This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
We all know people who have grown up to fit their names. At least one town near Rock Island did just that.
By 1843, Davenport, in Iowa, and Stephenson, in Illinois, had become thriving river towns. Just east of Stephenson, an entrepreneur named David Sears had erected a crude brush dam between the shore and Rock Island which was soon busy with several saw and flour mills.
Sears decided it was time to invest in a town, with lots for sale to mill workers. In 1843, he and his partners—staunch New Englanders with Yankee names like Charles Atkinson and Spencer White, laid out lots just up from the dam.
The surveyor who platted the town drew up two identical maps. On one he wrote the name "Moline," and on the other "Hesperia." Moline, he explained to the investors, was French for "mill town" while Hesperia was Greek and meant "Star of the West." In those days, schoolboys studied languages and read the classics.
Most Western towns wanted to become successful versions of eastern working cities such as Lowell, Massachusetts; on the other hand, they also harbored dreams of becoming the Queen City of the West, that visionary Utopia in the heart of the heart of the country.
At this little dam on the Mississippi, there was no contest. Charles Atkinson is reported to have looked at both maps, and said "Moline let it be, then." And so it was, and it was good.
Moline, with its no-nonsense name, grew into a sturdy town. With the First Congregational Church firmly in charge, Moline lived the work ethic, voted for Lincoln four to one, and abhorred waste. John Deere once warned a friend to be wary of his neighbors because the "used two spreads on their bread." "In Moline," one resident bragged, "very little is left to chance or the devil."
There was a price to pay: a local newspaper editor complained in 1854 that "a much duller town could not be found this side of Sleepy Hollow."
Think if the name had been Hesperia. What wild nights, what exotic entertainments.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
