- Industry & Science·Ogle County
City of Rochelle Railroad
Rochelle owns a railroad. Not a museum line or a preserved branch, but a working freight short line, built by the city in the mid 1980s with state money to serve industry on the east side of town and …
- Industry & Science·Ogle County
Global III
In 2003 Union Pacific opened a hundred and eighty one million dollar intermodal terminal southwest of Rochelle and called it Global III. The point of it was to get containers out of Chicago. Freight a…
- History·Ogle County
Hangtown
Rochelle has had three names in seventy years and got rid of the middle one on purpose. The town was platted on 30 July 1853 by Robert P. Lane, a Rockford physician and banker who bought forty acres f…
- Industry & Science·Ogle County
Rochelle Municipal Utilities
Rochelle has generated its own electricity since 1896, when the city put up a power plant near what is now Spring Lake to light the downtown streets. Municipal utilities were not unusual in the 1890s,…
- Nature·Ogle County
The Fairdale Tornado
On the evening of 9 April 2015 a tornado touched down in Lee County at twenty to seven, crossed Ogle and DeKalb counties and lifted forty one minutes later in Boone County, having travelled thirty mil…
- Transport·Ogle County
The Lincoln Highway
Before there were numbered federal highways there was the Lincoln Highway, laid out in 1913 as the first road intended to carry a motorist from New York to San Francisco, and it came through Rochelle.…
- Industry & Science·Ogle County
The Rochelle Canneries
Ogle County grows corn, and for a long stretch of the twentieth century Rochelle was where a great deal of it was put into cans. Sweet corn and peas are harvested in a rush over a few weeks and will n…
- Transport·Ogle County
The Rochelle Diamond
Two of the busiest freight main lines in North America cross each other at grade on the west side of Rochelle, and the crossing is why the town calls itself the Hub City. The older of the two arrived …