Little Reno
Field Studies of a Forgotten Illinois Valley Era
Established 1933 · Abolished February 21, 1953
Peru · early 1940s — August 1944
Tinney Cosgrove's son ran the legitimate front
After high school William R. 'Mickey' Cosgrove Jr. ran a service station at the corner of Fourth and Pike in Peru while his father William R. 'Tinney' Cosgrove Sr. ran the Silver Congo on First Street in LaSalle and broke ground on a movie theater called The Peacock. Mickey enlisted on February 23, 1943, landed at Omaha Beach in June 1944 with the 33rd Armored Regiment, was wounded in the Battle of Hill 91 in July, and was killed in action on August 29, 1944 — twenty-two days after returning to duty. His remains came home in 1948. The day Tinney got the telegram, he walked off the Peacock construction site and never came back. Mickey's pump went quiet that summer. The legitimate Cosgrove front died with the son.
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LaSalle · 1915–present
Six stories of Marshall & Fox elegance — and rumored Prohibition speakeasy
Designed in 1915 by Marshall & Fox — the same firm that built Chicago's Drake Hotel — the Kaskaskia hosted Amelia Earhart, Spike Jones, Admiral Nimitz, and a long list of mid-century celebrities passing through on the Rock Island line. Closed in 2001, it's currently being restored as a hotel-museum-conference center. Locals will tell you about the 1920s suicide ghost on the third floor and the speakeasy rumored to have run out of the basement during Prohibition.
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LaSalle · 1874–present
Where Zen Buddhism arrived in America
Fifty-seven rooms of Second Empire grandeur built by zinc magnate Edward Hegeler. His son-in-law Paul Carus ran Open Court Publishing from the first floor and brought D.T. Suzuki — the man who would later carry Zen Buddhism to the West — to live and work here for eleven years (1897–1908). It is genuinely true that the most influential Zen scholar of the 20th century lived in a 57-room mansion in LaSalle, Illinois. National Historic Landmark, 2007. Open as a museum.
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Peru · 1885–1980
Big Ben was patented here
Founded in 1885 as the United Clock Company, taken over by zinc baron F.W. Matthiessen in 1888, and renamed Western Clock Manufacturing. The Big Ben alarm clock — the most famous bedside clock in 20th-century America — was patented here in 1908. At its peak in the 1950s the plant employed 5,500 people across 44 buildings. A 2012 fire destroyed much of the complex, but the surviving wing now houses the Westclox Museum.
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Utica · 1840s–present
Six buildings on the I&M Canal
The Canal Warehouse — the centerpiece of this six-building campus on the I&M Canal — was a working transshipment station when LaSalle was the western terminus of the canal that connected the Mississippi to the Great Lakes. Steamboats from New Orleans unloaded molasses, sugar, coffee. Canal boats from Chicago brought lumber, stoves, eastern fashions. Today the campus holds the most important regional archive in the Illinois Valley — including the Native American collection from the Zimmerman Site, just across the river.
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Utica · 1682, 1769
Fort St. Louis, 1682. The siege legend, 1769.
In 1682 René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, and his lieutenant Henri de Tonti built Fort St. Louis on top of this 125-foot sandstone butte — a French outpost overlooking the largest Native settlement north of Mexico, the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia. By oral tradition, in 1769 a band of Illini retreated up the rock and were besieged by allied Potawatomi until they starved — a revenge campaign for the Peoria assassination of Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa. The legend gave the rock its name; archaeology has not confirmed it.
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