Little Commune on the Prairie | Post 23 | Illinois
What can we learn about America on a virtual cross-country road trip? That’s the principal motivation for this blog, and some of the stories Google Street View tells are more obvious than others. For instance, an unmissable revelation — which I wrote about while in Pennsylvania — is that the U.S. abounds with self-storage facilities. They are all over the place, even where land is plentiful and buildings sit abandoned and empty.
On the other hand, sometimes a wind turbine on the rural Illinois horizon leads you to a 19th-century utopian Swedish colony, the murder of its leader Erik Jansson, and the tragic death 150 years later of the last Jansson descendant still living in the village.
That America is a landscape of both idyll and decay is as obvious as the self-storage facilities. Here in the middle of America, I am tacking across grids of farmland, patterns that I know better from many coast-to-Midwest flights above. By air, the Corn Belt quadrilaterals are edge-crisp, toned yellow and brown, and the small green blots are surely farmhouses cozied beneath old, majestic trees. If you fixate hard enough on a single farm through the airplane window, you can see, imagine, the grain deliveries and barn work. It’s beautiful, and it’s exactly the same on Street View:
But the emerging Street View lesson, one I already noted in West Virginia and in Ohio, is the pockmarks of decay. As I approach a rural township, I know I am all but certain to encounter a hollowed Main Street and decomposing homes:
The juxtapositions of such visual health and malady are sad, and also jarring, the incongruities as severe as Chinese characters plying the American heartland or a red Corvette in a worn mid-size town:
Often, fortunately, a little digging resurrects a lifeless place. In Henry, I noticed a River Valley Falcons supporter packing a banner into her car trunk on vacant Edward Street. Curiously though, as I discovered in the local (online) paper, there is no such thing as River Valley High School.
The Falcons are what is called a co-op football team, comprised of students from three small high schools along the Illinois River: Henry-Senachwine, Low Point-Washburn, and Midland (where the team actually practices). 2013 was the Falcons’ touchstone year, when, entering the season with a 4–86 10-year record, the team won six games and made the state playoffs for the first time ever. As I passed through in Street View September 2015, however, River Valley was on the verge of cancelling its season. Injuries and withdrawals had reduced the roster from 31 to 16 players, forcing forfeitures. Still, the program marches on, and for those interested, Midland High School is accepting applications for RVF Head Football Coach for the 2017 season.
It is this kind of Street View travel that led me to another of those less obvious stories — and Bishop Hill, named not for a mound (there are none around here), but after Biskopskulla, Sweden, birthplace of the murdered Erik Jansson.
It all started as I was zigging west and zagging north on state and county roads between Kewanee and Moline. I spotted a wind farm far ahead.
My guidebook, Wikipedia, informed me that Illinois ranks fifth among states for installed wind turbine capacity and second (after Iowa) in terms of wind power density — kilowatts generated per square mile. I deduced that I was looking at the Bishop Hill Wind Project, one of the state’s larger wind farms with 133 turbines (circa Street View October 2013).
I then noticed an eponymous town just to the south. Reading further that Bishop Hill (pop. 128) was “founded in 1846 by Swedish immigrants affiliated with the Pietist movement” and that it “stimulated substantial migration for several decades and contributed to the formation of the Swedish-American ethnic community of the American Midwest,” I detoured deeper into the plains, intrigued. What I found was not another gutted town, but a veritable National Historic Landmark.
The buildings of Bishop Hill are well-kept remnants of (and latter-day tributes to) Erik Jansson’s utopian religious community, founded after the prophet-ish Jansson ran afoul of the Church of Sweden and urged over 1,000 followers to voyage with him to America and establish a colony aligned with his Biblical interpretations. The trip and disease dissuaded or killed quite a few colonists, but “after the first winter, life at the colony began to improve. . . housing was upgraded from dugouts to brick living areas, and crops were planted on 700 acres of land. . . . The Bishop Hill Colony was communistic in nature, as dictated by Jansson. . . . It wasn’t uncommon to see hundreds of people working together in the fields or large groups of laborers engaged in other tasks.”
Bishop Hill’s extant structures include a great big barn of a church (1848), and the Steeple Building (1854), and Swedish flags festoon inns and gift shops, with a few craft shops scattered about town.
By many Wikipedia accounts, Bishop Hill (i.e. letters from) was one of the more important instigators for 19th-century Swedish immigration to the U.S., the reports of fertile land drawing Janssonite and Lutheran Swedes alike to Henry County and the Midwest generally.
Despite initial agricultural success, the story of Bishop Hill as an official communal colony ended in just 1861 — bad investments by a trustee led to financial trouble — and Erik Jansson’s run ended earlier, thanks to a predictable source of tension in small communes: family feud. In brief, one immigrant, John Root, married Jansson’s cousin but soon wanted out of the commune. This was permitted, but Jansson and the other colonists declared Root could not take his wife and family with him. Though Wikipedia insists Root and Jansson were “dealing with unrelated legal matters” at the time, on May 13, 1850, Root pulled out a gun and shot Jansson at a rural courthouse a few miles away.
Life in Bishop Hill continued post-commune, including for Jansson’s family. In fact, his descendants lived in the village until the unfortunate and unjust 2004 death of Jansson’s great-great-grandson, a Bishop Hill volunteer firefighter who was hit by a vehicle while directing traffic around a car accident.
In a final nod to Illinois farming, I finished up this leg of my journey in Moline, site of John Deere World Headquarters. John Deere, the man, was a Vermont native who moved to Illinois in the 1830s, invented the steel plow, and founded the company whose name and green and yellow machinery grace the Illinois prairie, the world, and a pro golf tournament at TPC Deere Run whose recent winners include Jordan Spieth.
A river divides Moline from Davenport, Iowa. My virtual cross-country road trip now heads west of the Mississippi.
Ground covered since last post:
- Start: Streator, Ill.
- Magnolia, Ill.
- Henry, Ill.
- Bradford, Ill.
- Kewanee, Ill.
- Bishop Hill, Ill.
- End: East Moline, Ill.
Trip to date:
Blog post sources:
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Farmhouses Have Histories Too | Post 24 | Iowa
