This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
No sooner had the dust of the Civil War settled than the fledgling cities around Rock Island decided to make something of themselves in this world. That meant not only business and industry, but culture.
For the city of Rock Island, it meant the Harper House. Ben Harper, a former mayor of Rock Island, determined to build the finest hotel on the rail line between Chicago and the West Coast "to show visitors," Harper said, "that we have enterprise here, and faith in the future."
The Harper House opened in 1871, with a 1,200-seat auditorium. It was the first hotel in the west to have fire escapes.
The auditorium provided a platform for international celebrities such as Mark Twain, Sarah Bernhardt, Buffalo Bill, Susan B. Anthony, and Tom Thumb, who all played to packed houses.
Other visitors met a more mixed reception. On the last Sunday in April 1882, the famous English aesthete, Oscar Wilde, arrived to speak on "The English Renaissance." Wilde had not yet written The Picture of Dorian Gray, but he had been roundly satirized in a Gilbert and Sullivan Operetta as the leader of an art for art's sake movement, and his approaching visit was widely anticipated.
Local papers were not so positive following the lecture. The audience, said the Rock Island Daily Union, "was more select than numerous" and his lecture, in which he attempted to bring the artist and the workingman together in the "struggle for the beautiful and the best," was reported only after a detailed account of his dress. He was sufficiently animated, the reviewer wrote, but his hair was affectedly long, and his costume was more 18th century courtier than present-day gentleman. He wore a black velvet coat with a purple silk lining, lace ruffles at the wrists, a handsome seal dangling from his watch guard, and black silk stockings revealing huge calves. Rock Island was not impressed.
Wilde's reception illustrates a point it is still well to notice. When we Rock Islanders advise prospective visitors to dress for the climate, we're not just talking temperature.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
