ALTON

town (parish), East Hampshire district, administrative and historic county of Hampshire, England. It lies among the downs on the River Wey, about 18 miles (29 km) northeast of Winchester by road. The Church of St. Lawrence is in the Perpendicular style with a Norman tower. Eggar's Grammar School was founded in 1642, and there are many Georgian buildings. William Curtis, the botanist, was born at Alton in 1746, and the Curtis Museum was founded in 1855. Within the area are the Lord Mayor Treloar Orthopaedic Hospital, the 20th-century abbey of the Order of St. Paul, and the village of Holybourne, where the novelist and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell died in 1865. During 180917 the novelist Jane Austen lived at Chawton, 1 mile (1.6 km) south. Hops are grown in the area, and among the chief industries is brewing. Pop. (1991) 16,005. city, Madison county, southwestern Illinois, U.S. It is part of the St. Louis, Mo., urban-industrial complex and lies near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Named for a son of Colonel Rufus Easton, a St. Louis lawyer who laid out the townsite in 1817, it became a busy river port by the 1830s and still has considerable river traffic. Its industrial growth was stimulated by the availability of raw materials (iron ore, stone, lead, and zinc) and the establishment of oil refineries. Alton's manufactures include glass, paper, plastic, ammunition, hardware, machinery, and steel products. Factories fill the river plain in the lower town, while the residential area lies on the river bluffs, some of which rise to more than 200 feet (60 m). The Southern Illinois University School of Dental Medicine is in Alton. Lewis and Clark Community College was established (1970) on the campus of the former Monticello College (founded 1838) in nearby Godfrey. A monument commemorates the Abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah P. Lovejoy, who was killed in Alton by a proslavery mob in 1837. The site of the final Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858 is marked by a tablet. Inc. town, 1821; city, 1837. Pop. (1990) 33,064; (1994 est.) 32,953.