After Bennington Township received a switch and regular stop on the Santa Fe Railroad, the railroad hired Charles Devlin to prospect the area for coal for steam-powered trains. Mineral rights for 11,000 contiguous acres in Bennington, Bell Plain, Evans, and Roberts Townships were then purchased by the Devlin Coal Company, founded by Devlin. Development of the Toluca coal fields began in 1892, and shaft number 1 was sunk beginning February 9, 1893, reaching the lowest coal vein, about 512 feet deep, by September of that year. Devlin promised to produce 1,000 tons of coal a day within a year and kept that promise, and by 1895 the Toluca mine was one of the best equipped in Illinois. A second shaft was sunk 1,000 feet south of the first and connected underground, while all coal was brought up through shaft number 1, where a crew worked in a sixty-foot-tall tipple to sort and wash it. The mine was supplied with water from a dam on Crow Creek for steam engines, and the complex was first crossed by the Devlin-owned Toluca and Eastern Railroad, which became the Toluca, Marquette and Northern Railroad in 1902 after the line extended northward across the Santa Fe tracks west of the mine. Miners attached numbered brass checks to filled coal cars so their loads could be weighed and recorded, and they were paid 75 cents per ton. After the mine closed in 1924, vegetation slowly returned, and the site remained largely untouched until March 1997, when preservation and reclamation efforts safely filled and marked the shafts.