Galena, the lead city

The town named after the ore that built it

Galena, in the bluffs of Jo Daviess County in northwest Illinois, is named for its ore: galena, the natural lead sulfide and the most important lead mineral, found mostly here in the Ordovician Galena limestone. Native peoples, chiefly the Meskwaki, Ho-Chunk, Sauk and Menominee, mined it for more than a thousand years before European Americans came, using it in burial rites and, in the Mississippian period, as body paint. French explorers noted the lead in 1658, a French map of 1703 marked the area mines de plumb, and Indigenous people were trading galena with French traders by 1692.

American mining began in earnest in the 1820s, after George Davenport shipped the first boatload of lead down the Mississippi in 1816 and the War Department took control of the mines and leased them out. It became the first major mineral rush in the United States. From 1825 to 1828 some 21 million pounds of lead came out, and for a time Galena outgrew Chicago. By 1845 it was producing nearly 27,000 tons of lead ore a year and Jo Daviess County 80 percent of the nation's lead, and in 1852 the region turned out 10 percent of the world's. Steamboats crowded the Galena River, making the town the largest steamboat hub on the Mississippi north of St. Louis. Settlers pushed into Native land in search of new veins, and after the brief Winnebago War the 1829 Treaty of Prairie du Chien forced more land from the Ho-Chunk.

Ulysses S. Grant arrived in April 1860, a failed farmer working as a clerk in his father's leather-goods store, and left a year later as colonel of the 21st Illinois. When he came back in 1865 as general in chief, 20,000 people cheered him under an arch on Main Street, and the town gave him a furnished mansion; on election night in 1868 he waited for the returns at the home of his friend Elihu Washburne. Eight other Civil War generals also called Galena home.

Then lead gave way to steel, steamboats to trains, erosion left the Galena River closed to steamboats, and the town decayed until artists began restoring Main Street in the 1970s. Today a 581-acre historic district, with more than 1,000 buildings on the National Register, makes Galena the outdoor museum of the Victorian Midwest, from Federal storefronts to Greek Revival and Italianate mansions on the bluffs, and the Galena Historical Society shows an 1830s mine shaft found beside its mansion.