Solomon Pruitt, born in the Smokey Mountains in 1790, youngest of 10 children born to Martin Pruitt and his wife.  Solomon's father traveled with Daniel Boone and subsequently fought in the Revolutionary War at the Battle of King's Mountain. 

In 1806, when Solomon was 16, Martin Pruitt brought his family to Sand Ridge Prairie, some three miles east of Alton. Although Martin's wife died in 1807, Martin lived well into his 90's, spending most of his time hunting.

At the age of 21, Solomon was elected captain of a militia company; he spent 1813 and 1814 as an Illinois Ranger, protecting local residents. As it happened, Solomon was one of the few men not out with the Rangers patrolling on Sunday, July 10, 1814. That day Mrs. Reason Reagan and six children were killed by a band of renegade Indians in what came to be known as the Wood River Massacre.  It was Solomon who loaded the bodies onto a little one-horse sled and took them for burial in Vaughn Cemetery, south of Bethalto.

Preuitt (whose name appears variously as "Prewitt" or "Pruitt") participated as a captain the first campaign of the Black Hawk War in 1831. Upon his return home he was elected a major in the Madison County Militia; he held this post for many years afterward.

Solomon made his residence in Fort Russell Township. He was noted as once having raised a crop of 42 bushels of wheat to the acre at a time when the average was 10-15 bushels per acre.  in 1820, he planted some 40 yellow apple trees, grown from seed brought up from French settlements to the south; "six or eight of these trees produced very good fruit."

In addition to being a farmer, Pruitt was civic-minded. He served as a "gentleman freeholder" on the second grand jury in Madison County, in 1813.  In 1817 he helped supervise the building of a road from Indian Creek to Smeltzer's Ferry, "via Moore's bridge across Wood River."

Solomon married Rebecca Higgins and they had ten children; Rebecca died in the fall of 1855 and he remarried - to Elizabeth Higgins, Rebecca's sister.  The second marriage was childless.

Very suddenly, on January 9, 1875, Solomon Pruitt died, aged 85.  He was one of Madison County's true pioneers, having helped to develop this area for over 60 of its most dramatic years.