In the mid 1800s, Henry Hedrick Smith bought 800 acres of Bond County prairie from the Illinois Central Railroad and then secured a railroad terminal on his property by granting right-of-way to the St. Louis, Vandalia and Terre Haute Railroad when it built across Illinois in the late 1860s, creating Henderson Station. As that line ran its first passenger cars across Illinois in 1870, Smith planned a village, and in the following year he sold lots and recruited businesses for Smithborough. Ten years later, he negotiated passage of a second railroad through the community, and in 1881 the Jacksonville, Northwestern & Southeastern line carried passengers north to Jacksonville, Illinois, and south to Centralia, Illinois. By the early 1900s, Smithborough had a creamery, coal mine, bank, factory, restaurants, general stores, churches, schools, and about 600 residents, with Main Street in 1910 supporting an undertaker's parlor, two hardware stores, a lumber yard, grocery, and a mine door factory. Bond County residents traveled the National Road to worship, attend school, shop, socialize, and catch trains there. The town's first coal mine was sunk in 1884 by the Smithborough Prospect and Mining Company and operated sporadically until 1910, while mineral water from the mine was marketed as American Carlsbad Mineral Waters and used at the Smithboro Waterworks and Bath House and on Pennsylvania Railroad dining cars. In 1921, a fire destroyed most of the businesses on Main Street's west side, including Dinwiddle Steel Company, a Smithboro factory that produced automatic mine doors. The abbreviated spelling Smithboro appeared in the 1890s.