At a local high-point, on the edge of the Wood River Terrace where Cahokia Creek makes its way down off the bluff, and directly down the slope from the SIUE campus, sits the hamlet of Poag. A former station on the Wabash Railroad, Poag was a small farming community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries known for the raising of watermelons and cantaloupes in one of the few sandy soil patches in the bottoms. This region of the Township is known for its fertile land composed of glacial outwash from the Mississippi River marbled with silty loam alluvium. Edwardsville initially received its drinking water from a deep well in the village, and currently the city’s wastewater treatment plant lies in the vicinity. Today, Poag retains a legibility as a still-intact clustering of farmhouses and out-buildings on an otherwise open and empty stretch of the American Bottom.