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 for six hundred dollars from Charlotte Bartholomew, the widow who had inherited the ground, and it was called Lane after him. He appears never to have lived there. Then in June 1861, after a second arson fire took a row of grain warehouses and elevators, a mob seized a man named Thomas Burke. He was sixty four, a Kentuckian, and known across the region as the inventor of a wire fence in wide use. While the justices were still conferring, the crowd tied his hands, put a rope round his neck and threw him from a third storey window at Cherry and Washington streets. He hung there for an hour or more before he was cut down. Eight men were indicted for his murder the following year and a jury acquitted all of them, and the county's own 1878 history records that evidence later emerged suggesting Burke had not set the elevator fire at all. The town picked up the name Hangtown. In 1865 it changed its name again, to Rochelle, generally said to be after the French port of La Rochelle, though no early source explains the choice. It worked well enough: by 1880 Rochelle was the largest town in Ogle County, which it still is, and the 1884 city and town hall on North 6th Street belongs to the confident version of the place rather than the one that needed a new name.