Pick any stretch of road and you can find along it a history of the nation. I chose Illinois Route 2 along the Rock River, following a tour from a 1939 Illinois guidebook published by the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).1
The Rock River valley. Maps: USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection, scale 1:62500, Rockford (1938), Kings (1918), Oregon (1924), Dixon (1918). Book cover: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs.
Published between 1937 and 1941, the American Guide Series covered all 48 states at the time, plus territories and many cities. The Illinois volume, like most of the state guides, contains introductory chapters on history, geography, culture, and industry, followed by chapters about selected cities and towns, and then tour routes, usually by road (and one by water). As a whole, this series of guides suggests neither an encyclopedic chronicle nor an uncritical celebration of the United States.2 The writers took on the ambitious work of educating their audiences and encouraging deeper exploration.
The results sprawl, they meander, they diverge and digress. They show a country in process, looking to its past and considering its future. For the curious traveler today, they offer quirky road trip options. For the historian, they invite questions about the layers of memory in a landscape, the peoples who have inhabited it, and the powers that shape both a place and our understanding of it over time.
Our road trip begins in Rockford, Illinois.
Beattie Park, Rockford. This site once had twelve mounds, including turtle and bird effigies. Only five remain. All photographs courtesy of the author.
900 to 1300 years ago the peoples who lived along the river created earthen mounds, many of them burial sites, and some in the shapes of animals. Archaeologists now call this the Late Woodland period of the Upper Mississippi Valley. They can only speculate on the mounds’ cultural significance.3
Around 1800, the Kaskaskia, Sauk, Meskwaki (Fox), Potawatomi, Peoria, Miami, and Kikapoo called the Rock River valley home. A contested 1804 treaty ceded these lands.4 Sauk leader Makataimeshekiakiak (Black Hawk) resisted the injustice, arguing that the original treaty’s signatories had no authority and had not known what they signed. His arguments fell on deaf ears.5 Having been forced to leave their homes and fields for lands west of the Mississippi by 1831, a group led by Black Hawk returned to Illinois in 1832. A confrontation left the Illinois militia in retreat from a place now named after its ignominious leader. Stillman’s Run opened what became known as the Black Hawk War.
Left: The Stillman monument, erected in 1901. Right: At the site of Fort Dixon stands a 1930 statue of Abraham Lincoln by Leonard Crunelle, “depicting the youthful captain of volunteers,” in the words of the Illinois guidebook.
Within four months, hope ended in tragedy. In Black Hawk’s words, “the whites were not satisfied until they took our village and our grave-yards from us.”6
Corn fields in winter, Ogle County.
The settlers—the colonizers—kept coming, pushing ever west. The rich soil clung to everything and the prairie roots went deep. In 1837 in Grand Detour, a blacksmith from Vermont took a steel sawmill blade and bent it into a plow that would break the plains. Or so the story goes.7
After John Deere fashioned his first steel plow at his Grand Detour blacksmith shop, he formed a partnership with Leonard Andrus. They built their first factory on this site in 1846. Deere left the partnership in 1848 to move to Moline. Andrus’s company continued operating on the site until 1869. All that remains of the building is its stone foundation.
The foundation of the first John Deere factory
In 1861 Lincoln’s call came to fight for the Union. The men who answered were forever immortalized in stone. Byron, settled by abolitionists, erected one of Illinois’s first Civil War memorials in 1866. Downriver, Oregon took fifty years to follow, making up in style what it lacked in timing. Its design followed the era’s trend towards reconciliation, depicting Union and Confederate soldiers with a woman representing peace between them.8
Over the next century, the county’s sons and daughters continued to fall in her country’s forever wars. When the citizens erected a new monument, they left room for more.
Left: The Byron Soldiers’ Monument, erected in 1866 and financed by local contributions. Top right: The Ogle County Soldiers’ Monument, by Lorado Taft. Its design was approved in 1911 and it was dedicated in 1916. Bottom right: The Ogle County Fallen Soldiers Memorial (2015) has black granite panels with the names of soldiers from the county who died from World War I on.
The railroad made and lost fortunes along this shallow stretch of river. Rockford and its rural hinterlands grew together. The factories produced textiles and machinery while their owners grew rich and toured Europe collecting art and antiquities.
One display of that wealth is the Swiss Cottage, built in Rockford between 1865-1870 to the specifications of Robert Tinker. The guidebook noted it contained “curios collected by Tinker in Europe and the South Seas, as well as many early American pieces.”9
The Swiss Cottage
Following Tinker’s death in 1924, acting in accordance with his wishes, his family arranged to give the house to the Rockford Park District after the death of Tinker’s second wife (who was also the niece of his first wife and the house’s last occupant). She was still in residence at the time of the guidebook’s publication, but it was opened to the public as a museum four years later.
The wealthy built fabulous homes, and Illinois residents invested in architecture to make their cities proud. The 1878 Winnebago County Courthouse no longer stands, but according to the guidebook, its designers also drew inspiration from European precedents. “In bas-relief above the entrance appeared a group of unclothed cherubs,” which led a group of concerned citizens to petition for “such changes in said emblems as shall remove all occasion of offense and save the City and County from further reproach.” Their petition succeeded.
The guidebook also notes that the courthouse’s “modern addition, built in 1918, is of white limestone, anticipating in color and design the building which will some day replace the old structure.”10 While that may have been the original idea, the writer failed to anticipate the ubiquity of steel and concrete. Perhaps the residents are grateful: there is not a cherub in sight.
Winnebago County Courthouse: On the left in the photograph is the 1918 addition. The newer building was added in 1968.
Others sought in this place a retreat from the world.
For Walter Strong, publisher of the Chicago Daily News, retreat looked like a forest of solitude. Stronghold, completed in 1930, was built to resemble a medieval European castle; it now houses a Presbyterian retreat center.
Stronghold
For the rest of the state’s residents, a forest of peace. In 1934, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) began construction on the lodge, cabins, and other facilities at White Pines State Park. This work was still on-going at the time of the guidebook’s publication and the park is not mentioned. The park is home to one of the last remaining stands of virgin white pine trees in the state.
White Pines State Park
In 1843, a visitor to a spot along the river called Eagle’s Nest sang the praises of the prairie. With perhaps a trace of hyperbole, transcendentalist Margaret Fuller declared, “Rome and Florence are suburbs compared to this capital of nature’s art.”11 Such boosterism—quoted in the guidebook—brought its rewards: an island in the river now bears her name. Yet only a decade after the forced expulsion of the area’s indigenous inhabitants, already she relegated their presence to a nostalgic past, their traces the “arrowheads and Indian pottery” that turned up under the plow.12
Fifty years later, historian Frederick Jackson Turner stood in front of his peers in Chicago and declared the frontier closed.13
An artists’ colony formed at Eagle’s Nest. On the river bluffs, Lorado Taft created The Eternal Indian.14 The 48-foot poured-concrete statue, completed in 1911, portrays a figure with his arms crossed looking west across the river. The guidebook states Taft intended “to depict an idealization of the Indians who lived in this region, but popular fancy named it Black Hawk.”15 It bears no resemblance to the Sauk leader. Once pushed into the past, he could be safely romanticized.
Taft’s “Black Hawk” statue, first designed in 1908 and completed in 1911.
The Sauk and Meskwaki tell a different story, one in which history lives in the present. The graveyards taken from them still lay beyond their reach. Remains repatriated to the tribes cannot be reinterred in Illinois: “They wanted us out, and they don’t want us to come back, not even our bones. And that’s the legacy of our Black Hawk War. They don’t even want our bones.”16
Past, present, and future intertwine in the books of the American Guide Series. The Illinois guide lauds the state’s modern industries, advising readers visiting Mt. Morris to call at Kable Brothers Company to inquire about employment at its “modern two-and-a-half-acre plan in which 32 presses print some 300 of the country’s periodicals.”17 In 2021, readers are advised that unless they work in demolition, they should look elsewhere.
Demolition of the Kable Brothers plant in Mt. Morris (March 2021). Its antique bricks are packed up for resale.
The factories, once promising a prosperous industrial future, now quietly rust. The plumes rising from the twin cooling towers of a nuclear power plant may soon dissipate.18
Restored prairies bloom underfoot, bald eagles soar overhead, and the river flows on.
The nuclear generating station, seen from the Byron Forest Preserve District.
Pick any stretch of road and you can find along it a history of the nation. Stop at any point and you can see histories all around you, as with this panoramic view of Rock River from the top of Castle Rock, where “an easy climb to the 150-foot summit offers a splendid view of the river and surrounding hills and valley.”19
The view from Castle Rock
At the far left, looking northeast, the plumes from the Byron nuclear power plant are just visible over the trees. Across the river is Lowden-Miller State Forest, which in 1939 was Sinnissippi Farms, owned by former Illinois governor Frank Lowden and his wife Florence Pullman Lowden. To the right, the river continues its course southwest past Grand Detour, Dixon, Saukenuk (Black Hawk’s village, now part of Rock Island), and to the Mississippi. It is a view that invites questions.
In 1943 the Rockford Register-Republic printed an obituary: “There wasn’t even a funeral service when they buried the biggest employer of labor in U.S. history. If there were a graveyard for defunct federal bureaus, there’d be a new tombstone inscribed: ‘Works Progress Administration (WPA) killed by war prosperity May 1, 1943, aged seven years.’” Its legacies live on. Among them are the guidebooks, which “introduced Americans to their own country.”20 Perhaps it’s time we got reacquainted.
Follow your own WPA route using this research guide.
- Originally published as Illinois: A Descriptive and Historical Guide (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1939), available from archive.org; republished as The WPA Guide to Illinois (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), available from archive.org.
- Christine Bold, The WPA Guides: Mapping America (University Press of Mississippi, 1999); Scott Borchert, Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).
- Robert A. Birmingham and Leslie E. Eisenberg, Indian Mounds of Wisconsin (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000); National Register of Historic Places, Beattie Park Mound Group, Rockford, IL, National Register #91000084 (1991).
- Proclamation Signed by President Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison, with Handwritten Copy of the November 3, 1804, Treaty with the Sauk and Fox Indians
- Black Hawk’s autobiography was first published in 1833. The edition cited is an annotated edition of the original text. Black Hawk: An Autobiography, ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1955, 1987), 54-6.
- Black Hawk, 142.
- “The Plow That Broke The Plains,” directed by Pare Lorentz (1936, Resettlement Administration)
- David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Belknap Press, 2001).
- Illinois, 372.
- Illinois, 371.
- Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes (Boston: Charles C. Little & James Brown, 1844), 53. Quoted in Illinois, 458.
- Fuller, 52.
- Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893. This speech was given at the meeting of the American Historical Association.
- Taft also created the Ogle County Soldiers’ Monument pictured above.
- Illinois, 458. This assertion is confirmed in later research: National Register of Historic Places, Indian statue, Oregon, IL, National Register #09000871 (2009).
- Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, 1990), remains and cultural items are to be returned to tribes. However, the Meskwaki Nation has not been allowed to bury repatriated remains in their ancestral homelands in Illinois. They have been buried in Iowa instead, where the Meskwaki (the Sac & Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa) are the only federally recognized tribe in the state. Jonathan Buffalo, Historic Preservation Director of the Meskwaki Nation, quoted in Nicholas A. Brown and Sarah E. Kanouse, Re-Collecting Black Hawk: Landscape, Memory, and Power in the American Midwest (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), 70-71.
- Illinois, 459.
- Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco, “Going Nuclear: Byron Fights To Save Its Power Plant,” NPR, December 10, 2020.
- Illinois, 459.
- John Grover, “No Funeral for the WPA,” Rockford Register Republic, May 6, 1943.
