The Canoe on the Rock River: Lewis Lemon and the Founding of Rockford

On August twenty-fourth, eighteen thirty-four, three men pushed a canoe into the Rock River at Galena, Illinois, and headed downstream into territory that most Americans had never seen. One of them was Germanicus Kent, a merchant from New England who had been trading out of Galena for a few years. Another was Thatcher Blake, his business partner. The third was a twenty-two-year-old man named Lewis Lemon, who held the paddle.

Lewis Lemon had been born into slavery in North Carolina in eighteen twelve. His enslaver had brought him to Alabama, where Thatcher Blake became his enslaver. On the journey north through St. Louis, the two men struck an agreement: Lemon would work for Blake, and over several years he would purchase his own freedom. The papers certifying that freedom were signed in eighteen thirty-nine, five years after the canoe trip.

That August afternoon, the three men reached the mouth of a creek along the Rock River's western bank, in what is now northern Illinois. They pulled the canoe ashore, looked at the limestone bluffs and the timber and the river ford that gave the future city its name, and decided this was the place. Kent and Blake both claimed land on the west bank. The creek along the western side was named Kent Creek.

What Lewis Lemon built on his parcel of that new settlement, history has not recorded fully. The Rockford Housing Authority and local historians have worked in recent years to recover his story. He was one of the three men who paddled to the site and got out of the canoe. That the founding document of this city begins with an enslaved man holding a paddle is a fact Rockford is still learning how to carry.