This is Roald tweet on Rock Island.
If you are a typical American, you have gone through the trauma of moving. More than once, you have put lock, stock, and barrel in a U-Haul and headed out for greener pastures.
If so, you'll understand a strange 1854 event south of here on the Illinois prairie. That year, the entire town of Wethersfield picked itself up and moved a mile away.
Wethersfield was founded as a religious colony in 1836 by the Reverend Ithamar Pillsbury of Wethersfield, Connecticut. The small community which grew around Reverend Pillsbury's church farmed, mined coal, and made bricks.
But in 1854, the approaching Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad bypassed Wethersfield to avoid expensive bridges across ravines. Instead it platted its own railroad town on the level prairie a mile away.
In the 19th century, railroads held the power of life and death. Wisely, perhaps, Wethersfield decided to switch rather than fight. Captain Sullivan Howard, a carpenter who had helped lay out Wethersfield, supervised its removal. The shops and businesses were placed on huge logs and rolled across the prairie to become the nucleus of the new town, which eventually took the name Kewanee, an Indian word for "prairie hen."
The marriage of town and railroad was a happy one from the moment the first engine, the Pigeon, pulled into the station in October of 1854. The railroad brought prosperity and industry to the growing town, which eventually adsorbed the former site of Wethersfield.
Today, Kewanee is a thriving farm community, the "hog capital of the world." But if you believe the local television ads, it is in danger of being taken over, lot by lot, by a rapidly expanding furniture store.
I'm not worried. Those old Wethersfield logs must still be in storage, and it wouldn't surprise me if the citizens of Kewanee woke up one morning to find their restaurants, beauty parlors, barber shops, gas stations, hardware stores, and all the office buildings being slowly rolled down main street by their proprietors, heading out once more for the open prairie.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
