This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Galena, Illinois, a hundred miles upriver, must be one of the more unusual small towns along the Upper Mississippi River. When Galena found herself further and further behind in the frantic race toward the twenty-first century, with wider streets, brighter lights, more super stores and mega malls, she stopped for a breather, and then began running backwards toward the nineteenth century.
How then can she be winning the race?
Galena's beginnings seemed promising. Her population grew from a hundred in 1825—seven years after Illinois became a state—to ten thousand in 1830, five years later. The attraction was the lead ore for which the town was named, ore so pure and concentrated that it could be scooped up from open pockets on the surface. Virtually the entire supply of lead for the United States came down Galena's Fever River by keelboat to the Mississippi and then down to smelters near St. Louis. Galena turned into a picturesque small city nestled in among hills and bluffs, with wrought iron balconies and grand homes with colonnades. The Ulysses S. Grant family came here to live in the 1840s.
Then, overnight, steel shot replaced lead. The Fever River silted up, and Galena lay deteriorating and forgotten for a hundred years, weathering away, hopelessly behind the times.
Until some smart city council decided to make lemonade out of their lemon. They passed an ordinance that stopped all modernization. Any business remodeling its storefront had to restore that facade to its original design. Slowly, the neon and the permastone disappeared as Galena slipped further and further back toward 1840.
And the result? New families moved to Galena by the hundreds, but tourists have returned by the thousands, far outnumbering the stampede of miners who built the town. The largest mega-mall in any of the neighboring towns would be glad to attract half the number.
As the Good Book reminds us, "the race is not always to the swift."
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
