Erna

Erna is just off U.S. Highway 377 twenty-one miles southeast of Menard in southeastern Menard County. The site is said to have been settled shortly after the Civil War, in part by German immigrants. J. N. Andrews operated the only store in the community in 1890. A post office was established there in 1915 with Amos Brewer as postmaster. The office was discontinued in 1919, and mail for the community was sent to Streeter in Mason County. Only a few scattered houses marked Erna on county highway maps in the 1940s. From the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s the population was reported at fifty. By the 1980s only the place name appeared on county maps.