The Illinois River: A City Made by Water

Every significant thing that happened in Peoria before the railroad arrived happened because of this river.

The Illinois River, at Peoria, widens into a long, shallow lake that the indigenous people called Pimiteoui and the French adopted as Peoria Lake. The widening made this stretch navigable, gave steamboats room to turn, and created a natural harbor of sorts in the middle of the continent. The French understood this and built here. The Americans who followed understood it too.

The first steamboat, The Mechanic, reached Peoria in eighteen twenty-seven. By mid-century, Peoria was the largest of Illinois's inland river cities, with historians recording over twelve hundred steamboat arrivals in a single year. Grain came down from the farms of central Illinois. Whiskey went out in barrels. Ice was cut from the river in winter and sold in summer. Ferries crossed continuously. The riverfront, by the late nineteenth century, held fifty to one hundred commercial buildings in a continuous block, their loading docks extending to the water.

The railroad diminished the river's supremacy without ending it. The Illinois River still carries commercial barge traffic today, primarily grain, coal, and aggregate, making it part of the inland waterway system that connects the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.

What the river also carries is Peoria's explanation for itself. The question of why this city is here, in this specific place in central Illinois, has always had the same answer. The French found the Peoria people here. The Peoria people were here because of the widening. The widening happened because of the glacial floodwaters that gouged this valley more than ten thousand years ago. The city is downstream from everything that made it.