Tracy is a

ghost town Ghost Town(s) or Ghosttown may refer to: * Ghost town, a town that has been abandoned Film and television * Ghost Town (1936 film), ''Ghost Town'' (1936 film), an American Western film by Harry L. Fraser * Ghost Town (1956 film), ''Ghost Town'' ...

Essex Township, Kankakee County, Illinois Essex Township is one of seventeen townships in Kankakee County, Illinois, USA. As of the 2010 census, its population was 1,480 and it contained 686 housing units. History The now lost towns of Tracy, Oklahoma, and Clarke City, which housed coa ...

. Tracy was a relatively small settlement, amounting to possibly a dozen buildings, which housed

coal miners People have worked as coal miners for centuries, but they became increasingly important during the Industrial revolution when coal was burnt on a large scale to fuel stationary and locomotive engines and heat buildings. Owing to coal's strategic ro ...

exploiting a nearby

coal seam Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from ...

in the 1800s; and it disappeared quickly around 1900, when the seam ran out. According to th
1892 Map
of the

Illinois Central Railroad The Illinois Central Railroad , sometimes called the Main Line of Mid-America, was a railroad in the Central United States, with its primary routes connecting Chicago, Illinois, with New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mobile, Alabama. A line also co ...

, Tracy was located just northwest of

Buckingham Buckingham ( ) is a market town in north Buckinghamshire, England, close to the borders of Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire, which had a population of 12,890 at the 2011 Census. The town lies approximately west of Central Milton Keynes, sou ...

and served as a major spur from the later.

References

Ghost towns in Illinois {{US-ghost-town-stub