Editing Illinois Country (section)

===Agricultural settlement and slavery===
According to historian Carl J. Ekberg, the French settlement pattern in Illinois Country was generally unique in 17th- and 18th-century French North America. These were unlike other such French settlements, which primarily had been organized in separated homesteads along a river with long rectangular plots stretching back from the river (ribbon plots). The Illinois Country French, although they marked long-ribbon plots, did not reside on them. Instead, settlers resided together in farming villages, more like the farming villages of northern France, and practiced communal agriculture.<ref name=autogenerated3>Ekberg (2000), pp. 28−32</ref>

After the port of [[New Orleans]], along the Mississippi River to the south, was founded in 1718, more African slaves were imported to the Illinois Country for use as agricultural and mining laborers. By the mid-eighteenth century, slaves accounted for as much as a third of the population.<ref name=autogenerated1>Ekberg (2000), pp. 2−3</ref>