The building that houses Rochelle's local history museum was put up in 1884 as a joint city and town hall, and getting to that point took eighteen years of argument about who should pay. Flagg Township levied a tax for the purpose in 1866 and the city declined to contribute its share, and there matters sat until the two sides finally agreed in 1884 to build the thing together. What they got was an Italianate block worked up by the Rockford firm of Bradley and Son from a sketch drawn by a Rochelle alderman, Sam J. Parker, and built in local stone and brick by a local contractor, John R. Steele, for six thousand two hundred dollars. It held the fire station and the police station from the start, the township board and the courtroom, and from 1887 the city council chambers as well. The fire department moved out in 1930 and the police in 1931, and by 1968 the building was close enough to demolition that a historical society was founded expressly to save it. That society still runs the museum inside, and its collection is the ordinary archaeology of a farming county rather than a set of highlights: desks from the one room schools, nineteenth and twentieth century clothing, the working papers of a town that has spent more than a century and a half between two railroads. On the lawn stands a cannon, placed there by Civil War veterans in 1899. The building has been on the National Register since 1992.
Getting there
41.9225, -89.0673
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