Lee County celebrates all the ‘cents’ this year

Rural Lee County’s past is full of stories – people, places, facts and figures that have played a part in putting it on the map and helped tell its tales. Some are well-known, while others can only be found when you dust off the history books and flip through the pages.

All those stories, big and small, have earned their place in local history books – but some of them just don’t always get their place in the local limelight.

When it comes to celebrating the past, most of the historical hoopla is usually reserved for benchmark anniversaries – 100 years, 200 years and the like. People don’t tend to get as nostalgic when the 99th or 101st anniversaries come around.

But it’s not just centennial celebrations that bring the past to the present. Double the milestone and double the memories, there are 200 reasons to celebrate bicentennials. Just ask anyone old enough to remember being around for America’s yearlong love affair with liberty during its red, white and blue birthday bash in 1976.

Other milestone markers come with some linguistic tongue-twisters, although they don’t tend to get as much attention as centennials and bicentennials. There’s the quasquicentennial for 125 years and sesquicentennials for 150 years, and when it’s time to mark 175 years, you’ve got several different words you can wrap your tongue around – seven by some counts, including dosquicentennial and septaquintaquinquecentennial. (Some who’ve done the math contend that some of the terms don’t quite add up, but we’ll leave that to the linguists).

Some Lee County tales from the past have been featured in Shaw Local publications in recent years, such as how the former Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroad roared through the heart of the county and created communities; the Green River Ordnance Plant’s contribution to World War II; and the story of the only Catholic church in the nation to bear the name of St. Flannen, itself having observed its quasquicentennial a year ago.

Today, we’ll tell you a few more stories that have reached a milestone this year – tales mostly forgotten, but ones that deserve to be remembered: when Route 2 was first paved through the county, a legendary Amboy athlete’s beginnings in sports, the genesis of Amboy’s oldest park, a community that shares its name with an early 1900s movie star, and natives pondering their future home.

You might not be able to say “septaquintaquinquecentennial,” but once you’re done reading, you shouldn’t have any trouble saying, “Hmm, now that was interesting.”

Paving the way

The popularity of modern-day motoring reached a milestone in 1924 in Illinois, when the number of automobile licenses issued surpassed the 1 million mark.

As more cars and trucks traveled through Lee County in the Roaring ‘20s, the gravel and dirt roads that were good enough for horse and carriages just weren’t cutting it for horseless carriages.

Riders were getting in a rut on roads worn by weather and wear and tear, making for a bumpy ride wherever they went. Paved highways were the answer to a growing problem, but they took time and money. In 1924, the rubber finally met the road on the county’s first major north-south highway that was paved, with the opening of Route 2, which originally went from South Beloit down to Cairo.

Currently, Route 2′s journey through Lee County, heading south, goes from the bridge over the Rock River near Grand Detour, through Dixon, and toward Sterling. However, when Route 2 opened a century ago, it didn’t go to Sterling – instead, it went south of Dixon along most of the current Route 52 to Mendota, making a boomerang-like shape within Lee County.

Planning the route involved the improvement of existing roads. Initial construction began along the stretch heading north from Dixon in late 1923 by turning dirt stretches into gravel. Pavement of the highway within almost all of its entirety was completed the following year, save for a section around Henkel Station in the county’s southeast corner (finally paved in 1926).

For the highway’s first year in the county, its route from Amboy to Sublette initially took motorists out from Main Street to what is now Shaw Road, and then turned toward Sublette near the small village of Shaw on what is now Inlet Road.

A more direct path from Amboy to Sublette was completed in 1925; it turned off from Shaw Road onto what is now Searls Road, and followed it in a southeast direction into Sublette. The Searls Road alignment was bypassed in 1929, with the current stretch of highway going southeast from Amboy’s city limits.

In 1935, Route 52 was created and replaced the Route 2 designation south of Dixon. Route 2 extended west from Dixon through Sterling and eventually to the Quad-Cities in 1937; it was removed west of Sterling in 1974.

A Frank discussion about local sports

Ask someone from Amboy today who the city’s most well-known football players are, and they’ll most likely rattle off the names of the 2023 Clippers, Amboy High School’s eight-man team that won the state football championship in fall 2023.

If you asked the same question around the turn of the 20th century, the name that likely would’ve come up would have been “Shag.”

Frank “Shag” Shaughnessy played his first downs of high school football 125 years ago, back in 1899. It was the beginning of a sports career that led him to a well-known college football program, Major League Baseball, managerial success as a coach in Canada, and enshrinement in the Canadian football and baseball halls of fame.

Born on April 8, 1883, to Irish immigrants Patrick and Hanora Shaughnessy, young Frank cultivated his great interest in sports as a student at Amboy High, starting as a left tackle for a team that faced others from much larger cities throughout the season. The tall, slender Shaughnessy was part of a team that was small but held their own against stiff competition: His team duked it out with Dixon and La Salle-Peru high schools in 0-0 ties, but not all of the seasons saw Amboy on the wrong end of the scoreboard. It lost to Sterling in a late November game 15-0 but held the Sterling team to one of its lowest-scoring games of the season.

Shaughnessy, who also played baseball for the Amboy city clubs, graduated from Amboy High in 1901 and played four years of baseball at the University of Notre Dame, where he was captain during his senior year. Shaughnessy also played some football for Notre Dame, and he has his name in the storied program’s history book as having the longest fumble return for a touchdown at 107 yards (the fields in the early days were 110 yards from end to end).

His sports journey continued into adulthood, when he played two years of professional baseball for the Washington Senators (1905) and Philadelphia Athletics (1908), coached in the collegiate football ranks at Clemson and McGill universities, and managed baseball teams for 10 minor league clubs between 1907 and 1936. He also coached hockey for McGill and for the original Ottawa Senators hockey club, which he led to the Stanley Cup Final in 1915.

After a long administrative career in minor league baseball from 1943 to 1960, Shaughnessy died May 15, 1969, long enough to see his then-hometown of Montreal have its first season of major league baseball with the Expos. Shaughnessy is buried in Montreal; his parents are interred closer to home at St. Patrick Cemetery in Amboy.

Shaughnessy’s footwork on the football gridirons 125 years ago led to a successful professional career in multiple sports, which is rare for a player or a coach.

While voting on a park one day...

There’s something about a park that just makes a city feel complete – a place where people can gather for a picnic, play some ball, relax – and 150 years ago, voters in Amboy gave a thumbs-up to making their city feel complete, saying yes to spending some green for green space.

Located on the town’s east side, Amboy City Park (originally known as Green River City Park) consists of almost 25 acres of woods and grassy areas. It also has a baseball field (home to the Amboy High School clubs), playgrounds, basketball hoops, restrooms and picnic shelters.

On April 13, 1874, a meeting was held in town for the purpose of establishing the park. Voters were asked to approve of the town borrowing $4,800 to purchase property for the park. They said yes, and the park was ready to open its great outdoors by 1880.

The land previously was owned by A.B. Searles and consisted of a large grove of trees, referred to by locals as Searles’ Grove. Even today, the park maintains much of its trees, providing plenty of shade to those who wish to play.

Only four years into its existence, the park was host to a Civil War soldiers’ reunion featuring Union Gen. John A. Logan. Over the years, the park also hosted several horse races and derbies, Easter egg hunts, and Fourth of July fireworks, just to name a few.

The park changed forever 125 years after its establishment: On June 1, 1999, a severe thunderstorm toppled and damaged many of the parks’ trees. About 50 trees were destroyed and another 50 severely damaged. As cleanup took place, local businessman George Kaleel came up with an idea to find a new use for some of those damaged trees. He brought former residents Bob and Marie Boyer, who had experience as chainsaw artists, to the park to create a series of sculptures from the damaged trees that helped tell Amboy’s story.

Amboy City Park’s tree sculptures turn 25 this year, and they’re still telling their stories of people, places and chapters of the city’s history. It’s a double anniversary for a place that has been an important part of residents’ lives through three centuries.

A grove grows

Franklin Grove’s central hub sits just south of the Union Pacific railroad tracks today, but back when the town began in 1849, it was in a much different place, and that’s not all that was different.

Franklin Grove wasn’t even Franklin Grove.

The city’s beginnings can be traced back 175 years to the small village of Chaplin, founded by Christian Lahman, with 17 lots platted near the intersection of what is now State Street and the street that would bear Lahman’s name. His family came to the area six years before, and the town site was situated near the merging of two small creeks that eventually would form Franklin Creek.

According to a 1914 history of Lee County, Chaplin’s early history included the Minor Hotel, owned by Timothy Lockwood Minor; a store owned by Charles Ambrose; John Wagner’s blacksmith shop; and a school. Abram Brown served as its first postmaster. The town’s growth was slow, but when it did expand, it grew northeast. This would prove crucial to the town’s relocation and eventual name change beginning in 1854, when the-then Galena and Chicago Union Railroad laid out its tracks between Rochelle and Dixon. The line didn’t bypass the original Chaplin settlement center by much, but it moved business closer to it. That led to Chaplin’s essential transformation into Franklin Grove by 1857.

Also in 1849, residents in then-China Township voted to approve the construction of a plank road from Grand Detour to Peru, which cut through the southwest part of the township about 2 miles southwest of Chaplin. Constructed from south to north, the road eventually didn’t get much traffic within the northern half of Lee County, and only parts of it remain today as existing roads in that area: Detour Road, Sheap Road and a portion of Whitney Road. The road did see plenty of traffic south of Amboy, however, and makes up a route that today goes through LaMoille, Arlington and Cherry in Bureau County (the latter portion named Plank Road going south into Peru).

Chaplin’s history almost faded into obscurity, but determined historians wouldn’t let it disappear.

In the 1990s, the Franklin Grove Area Historical Society sought to recreate what the original village looked like in 1849 with the Chaplin Creek Historic Site project. Several old buildings were purchased and moved to an area about a half-mile south of the original town center. During special town-wide events, the village’s buildings opened for tours and history lessons on what life was like in the town 175 years ago.

What might have been?

What was life like 200 years ago on land that would become Lee County? Pretty quiet for the most part. Pierre LaSallier operated a trading post at the mouth of Franklin Creek, across the Rock River from Grand Detour. However, it wasn’t for another few years that more white settlers came to the county.

The area was settled by Native Americans of the Sauk and Fox tribes, led by Chief Black Hawk, as well as the Winnebago tribe. During most of their years in the area, they laid nary an eye on white settlers.

Filling in the missing blanks of the area’s history during the 1820s comes down to the telling of secondary and tertiary history involving the Sauk and Fox, whose primary home was the village of Saukenauk, around present-day Rock Island.

Keokuk, one of the Sauk’s leaders at the time, visited the East Coast in 1824 along with Chief Wapello, also of the Fox Tribe. The Native Americans had known for years that the developing nation was expanding toward the West, and Keokuk realized it was inevitable that the land controlled by the Sauk and Fox soon would be lost to the westward settlers.

Dealing with the eventual loss of their land was a pressing subject among Sauk leaders; Keokuk was in favor of relocating across the Mississippi River into present-day Iowa, while Black Hawk held firm in his desire to remain and fight off the newcomers. In trying to convince Black Hawk and his supporters to leave, Keokuk only made Black Hawk more convinced to stay.

Keokuk eventually left, and Black Hawk and his “British band” of followers unsuccessfully fought American forces in the Black Hawk War of 1832.

Had Keokuk and Wapello not seen the vast difference between their people and what was going on in the eastern U.S. 200 years ago, perhaps history would have been different.

The war initially got off to a strong start for Black Hawk’s troops after the ambush of Stillman’s Run (in present-day Stillman Valley), and if Keokuk and Black Hawk had stayed and united to fight to preserve their home, perhaps the Black Hawk War would have lasted a little longer. Who knows? But it’s fascinating to consider that alternative history.