View of Vandruff Island from Black Hawk Tower
Vandruff’s Island lies just outside Rock Island’s border, with this view from Black Hawk’s Watch Tower being enjoyed by thousands through the decades. This postcard, from the Augustana College Library Special Collections, dates from around 1920 and shows the island with the Rock River on either side and the town of Milan visible in the … [ Continued
Model T Touring Car – Rock Island to California
Second Avenue & 14th Street Sometimes there’s a postcard that allows our imagination to play. This is one such card. It was hard to identify, but there were clues. First, the sign hanging on the building says “Brown’s Business College.” Then there were the words someone had scrawled on the back of the unaddressed and … [ Continued
Black Hawk Watch Tower Amusement Park
Black Hawk Road near 17th Street Here is a peek at Rock Island’s own homegrown amusement park. Like Chicago’s Riverview, New York’s Coney Island, and the much later Disneyland, the Watch Tower amusement park was a destination for people from near and far in the early 1900s. It was located in an area that we … [ Continued
Rock Island County Tuberculosis Sanitarium
2122 25th Avenue The plague of tuberculosis, usually called TB, is all but forgotten, thanks to modern antibiotics. As recently as the early 20th century, it was the leading cause of death for those between the ages of 15 and 45. There was no effective treatment for TB until the mid 1900s. Today TB, nearly … [ Continued
