The Tinker Swiss Cottage: A Mayor Who Built His Dreams in Limestone

Robert Hall Tinker was born in eighteen thirty-six in what are now the Hawaiian Islands, where his father was a missionary. He came to Rockford as a young man, found success in business, and in eighteen sixty-two traveled through Europe for nine months. He did not come back the same person.

What captured him was Switzerland. The mountain chalets of the Alps, their deep overhanging rooflines and carved wooden details, their limestone foundations and their intimacy with the landscape, seemed to him the most beautiful domestic architecture he had ever encountered. He came home with a plan.

Between eighteen sixty-five and eighteen seventy, Tinker built his cottage on a limestone bluff overlooking Kent Creek, near the center of Rockford. He used local limestone for the walls. He carved and fitted much of the woodwork himself. The walnut spiral staircase inside the house, a single sweeping helix, he made from one piece of wood. The rooms have rounded corners instead of right angles. Every room is different.

In eighteen seventy, he married Mary Manny, whose family owned the mansion on the north side of the creek. They lived between both houses for decades, wintering in his cottage and summering in hers. Tinker served as mayor of Rockford in eighteen seventy-five. Mary died in nineteen oh one, and Tinker later remarried, to Jessie Dorr Hurd.

He died in nineteen twenty-four. His wife Jessie, who had nursed him through his final years, reached an agreement with the Rockford Park District to preserve the house. She stayed until her own death in nineteen forty-two. The Park District opened the home as a museum in nineteen forty-three.

The cottage was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-two. It sits on the bluff where Tinker put it, as strange and specific as the man who built it.