Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Stachnikville, Illinois

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Yunshui ^雲 _水 08:31, 24 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Stachnikville, Illinois[edit]

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Fails WP:SIGCOV. I can't even find solid evidence that this place was real, let alone was in Tazewell County. Closeapple (talk) 08:28, 17 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per my own nomination. The couple of web sources are very, very vague and sometimes make contradictory statements: https://www.ghosttowns.com/states/il/stachnikville.html (which I only cited because sourcing is slim pickings for this topic) says "The town originated in 1856 reached it peak in 1873 and then began a steep decline. For some reason Morton Community Bank ("Hometown Community Banks") posted a Facebook message about a couple of ghost towns: "Another, somewhat more mysterious ghost town is Stachnikville in Tazewell County. Stachnikville was a large community with a population, said by some sources, to be in the many thousands. Not only is there no trace of it today, but nobody seems to know exactly where it was. We tried to investigate but had no luck. Best guess might be the Pekin/East Peoria area since the town was largely made up of coal miners. How about it?" There's where the suspicion starts:

If a town was "in the many thousands" and "reached its peak in 1873", it would have been one of the major settlements in Illinois: Even the county seat of Pekin was only 1,678 in 1850 and 5,696 by 1870. Yet somehow it's on no maps. No hits on the Google Search of Historic Map Works, which usually has at something. In the directory of subscribers to the 1872 Lyter & Co. atlas has nobody named Stachnik and nobody shown as being in Stachnikville. There appears to be no town/subdivision plat named Stachnikville either: https://tazewellil.devnetwedge.com/ shows no subdivision by that name (not that there had to be).
Facebook post says "nobody seems to know exactly where it was" and GhostTowns.com has no location yet claims "REMAINS: A large valley, an abandoned house". But this Wikipedia article (which has existed since creation in 2014 by User:Palletcarl) says "The only thing that still remains is the Hillman Street Barn", a claim which seems to appear nowhere else on the Internet. How does anyone know what elements still exist if nobody knows where it is? By the way: The only Hillman Street in Tazewell County is in sections 7 and 8 of northwestern Washington Township, northeast of East Peoria, not south by Pekin. That subdivision is Harvard Hills, which I'm pretty sure is a 20th-century subdivision, though it's possible that Harvard Hills overlays an earlier subdivision. I see two somewhat-barns at 311 and 314 Hillman St., and 2 buildings that could vaguely meet an inaccurate description of "Hillman Street Barn": Harvard Hills Southern Baptist Church, 109 Hillman St., at the southeast corner with Green Ave.; and the Harvard Hills Water Association, 101 S. Berhrens Ave., the first building from the the southeast corner with Hillman St. The 1872 Lyter & Co. atlas page of Washington Township shows no town, no Hillman Street, and no other streets (other than Spring Creek Road) in that area.

So this discussion page now has more information than everything else on the web. --Closeapple (talk) 08:40, 17 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Geography-related deletion discussions. Closeapple (talk) 08:45, 17 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Illinois-related deletion discussions. Closeapple (talk) 08:45, 17 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Delete I found this rather odd document from something claiming to be the "General Post Office of the United States", but it appears to be based on Wiki. Nothing else showed up. Appears to be some kind of hoax or mistake. FOARP (talk) 09:07, 17 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I saw that site also. It's either fantasy, fraud, or both. They appear to have copy-pasted some Wikipedia page into one of their crazy documents, which makes it show up in search results. The whole site is very weird, and it also links to other sites that appear to be trying to sell "copyright registration" for profit without any government authority. --Closeapple (talk) 11:43, 17 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Seemingly the creation of a contributor to (non-RS) ghosttowns.com, which has taken on a life of its own. Appears in no reliable sources, including contemporary ones. Does not appear in any way in Illinois records of coal mining in Tazewell County. The cited article in the Peoria Journal Star does not support the claim it is being used to reference, and does not mention Stachnikville, or anything similar, whatsoever. As to the other thing discovered by FOARP, that's hot nonsense created by a fringe group in the tax denialist/sovereign citizen vein (the giveaway is the reference to the "Bar Treaty of 1947", which doesn't exist, and... let's just go ahead and firmly conclude that wouldn't be a reliable source even if it wasn't using Wikipedia for its town list!). It's plausible that we're missing an abandoned Tazewell County coal mining town, perhaps even near what is now Harvard Hills. But I'm pretty confident that such a town, if it existed, wasn't named Stachnikville. Squeamish Ossifrage (talk) 17:14, 17 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Delete There are not reliable sources showing this place ever existed.John Pack Lambert (talk) 05:08, 21 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.