About 7:00 P.M. leadership began to develop in the mob about the jail. The leaders demanded the two Negroes, but were finally convinced by the sheriff that they were not in the jail. Then the story spread that Harry Loper, a restaurant keeper, had provided the automobile in which the men had been removed. The crowd rushed to the restaurant five blocks away. In response to the mob's hootings Loper appeared in the doorway with a firearm in his hand. About 8:30 P.M. someone threw a brick through a plate-glass window and in a few minutes the front of the restaurant had been smashed out. Then followed the complete wrecking of the restaurant, as well as the owner's automobile, which had been standing in front.
When the mob began to surge through the town the Fire Department was called to disperse it, but the mob cut the hose. Control having been lost by the sheriff and police, Governor Deneen called out the militia. The mob, by this time very much excited, started for the Negro district through Washington Street, along which a large number of Negroes lived on upper floors. Raiding second-hand stores which belonged to white men, the mob secured guns, axes, and other weapons with which it destroyed places of business operated by Negroes and drove out all of the Negro residents from Washington Street. Then it turned north into Ninth Street.
At the northeast corner of Ninth and Jefferson streets was the frame barber shop of Scott Burton, a Negro. The mob set fire to this building. From that point it went a block farther north to Madison Street and then turned east and began firing all the shacks in which Negroes and whites lived in that street.
Burton, the first victim of the mob's violence, was lynched in the yard back of his shop. The mob tied a rope around his neck and dragged him through the streets. An effort was then made to burn the body, which had been hung to a tree. This was at two o'clock in the morning.
About this time a company of militia arrived from Decatur, Illinois, and proceeded through Madison Street to Twelfth Street, where the mob was engaged in mutilating Burton's body, riddling it with bullets. The mob was twice ordered to disperse, and the militia fired in the air twice. The third time the troops fired into the ankles and legs of the mob. At least two of the men in the mob were wounded and the mob quickly gave way.