mr. Ritchhart said. “What’s left after the prison is gone?”
About 13,000 people live in Lincoln, three hours south of Chicago. There is still work in health care, manufacturing and agriculture, amid the rich farmland of central Illinois. A history museum is devoted to Lincoln, drawing visits from road-trippers who also stop to pose next to the world’s largest covered wagon.
Residents wear the Lincoln namesake with pride, noting that it is the only town in the United States named for the 16th president before he was elected to the White House. As the legend goes, Lincoln himself, then a respected lawyer who practiced in county courtrooms, christened the town in 1853 with watermelon juice.
The Logan Correctional Center, known around Lincoln simply as the women’s prison, was one of the few big, steady sources of work remaining, with more than 500 employees. But this month, the Illinois Department of Corrections said that after careful study, it had concluded that the prison was too old and deteriorated to be renovated, so it would be closed.
Some buildings on the prison campus are nearly 100 years old, the department noted. The new facility upstate will be fully modern and have design features that consider the mental health, recreation and education of inmates. It will be built in Crest Hill, Ill., outside Chicago.
The news landed with a thud in Lincoln, which, like many other towns in central and southern Illinois, has slowly lost industry, state institutions and people. Nearly everyone seems to know someone who works at the prison, and for months houses and restaurants around Lincoln have displayed placards reading “Save Logan Correctional Center” in their windows.
Some regulars at Chances R, a bar and grill in Lincoln, put one of the signs in the front window more than a year ago, said Mandy Demling, the owner. She knows that her business — already a challenge, with the rising cost of food and utilities — will suffer once the prison is gone.
“Horrible,” Ms. Demling said. “It’s just a bad deal and everyone knows it.”
Many residents said it was especially painful to see that a new prison would be built near Chicago, such a giant economic engine for the state that it seems to muscle out smaller towns.
“Chicago gets this, Chicago gets that,” said Dan Fulk, a shop owner in Lincoln. “I don’t think they look out for us here. You see a lot more factories and businesses far north.”
Some people in Lincoln, a Republican stronghold, saw politics at play. They blamed Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat, saying that his priorities lay with more liberal voters in the Chicago area. Already fed up with high taxes in Illinois, few people in Lincoln are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“It’s a Republican county, so they’re going to move the jobs up to Chicago where the Democrats are based,” said Bob Sanders, a member of the county board.
Mayor Tracy Welch of Lincoln said that he and other elected officials had fought the removal of the prison for years.
There were public hearings, meetings with state officials, even direct pleas to members of Mr. Pritzker’s staff. A prison outside Lincoln that houses men, the Lincoln Correctional Center, will stay open, but Mr. Welch said he had hoped that the governor knew how much Lincoln also needed the women’s prison to stay put.
When it closes, Mr. Welch fears that families will have no choice but to go where the jobs are.
“They have to make a living,” he said. “When families move out, it impacts businesses, it impacts our schools.”
Ron Keller, the director of the Lincoln Heritage Museum in town, moved to Lincoln in 2000 to teach history at the college. He said he happily raised a family there and has come to see it as his home, a place where there is “a slice of the American dream.”
But he has seen friends who have lost jobs reluctantly move away in search of work. After the announcement that the women’s prison would close, a gloom has settled over Lincoln.
“Right now it feels bleak,” he said. “It’s just been one thing after another. It’s been difficult to remain optimistic.”
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