Galena & Starved Rock: Grant's Hometown, Mississippi Bluffs & Illinois Canyon Falls

The most intact 19th-century commercial streetscape in the Midwest — Galena's Main Street descends through a limestone gorge to the Galena River, and 85% of the town's buildings date from before the Civil War. The town was the commercial center of the lead mining region and a major Mississippi River port before the railroads bypassed it in the 1860s; the resulting economic stagnation preserved its architecture perfectly while most comparable Midwest towns were demolished in successive development booms. The DeSoto House Hotel (1855, seven stories, the grandest hotel between Chicago and St. Louis when it opened) served as Ulysses Grant's 1868 presidential campaign headquarters. The Main Street hill rises 80 feet in three blocks and is lined with Italianate commercial buildings, hardware stores, and galleries.

Use the afternoon to explore a different side of Galena Historic District — Main Street — there's more to discover beyond the morning highlights.

Two of Galena's most architecturally significant houses — the Belvedere Mansion (1857, 22 rooms, the largest Italianate villa in Galena, built by steamboat and stagecoach magnate J. Russell Jones) has its original furnishings including items from the 1939 film Gone With the Wind's prop auction. The Dowling House (1826) is the oldest building in Galena, a limestone fieldstone two-story house on Diagonal Street that served as a trading post for lead miners; it represents the pre-boom vernacular architecture that the Main Street commercial blocks replaced. Both houses are within a 10-minute walk of each other in Galena's residential hilltop district.

One of Galena's most reliably lively dinner spots on Main Street — a broad menu of burgers, sandwiches, nachos, and fish fry in a high-energy room that draws both locals and weekend visitors. Live music on weekends keeps the energy going well past dinner. Among the most fun options in town after a day of mansion tours and historic walks.

The 1855 grand hotel on Main Street where Grant, Lincoln, and Twain all slept — now fully restored with 55 rooms in the original seven-story Italianate building. The hotel's Gold Room Restaurant serves good Mississippi River Valley food; the downstairs bar has live music on weekends. Galena's restaurants thin out in the off-season; reservations recommended in fall (peak foliage tourism).

A Smithsonian-affiliated museum and aquarium on the Dubuque Ice Harbor covering the full cultural and natural history of the Mississippi River — the continent's longest river system and the drainage basin that covers 40% of the contiguous United States. The aquarium exhibits follow the river from its Minnesota headwaters through its nine ecological zones to the Gulf of Mexico; the museum portion covers river history from Native American dugout canoe travel through French fur trade to steamboat era to the Army Corps of Engineers' lock-and-dam system that made the modern commercial river. The William M. Black (a 1934 US Army Corps dredge boat now converted to a floating museum) is docked at the museum and open for tours.

The steepest and shortest funicular in the world — 296 feet long, rising 189 feet at a 60-degree grade from Fourth Street in Dubuque's downtown to the bluff top residential neighborhood in under a minute. The original 1882 cable car was built by banker J.K. Graves to avoid the 20-minute horse-and-buggy climb from his downtown office to his hilltop home; the current funicular dates from 1964 and operates on the same counterbalanced cable system. The view from the top takes in the entire Mississippi River valley, the Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois shores, and the Dubuque rail bridge. The round trip is $2.50.

The reconstructed 1832 frontier fort that survived the only armed attack of the Black Hawk War on Illinois soil — in June 1832, a force of Sauk warriors under Black Hawk attacked the lead mining settlement of Apple River Fort while most men were in the fields. The women, children, and 25 remaining men held the stockade for several hours until the warriors withdrew. The reconstruction accurately depicts the square palisade fort and the fortified gateway; the site's interpretation covers the Black Hawk War in its context of the 1804 Treaty of St. Louis (which Sauk leaders disputed as fraudulent) and the forced removal of the Sauk and Fox people from their Illinois and Wisconsin lands.

Galena dinner in a room with the dark-wood, brick-and-mirror atmosphere that suits the historic district — steak, prime rib on weekends, and a reliable American grill menu. More sit-down than the Main Street pub options; convenient if staying at the DeSoto House Hotel a block away. A solid end to a day in the lead-mining district.

A second night at the DeSoto House — the Apple River Fort is 30 minutes from Galena, and evening return to the hotel is straightforward. Tomorrow's drive to Starved Rock takes 2 hours south on US-20 and IL-178.

Starved Rock State Park's most dramatic canyons — Saint Louis Canyon (a 0.7-mile round trip from the parking area) has an 80-foot waterfall dropping over a mossy sandstone overhang into a circular pool, with the canyon walls narrowing to 10–15 feet at the base. French Canyon (a 0.5-mile loop) has a smaller falls in a box canyon that maintains ice formations into April. Both canyons were carved by glacial meltwater draining Lake Chicago (the predecessor lake to Lake Michigan) approximately 14,000 years ago; the process cut 18 separate canyons in the park's 2,630 acres in what geologists call one of the fastest landscape-carving episodes in North American glacial history.

The 125-foot sandstone butte at the park's core — 'Starved Rock' refers to the 1769 Illinois Confederation siege in which a Potawatomi and Ottawa force trapped a band of Illiniwek people atop the butte; the stranded people starved rather than surrender. The butte sits directly above the Illinois River and marks the location of Fort St. Louis (1682), the largest French fur trading post in interior North America at its peak, established by La Salle and Tonti. The butte trail (0.3 miles round trip) gives the park's best view of the Illinois River valley. The 1939 CCC-built Starved Rock Lodge on the butte's east side is a National Historic Landmark for its log construction.

The eastern canyons of Starved Rock — Wildcat Canyon (2.0-mile round trip) has the park's widest canyon entrance and a multi-tiered falls in a cathedral space; Illinois Canyon (the most remote in the park, 3.2 miles round trip) rewards the longer walk with the most dramatic overhanging sandstone walls and a falls that flows year-round. The 1940s CCC stonework trails throughout the park — drainage channels, retaining walls, and stairways all in native limestone — are themselves a remarkable example of Depression-era craft. The return to Chicago takes 2 hours east on I-80.