Sterling-Rock Falls Historical Society

Notes for a Capsule History

It is remarkable that so young a community as ours should have legends and traditions. It is regrettable that our citizens do not, for the most part, know their own heritage.

A town is its people. It can be no more, no less. The faithful street department who swiftly rid our clogged streets of snow in winter; the youngsters, or those older, who break into our places of business or our homes but live, themselves, in Rock Falls both groups are this town, and of the fabric of its being and existence.

And so, whether your antecedents arrived in this area a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, or yesterday this Rock Falls on the Rock River in the heart of America’s Midwest, is Your Town. Its history, its legends and traditions are yours, whether you are aware of then or not. They exist. They have been. They are the fabric of the town you call Home.

Most of the early people who created the town, were aware of their obligation. Their descendents, physical or spiritual, you and I and our children, are lamentably less aware of these obligations. Why should we improve our streets, or better educate our children? What do we owe Rock Falls?

Loyalty may be a bit out of fashion, as a word. Children feel it fiercely in a basketball game. Rock Fall’s soldiers have felt and known its meaning in wars where they have been called upon to give nothing less than their lives: in a tragic Civil War, a brief Spanish war: two World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam. Some of these boys and men lie in the tiny prairie cemetery east of Rock Falls.

They died in 1861-65, 1898, 1917-18, 1941-45, the 1950’s and ‘60’s: a hundred years of Rock Falls boys going to war and dying for loyalty, understood, or blurred of meaning.

Rock Falls, the town, the people who live here today – where did we begin?

Historically, with Isaac Merrill and Edward Atkins, a shoemaker and an Irishman. Before history, with tropic inland seas that covered our area seven times at intervals over thousands of years. (Fossilized sea corals have been found at Sinnissippi; a child brought a teacher a trilobite, millions of years old, found In an irrigation ditch In Coloma township a few years ago;) and with intermittent glaciers; a river carved; ancient Indians who built mounds across from us; later tribes who roamed, camped, fished, hunted under long-vanished trees, over prairies blurred with flowers or blinding blizzards of snow. All have vanished, like the flowers and the snow. The place we live, remains.

Merrill arrived first, then Atkins, early in 1837, thirty years before our centennial-measurement year. (Martin Van Buren was inaugurated as our 8th President on March 4, and on May 10, financial panic struck, 618 banks failed and a seven-year Depression followed. This same year, 1837, Elijah P, Lovejoy was killed by pro slavery rioters at Alton in our state; our forefathers were reading Emerson, Hawthorne and Dickens; Knox College was chartered at Galesburg; Temperance stories were rampant in our magazines, ladies were told it was vulgar to cross the knees (shades of' their great-granddaughters’ miniskirts) and also that it was harmful for them to ride horseback; Washington Irving coined the phrase "The Almighty Dollar", and Nathaniel Hawthorne reported that the "moustache fashion” had arrived from England.)

When Merrill and Atkins arrived, the settlements on the other side of the river (Chatham and Harrisburg) that were to merge into Sterling, were only three years old and had some 70 settlers. There was no bridge, of course, and the nearest neighbors were at Prophetstown and Dixon Ferry. The bloody Black Hawk War was only 5 years in the past.

What has the Black Hawk War to do with this place that became Rock Falls only 35 years later? Try to vision: an Indian trail that curved across our square mile, before there was one other path or cabin. It came in from the West. We call it the Prophetstown Road today. Straight to present day 11th Avenue It came, right-angled to today's 5th Street, ran straight as an arrow to 8th Avenue where the Lutheran Church now stands, turned North toward the river to our present 2nd Street, (Main Street in the old days); and from there found its way straight as possible (in the Indian way) to our Dixon Avenue, and on to Dixon Ferry by the old Rook Island Road.

This was the trail through future Rook Falls. Who followed it? The Indians who made it. The earliest white men, seeking homes. Are we sure? Nothing could be more historically so, with affixed dates of 1832 onward. The Black Hawk War surged through future Rock Falls and up our Rock River with a color and panoply and excitement that happened here, in this spot, only 135 years ago this spring.

We can pinpoint the date – May 8, 1832. On that day, through our future town, along the trail above described, swept Black Hawk, and 800 of his warriors, enroute from their great village at Rock Island, by way of the Prophet's Town to Dixon’s Ferry. They had crossed the Mississippi, breaking a trio of treaties with the United States government, picked up the Prophet, White Cloud, at his town on the Rock, and rushed on toward Dixon’s ferry, a day or two ahead of the United States troops, under the command of Col. Atkinson.

We don't know that the Indians, on horseback and in canoes, camped here enroute to Dixon. We do know that the United States troops did: 1900 volunteers with their horses, camped about 12 miles from the Prophet’s town, after they had left his village in ashes, (a wholly unnecessary act of destruction.) One thousand Regulars swept up the Rock in boats – how many to carry ammunition and supplies for nearly 3000 men? We do not know. Where did they camp? We don't know precisely, but it may well have been within the western limits of present day Rock Falls.

At this camping spot, a messenger from Dixon’s Ferry reported that Black Hawk and his 800 warriors were already 50 miles beyond! The decision was made to leave supplies behind and pursue as swiftly as possible, at dawn the next day. Nineteen hundred mounted men swept through our future streets in the early dawn of May 12. You would recognize some of them: Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy; Zachary Taylor (to become the 12th president of the United States); Samuel Whiteside, for whom the future county was to be named. And Abe Lincoln, 23 years old, up from New Salem to lead a company of Volunteers against the Indian threat. These and others who would later carve out more of our history rode post haste along the old Black Hawk trail, (Prophetstown Road) through a town 30 years in the future, to their date with destiny at Dixon’s Ferry.

We know the outcome of that brief summer-long Black Hawk War. After that, it was safe for Mr. Atkins and Mr. Merrill to come and found a settlement. Although what they actually founded was a paper town they called Rapids City because of the rapids in the Rock at this place. Their town was a mile square. It was going to be one of the big towns of the state, far surpassing Chicago, or even Galena. The canal the State was going to build around the rapids, was going to make Rapids City a metropolis, with a navigable river, and water power in abundance. The canal actually did progress for a half a mile between Avenue A and D, 60 feet from shore and had a wall 6 feet high, but it was never finished. The financial panic of 1837 put an end to the canal and the paper town of Rapids City. Sixteen years later, in 1853, the stones from the old canal wall were used in the construction of the Lower Dam and are their to this day.

But it is people who are the soul and personality of a town, not canals and dams or streets and houses. We have had some colorful figures living in the same place we call home, as they did.

There was that Irishman, Edward Atkins himself, whose first act was to build a hotel on the river bank, and on a grand scale, too. It was two stories high, and stood in the middle of what is now First Avenue, about in line with the point where the C.B. &Q. tracks run between the future Illinois Harvester building. It was built of local oak, butternut, black walnut, cherry and basswood; the only pine was on inside doors and window sashes, brought by team from Chicago; its crown moulding was all made by hand.

But more interesting, perhaps, than his house, was Mr. Atkins personal life. It seems that in Canada, from where he had emigrated after coming from Ireland, he went by the family name of Watson.

Leaving his wife and children, and his name, behind in Canada, he was known here as Atkins, and under that name, took another wife and reared another family. Then he dashed off to the California Gold Rush for two years. While he was gone, Mrs. Atkins got a divorce, (probably not knowing that it wasn't really necessary,) and married again. This left Mr. Atkins without a wife, so he persuaded his first wife to marry him again, (only an Irishman could have used the blarney to such good effect), and they lived happily – not “ever after”, but until – he left her! In the meantime, the second Mrs. Atkins had divorced her second husband, and Mr. Atkins first wife died, so he married the second Mrs. Atkins the second time. Mr. Atkins was a fair and impartial man; he married each of his two wives twice, and by each had 7 children, for a total of 14; 7 went by the name of Watson, 7 by Atkins. All turned out to be worthy citizens, the 7 Watson’s growing up in Wisconsin, the 7 Atkins locally.

Our next colorful citizen is John Arey who came to our area in 1844 as a little boy of 9, from Cape Cod, via railroad, canal, packet boat, and finally by prairie schooner from Chicago. Fortunately, since their destination was south of the river, their two prairie schooners didn't have to cross the Rock, even at Dixon’s Ferry. They followed the route of the stage coaches that ran between Chicago and Rock Island, down the south side of the river. The family, John, his parents, and his four brothers and sisters, rode in one prairie schooner; the other was filled with their belongings.

None of them had ever seen a prairie before, and little John never forgot the sight of that great “sea of grass”, dotted here and there with a few small “islands” of trees, between Chicago and “Rapids City.” 74 years later, when he was an old man of 83, writing the story of his life, he wrote vividly of that 3-day trip across the thickly flower-carpeted prairie in the month of May.

Where did the Arey family stay at first? In Edward Atkins big two story “hotel”, of course, although by then, it was owned by little John’s Uncle Jim Cooley. Later, John’s father, Richard Arey, bought it himself, and it was known as the Arey house until it was demolished, some time in the 1920’s.

In the winter of 1844, the very first winter that young John lived here, about 30 Winnebago Indians camped in the vicinity – probably on Eagle Island, (now Lawrence Park). The next spring they went North and never returned.

Little John Arey grew up to be a surveyor, and when he was 34, was hired to lay out the town of Rock Falls. He says there was a reason for every street line, but one wonders about the waywardness of a few of them. John Arey laid out sewage systems, parks and streets and cemeteries her and in other places too – including some Chicago parks and Iowa and Kansas towns. Retirement never entered his head. In 1885 he surveyed the area of the Upper Dam; in 1901 (age 67) he laid out 16 lots north of Dixon road, East of Hennepin canal, 2 block of lots in Rock Falls cemetery, 12 in Riverside, and numerous “additions” in both towns. At 70, he surveyed and made plans for sewers in Rock Falls, and superintended their own construction in the fall and summer of 1905.

At 77, “young” John Arey laid out the foundation of Lawrence Brothers large factory in Sterling and located the piers himself. And in 1914, at the age of 80, he went wading in the mud of Rock River bed, to a rock he'd fished from as a boy, briefly uncovered when water was drained from between the two dams, so that sewer pipe could be laid.

If ever we put up statues to our “great men”, John Arey should surely have one of his own – or maybe two! – maybe one of a 9-year old boy looking wide-eyed from a prairie schooner, and one of a sturdy old man wading out into the Rock to find his old fishing spot. For he was the man who laid out our town, and deserves to be remembered.

The man who hired him to do it was Augustus P. Smith, to go down in our history as the founder of Rock Falls. He was born February 2, 1831 in New York state, migrated to Sterling (at age 25), then when the Civil War was over, and he was 36, looked across the river and say nothing but the big Arey house and a few other scattered houses and cabins, (although no bridge as yet,) and decided here was a fine location for a town.

Full of ideas and plans, he hired young John Arey to lay out Rock Falls, and immediately began the construction of a mill race, connecting with the dam. A.C. Hapgood moved a store building across the prairie from Como to the new town site, Galt and Tracy erected a machine shop, and a post office was established and open for business on March 15, 1868, with Thomas Culver as postmaster. Rock Falls was on the map and growing by leaps and bounds.

So was the country, with a population in 1867, the year of our “birth”, of 30 million people. 12 more states had joined the Union, (since Merrill and Atkins arrived 30 years before;) Andrew Johnson was president and vetoed 3 Reconstruction Acts during the year; we also purchased Alaska at a bargain price from Russia, though no one realized it then and referred to it as Seward’s Ice Box and his Folly. We were also surveying for the Panama Canal. Horatio Alger and Bret Hart, Charles Dickens and Wild Bill Hickock, each was becoming famous in his own way. The 8-hour day was legalized in our state and two others, but not enforced. The University of Illinois was founded, and the first successful typewriter was invented, lending immediately to the coining of the traditional practice phrase “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.”

And, Rock Falls, new born, in ten short years accumulated a dry good store, 4 groceries, 2 hat shops, a tailor shop, 2 drug stores, a jeweler, 2 boot and shoe stores, a harness shop, two butcher shops, a lumber yard (Johnston’s), a grain elevator, ice dealer, real estate office, insurance office, 2 coal dealers, 4 hotels, 6 doctors, one restaurant, 2 livery stables, a bank and 15 industries! These in addition to 3 churches and 2 school houses, and a hose company for putting out fires.

We also had a depot, and a train running through, plus a bridge and a little ferry steamer called the White Swan darting back and forth between here and Sterling. We were a busy, bustling little town, ninety years ago!

The years since can no longer be called “early history” and can have no place in a capsule account of our beginnings. Of these origins, we can be proud. On these firm foundations, we can build into an age that has its eyes of the stars, its goal on conquering space, its tasks to create a peaceful world of equal opportunity for all men.

It is to be hoped that our sturdy pioneer ancestors can be as proud of us, as we are of them, and that in our descendents may not say we failed to carry on a fine tradition.

"Madeline Strain Nuttall 1923 started writing at the age of 5 when she dictated a story to her mother. While attending Northern Illinois University she met Carl Sandburg. He read some of her works and encouraged her to keep writing. They remained friends and stayed in touch throughout the years. In 1925 she married Raymond Nuttall. The lived in Chicago where Madeline attended writing classes at the University of Chicago. In 1930 her book A Prisoner in Babylon was published. This was a difficult time to launch a writing career since the country was struggling to survive the Great Depression. Widowed in 1938 she and her two small sons returned to Sterling. She supported the family by teaching and working as a librarian. She wrote a novel, The Gift, which was published in 1951, about the Sterling area. Many local landmarks are easily identified by residents. It has been translated into Japanese and is in the stacks at the University of Tokyo. Madeline wrote 300 stories published in various magazines. She served as the first secretary of the Sterling-Rock Falls Historical Society."