Three Shows, One Fall ArtScene: Haiku, Rockford Streets, and Salvaged Nature

I wasn't planning to have three shows in Rockford Fall ArtScene this year. These things have a way of accumulating. One project leads to another person, one conversation opens another door, and suddenly what began as a few photographs and haiku made while walking around Rockford has expanded into three different exhibitions involving photography, poetry, salvaged metal sculpture, the prairie, and several years of looking closely at the place where I live.

For Fall ArtScene 2026, my work will appear in three separate exhibitions around Rockford: Hike You! at RevHaus, a collaborative salvaged-metal sculpture at the Rockford Public Library, and SECOND NATURE at Rockford Art Deli. Although the three projects developed independently, they've ended up telling different parts of essentially the same story. All of them are about paying attention to ordinary things, reconsidering objects and places we normally overlook, and discovering that the familiar can become strange again if you look at it long enough.

Hike You! — photograph by Ryan Davis, haiku by Thomas L. Vaultonburg.

Hike You!: Six Years of Walking Rockford

The largest and longest-running of these projects is Hike You!, a collaboration with photographer Ryan Davis that grew out of six years of walking Rockford. We didn't begin with the idea of making an art exhibition. We walked. Ryan carried a camera and I wrote haiku. We wandered outward from the center of the city through downtown streets, alleys, neighborhoods, riverbanks and commercial strips, paying attention to things that most people—including us, ordinarily—would simply pass without giving them much thought.

Over time, that act of looking became the project. A discarded office chair in the window of the old Zant Office Equipment building on Broadway could suddenly evoke an entire vanished era. A mud-covered bicycle pulled from the Rock River and left standing in front of the former Rockford Register Star building became an accidental monument to lives in transition. Weather, abandoned objects, signs, animals, buildings, weeds and the strange little collisions between nature and the constructed city became our subjects. None of these things announced themselves as art. They were simply there.

Ryan's photographs and my haiku eventually began functioning as pairs. Neither necessarily explains the other, and that became important to the way the project developed. The photograph provides one way of encountering a moment while the poem opens another. Sometimes the connection is immediately apparent and sometimes it isn't. That little space between the photograph and the poem gives the viewer somewhere to enter the work and make an association of their own.

Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford will be shown at RevHaus during Fall ArtScene, October 2–3, 2026. The exhibition contains 24 pieces, but behind those finished works are years of walking and thousands of moments that never became anything at all. That's part of the idea, too. Art doesn't necessarily require traveling somewhere exotic in search of a subject. Sometimes you walk out the door, pay attention to your own neighborhood, and keep walking until the familiar becomes unfamiliar again.

A Possum Climbs Onto the Library Terrace

The second project took some of those same ideas somewhere completely different. For the Rockford Public Library Terrace, I collaborated with Rockford artist and fabricator Michael Zant on a reclaimed-metal opossum sculpture paired with one of my haiku. Michael makes animals from salvaged metal, taking objects that already had previous purposes and previous lives and reassembling them into something recognizable as a living creature. Nuts, bolts, scraps, machine parts and discarded pieces of the industrial world become fur, legs, faces and bodies.

That immediately struck a chord with me because Rockford is a city that knows something about metal, but it also knows something about reuse, survival and adaptation. The industrial landscape and the natural landscape aren't really separate here. You can walk from old factories to the Rock River, from machine shops to prairie remnants, and watch plants and animals continually working their way through the human structures we've put in their path.

The opossum seemed like an especially appropriate creature for that intersection. It is one of nature's great survivors: ancient, adaptable, routinely misunderstood and remarkably good at continuing to exist under circumstances that might suggest otherwise. It's simultaneously ridiculous and magnificent, which is probably part of the reason I've always liked it. As a subject for a sculpture made from the leftovers of human industry and paired with a haiku, the possum seemed almost inevitable.

Working on that collaboration also produced something neither of us had initially anticipated. Once Michael had made one salvaged-metal animal and I had written a poem to accompany it, there was an obvious question sitting there waiting for us: why stop at one?

SECOND NATURE

That question became SECOND NATURE — Salvaged Metal Sculpture & Haiku, featuring Michael Zant and Thomas L. Vaultonburg at Rockford Art Deli for Fall ArtScene. SECOND NATURE brings together a collection of Michael's small reclaimed-metal animal sculptures with original haiku written in response to the animals, their materials and the larger ideas surrounding them. The industrial and natural worlds occupy the same space: discarded metal becomes wildlife while poetry provides another way into the creatures and their environments.

A salvaged-metal animal sculpture takes shape in Michael Zant’s workshop for SECOND NATURE, his Fall ArtScene collaboration with haiku poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg.

The exhibition is also a benefit for Wild Roots, connecting the work to the prairie and to an organization devoted to promoting it. That gives the exhibition another dimension because the animals aren't simply whimsical sculptures made from junk. They point outward toward an actual landscape and toward questions about what we preserve, what we discard and what can return after we think we've lost it.

There is something wonderfully Rockford about the whole arrangement. This is a manufacturing city surrounded by prairie country, so metal and milkweed aren't really opposites here. They're neighbors. Michael's sculptures make that relationship literal by taking the remnants of one environment and turning them into inhabitants of another. Human artifacts that might otherwise have become waste are transformed back into animals. The artificial becomes natural again—or at least begins pretending to be. Hence SECOND NATURE.

The Thread Connecting All Three

Only after the three exhibitions came together did I realize how closely related they actually are. Hike You! begins with walking and noticing. The Rockford Public Library collaboration takes something discarded and asks us to see another possibility inside it. SECOND NATURE expands that transformation into an entire little ecosystem of salvaged animals and poems. They weren't designed as three pieces of a larger project, but they somehow became one anyway.

Running underneath all three is something I've increasingly come to think of as Prairie Zen. I don't mean Zen as decoration or as a philosophy imported wholesale from somewhere else. I mean something closer to a Midwestern practice of attention: walking slowly enough to notice what's actually there and resisting the temptation to dismiss something because it appears ordinary, ugly, broken, industrial or commonplace. A bicycle dragged out of the Rock River, an old office chair on Broadway, a discarded piece of metal transformed into a possum, weeds pushing through concrete and a three-line poem can all occupy the same landscape and become part of the same conversation.

Rockford provides an almost inexhaustible supply of these things because the city is constantly revealing layers of what it was, what it is and what nature is trying to make of it now. Six years of walking around here has convinced me that finding interesting things isn't particularly difficult. The harder part is learning not to walk past them.

Somehow, that practice of noticing has turned into three Fall ArtScene exhibitions this year. I certainly didn't plan it that way when Ryan and I started walking around Rockford six years ago, and Michael and I didn't plan it when we started talking about a metal possum. But that may be the most appropriate thing about all of it. None of these projects began with a grand plan. We found them by paying attention to what was already there.

 

Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford

For more than six years, photographer Ryan Davis and I have been taking walks through Rockford.

That description is completely accurate, but it doesn't really explain Hike You!.

We began with a simple idea. We would start our walks from essentially the same place near the geographical center of Rockford and head in a different direction. Sometimes we had a destination in mind. Often we didn't. Ryan brought a camera. I brought the habit of looking at things as a poet. Then we walked.

Over six years, those walks accumulated into thousands of photographs, hundreds of haiku, a record of a friendship, and a portrait of Rockford that neither of us could have deliberately set out to create. This fall, a selection of that work will be exhibited as Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford, a collaborative exhibition by Ryan Davis and Thomas L. Vaultonburg at RevHaus during Fall ArtScene 2026.

The City at Walking Speed

There is a Rockford you experience from a car, and there is another Rockford you discover on foot.

Mt. Fuji mailbox 7th Street

Walking changes the scale of a city. Places that seem unrelated when you're driving between them turn out to be connected. Streets have transitions you don't notice at thirty-five miles an hour. An alley becomes as interesting as a major road. An abandoned building stops being part of the background and becomes an object with a history. You notice old signs painted on brick, strange objects caught in trees, flowers growing through concrete, forgotten staircases, railroad tracks, utility poles, river debris, vacant lots and the remains of businesses nobody has thought about for decades.

We walked past the Rockford everyone knows: the Faust Hotel, the Midway Theater, the Times Theatre, the Rock River and the old Register Star building. But those landmarks became only part of the project. We became equally interested in the things that weren't landmarks at all.

A discarded office chair in a window on Broadway could become a poem. A bicycle pulled from the Rock River and left standing in front of the former Rockford Register Star building could become an image about transition. A fading ghost sign on the side of a building could briefly become the most important thing we saw that day.

The ordinary kept refusing to remain ordinary.

Photography and Haiku

Ryan and I weren't trying to make photographs illustrate poems or poems explain photographs. That distinction became important.

Photography and haiku are both very good at paying attention, but they pay attention differently. A photograph can preserve an instant with enormous specificity. A haiku can take that same instant and move sideways into memory, association, humor, absence or something that can't actually be seen.

Sometimes Ryan would photograph something and a poem would occur to me immediately. Sometimes I wouldn't understand why an image mattered until much later. Sometimes the photograph and poem seemed to be looking at entirely different things even though they came from the same place and moment.

We learned not to force them together.

The best pairings created a third thing between them: something that belonged neither entirely to the photograph nor entirely to the poem.

Six Years Changes a City

When you repeatedly walk through the same city for six years, you also begin documenting time whether you intend to or not.

Buildings disappear. Businesses close. Murals appear. Trees come down. Construction fences go up. Something you photographed because it seemed mildly interesting one afternoon becomes historically interesting three years later because it no longer exists.

This sign for Mera's has since been painted over. 

But the walkers change, too.

That became increasingly important to Hike You!.

The project began during one period of our lives and continued into another. Some of the places we encountered began to feel symbolic of that movement without either of us intending them to. The bicycle that came out of the Rock River is perhaps the clearest example. It was simply an object Ryan encountered and photographed, covered in river mud and standing improbably in front of the old newspaper building. But over time it came to represent something larger to us: an object emerging from one existence into another, battered and dirty but still recognizably itself.

That is part of what these walks became.

They weren't an attempt to escape Rockford. They were an attempt to see what was already here.

The Rockford We Found

There is a tendency to believe that discovery requires travel. We imagine that interesting things are elsewhere and that familiar places have already revealed everything they contain.

Six years of walking around Rockford taught us almost exactly the opposite.

The more familiar the city became, the stranger it became.

We found hidden murals and remnants of old advertisements. We found architecture we'd passed hundreds of times without actually seeing. We found animals, weeds, industrial ruins, religious objects, graffiti, abandoned furniture and things neither of us could satisfactorily explain. We watched seasons repeat themselves over the same streets while nothing ever repeated itself exactly.

There is no exotic destination at the center of Hike You!.

The destination is attention.

The project is about what happens when you return to the same place often enough, slowly enough and openly enough that familiarity begins to break down. Eventually you stop seeing what you expect to see and begin noticing what is actually there.

That was when Rockford became mysterious again.

Hike You! at Fall ArtScene 2026

Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford will be exhibited at RevHaus, 1023 Harlem Road in Machesney Park, as part of Fall ArtScene 2026.

Fall ArtScene takes place Friday, October 2, from 5–9 p.m., and Saturday, October 3, from 4–9 p.m. ArtScene is presented by the Rockford Area Arts Council and is free and open to the public.

RevHaus describes itself as a creative automotive space where craftsmanship, design and art come together. For Fall ArtScene, the venue is bringing together artists working in photography, poetry, mixed media, reclaimed materials, woodworking and metalwork. Along with Hike You!, the venue will feature reclaimed metal and wood artwork by Oscar Pagles of Foraged and metalwork by Shayne Pagles of VinGogh, LLC, as well as live metalworking and woodworking demonstrations.

For Ryan and me, the exhibition is also a preview of the forthcoming Hike You! book, which will bring together photographs and haiku from the larger six-year project.

What Hike You! Is Really About

I suppose an artist statement is eventually supposed to explain what the art means.

After six years, I'm not sure I can reduce Hike You! to one meaning, and I'm glad I can't.

It is about Rockford. It is about friendship. It is about walking. It is about photography and haiku. It is about aging and time and places disappearing. It is about discovering that an object pulled out of a river can suddenly seem like a self-portrait. It is about looking at something you've seen a thousand times and, for reasons you can't entirely explain, seeing it for the first time.

Most of all, I think it is about attention.

A city doesn't have to be beautiful in the conventional sense to deserve attention. A moment doesn't have to be important to deserve preservation. A place doesn't have to be famous to contain mystery.

For six years, Ryan Davis and I walked through Rockford and paid attention.

Hike You! is what we brought back.

 

The 1928 Rockford Tornado: The Afternoon a Tornado Tore Through the City

On the afternoon of September 14, 1928, Rockford was struck by one of the deadliest tornadoes in the city's history. At approximately 3:20 p.m., a tornado touched down on the south side of Rockford, east of the Rock River and just south of Harrison Avenue. From there it began moving northeast, directly toward populated neighborhoods and some of Rockford's busiest industrial districts.

By the time it was over, 14 people were dead, at least 100 were injured, factories had partially collapsed, houses had been destroyed or moved from their foundations, and a trail of wreckage stretched out of Rockford and across the countryside toward Boone and McHenry counties. Nearly a century later, many of the streets along the tornado's route remain familiar Rockford addresses.

A "Huge Blue Curtain"

One of the remarkable things about the 1928 tornado is that eyewitness descriptions survive. Two men watching the storm approach described what they saw as a "huge blue curtain with small black dots." Those dots were almost certainly debris being carried through the air by the storm.

In 1928 there was no Doppler radar watching rotation develop over Winnebago County, no cell-phone alerts, and no outdoor warning system comparable to what Rockford residents know today. Tornado forecasting itself was still primitive. For many people in the tornado's path, the first warning was simply what they could see and hear approaching them.

After touching down south of Harrison Avenue, the tornado began damaging houses and farm buildings. Four people were injured when one house was badly damaged, and another person who had been caught outside was killed. The tornado then continued northeast toward one of the places where it could do the most damage: industrial Rockford.

Disaster at the Rockford Chair and Furniture Company

One of the worst tragedies occurred at Factory B of the Rockford Chair and Furniture Company along Peoples Avenue, west of Kishwaukee Street. The tornado struck the factory with tremendous force, collapsing the roof and multiple walls while workers were still inside. Eight people died at the factory and at least 40 more were injured.

Contemporary accounts describe rescuers digging through the ruined building looking for survivors. Employees from the nearby Chappel Brothers packing plant reportedly rushed to the scene and organized themselves into rescue squads. For a city whose identity and economy were deeply connected to furniture manufacturing, the destruction must have been particularly shocking. This wasn't a tornado crossing an empty field outside town. It was moving directly through the places where Rockford people worked.

Three Children Trying to Get Home

The tornado continued northeast across Kishwaukee Street and into residential neighborhoods. As it approached 7th Street, the damage became particularly severe, with houses destroyed or pushed from their foundations. Then came perhaps the most heartbreaking event of the afternoon.

A roof was ripped from a building and carried several blocks through the air. Three children who were attempting to get home were struck and killed by the falling debris. The tornado continued toward another of Rockford's major industrial areas, striking the National Lock Company, Union Furniture Company and Mechanics Machine Company along 18th Avenue.

At Union Furniture, portions of the roof and floors collapsed and two workers were killed. Elsewhere, windows shattered, walls collapsed, and businesses, houses, a service station and a grocery store were damaged or destroyed. The tornado was cutting diagonally through a working city filled with people who had begun the afternoon at factories, businesses, schools and homes with no idea of what was approaching.

Across Broadway and Toward Charles Street

The storm continued northeast. Near Broadway and 13th Street, the front wall of the National Furniture Company collapsed into the street, while the Elco Tool Company also suffered major structural damage. The tornado then crossed Woodruff Avenue and entered the Rockview neighborhood, where homes lost roofs, windows and siding.

Two houses were reportedly blown completely from their foundations and deposited in the middle of 9th Avenue near 19th Street. The Carlson Roofing Company building along Charles Street was destroyed. From there, the tornado began moving away from Rockford's densely populated neighborhoods and into the countryside.

Farms along State Street and Guilford Road were damaged as the storm continued northeast. It passed north of Poplar Grove and northwest of Capron before eventually reaching the vicinity of the Boone-McHenry county line. The known tornado path was approximately 26 miles long, and the entire event lasted only about 45 minutes.

And Then Came the Water

Rockford wasn't finished with the storm even after the tornado passed. The same severe weather produced flash flooding along Keith Creek. Roads flooded and buildings were surrounded by water, while photographs from the aftermath show automobiles sitting in floodwater and neighborhoods inundated along the creek.

Residents were therefore dealing with tornado wreckage and flooding at the same time. Hundreds of people were left homeless, and damage to factories temporarily deprived some Rockford families of their livelihoods. The Illinois National Guard's 129th Infantry Regiment was sent to Rockford to assist with the aftermath.

How Strong Was the 1928 Rockford Tornado?

The tornado is sometimes described as an F4. Tornado historian Thomas Grazulis later classified it at that level using the Fujita Scale, which would place it among exceptionally violent tornadoes. There is, however, an important wrinkle when attempting to rate a tornado that occurred decades before the Fujita Scale even existed.

The National Weather Service conducted a modern historical reassessment of the damage and determined that surviving evidence supports at least EF3-level damage. Photographs and written descriptions from 1928 cannot provide investigators with all the structural information available following a modern tornado, so assigning an exact modern rating nearly a century later inevitably involves some uncertainty.

Whatever label is attached to it, the physical results aren't ambiguous. Fourteen people died and at least 100 were injured. Factories collapsed, homes were destroyed, and parts of southeast and east Rockford were transformed in a matter of minutes.

Rockford's Invisible Tornado Path

Perhaps the strangest thing about the 1928 Rockford tornado today is how ordinary its path looks. Harrison Avenue, Kishwaukee Street, 7th Street, 18th Avenue, Broadway, Woodruff Avenue, Charles Street, State Street and Guilford Road aren't remote historical locations. They are streets thousands of Rockford residents still travel all the time.

Drive through southeast Rockford today and there is little to announce that, on a Friday afternoon in September 1928, a tornado crossed those same streets, demolished factories and houses, carried pieces of buildings through the air and killed people who had been going about an otherwise ordinary workday.

That's one of the peculiar things about local history. Eventually the wreckage gets cleared, buildings are repaired or replaced, factories disappear, streets change, and new houses and businesses arrive. The people who remember what happened grow old and disappear too. The city keeps moving, but underneath the Rockford we see every day is another Rockford composed entirely of things that happened in the same places before we got here.

On September 14, 1928, for about 45 minutes, one of those places was directly in the path of a tornado.

 

When Rockford Sold Seeds to the World

Rockford is remembered as a furniture town, a machine-tool town, the home of the sock monkey and the city that gave the world Cheap Trick. Far fewer people remember that Rockford was once one of America’s great seed-selling cities.

For decades, brightly illustrated catalogs bearing a Rockford address traveled to farms, gardens and kitchen tables throughout the United States and beyond. Customers selected tomatoes, beans, sweet corn, flowers and farm seed, mailed their orders to Rockford and waited for packets of possibility to return.

At the center of that forgotten industry was the building that still stands at 624–642 Cedar Street.

The old Condon Brothers and R. H. Shumway building does not announce its importance very loudly today. It is a long, irregular brick complex assembled in several stages between 1912 and 1946. Its various sections once contained offices, a retail store, freight elevators, warehouse space, seed-cleaning equipment and rooms where orders were filled and prepared for shipment.

A railroad spur originally ran directly behind the building. That was no accident. Seeds could arrive in bulk, be cleaned, sorted and packaged inside the plant, and then leave Rockford by rail as thousands upon thousands of individual orders.

This was not a quaint neighborhood garden shop. It was part of a national mail-order operation.

R. H. Shumway Builds a Seed Empire

The older of the two businesses began in 1870, when Roland Hallett Shumway founded the R. H. Shumway Seed Company on his family’s farm near the meeting of the Rock and Kishwaukee rivers.

Shumway had been born in Winnebago County in 1842. He spent his early years on the farm, served during the Civil War and returned home with an understanding of what farmers and gardeners needed. By 1871, he had made the quality of his seeds the foundation of his business.

Mail order allowed him to reach far beyond northern Illinois. A printed catalog could travel anywhere the postal service traveled, turning a Rockford seed house into a national business without requiring stores in every town.

Shumway first maintained a Rockford sales outlet at 323 East State Street. By 1885, the company had moved to the 100 block of South First Street, where it remained for approximately forty years. The operation expanded repeatedly as its reputation and customer list grew.

A 1900 history of Rockford and Winnebago County reported that Shumway had acquired a national reputation as a seedsman and accumulated a considerable fortune. In 1905, he reportedly paid the highest personal-property tax of any Rockford resident. That same year, he donated East State Street land for the creation of a farmers’ market—the origin of the building later known as Shumway Market.

Roland Shumway died in 1925 after being struck by an automobile while walking home from his seed company. His son, Myron Raymond “Ray” Shumway, continued operating the business. When Ray died in 1933, his widow sold the company to another Rockford seed family: the Condons.

The Condon Brothers on Cedar Street

Condon Brothers Seedsmen had been established in 1910 by Thomas Condon and his sons Leonard R. and John R. Condon.

Thomas Condon was an Irish immigrant from County Tipperary. His sons already knew the seed trade. Both had worked for H. W. Buckbee, another enormous Rockford seed company. John Condon had been a Buckbee foreman for approximately twenty years, while Leonard began working there at thirteen.

The Condons opened a small retail store at 513 West State Street. In 1912, only two years after entering business, they relocated to Cedar Street and established a seed-cleaning and refining plant, mail-order department and wholesale store.

Cedar Street was still little more than a muddy industrial road. Nearby stood a railroad freight station, a bakery and a paper company. The Condons, however, had chosen a location with room to grow and immediate access to rail transportation.

The business expanded in 1918 and twice during 1928. A retail storefront and additional offices were added, along with more space for processing and storing seed. By 1933, the plant occupied roughly 175 feet along Cedar Street and was conducting several million dollars in annual business.

After the Condons purchased R. H. Shumway that year, they moved the older company’s operations into the Cedar Street complex. They wisely retained the famous Shumway name. Condon Brothers and R. H. Shumway continued to issue separate catalogs and appear to customers as distinct seed houses, although both were being operated from the same Rockford building.

Rockford’s Other Famous Crop: Catalogs

The seeds were the product, but the catalogs made the industry possible.

These were more than price lists. Their colorful covers and illustrations offered visions of enormous tomatoes, perfect flowers, abundant fields and gardens without weeds, insects or disappointment. During the coldest months of the year, they allowed customers to imagine the garden that might emerge in spring.

Millions of Condon and Shumway catalogs were eventually distributed around the world. Historic Condon catalogs survive in the collections of the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Library, including editions with titles such as Condon’s Sure Crop Garden and Farm Guide. Collections preserve Rockford catalogs dating from the 1910s through the 1950s.

Rockford was not home to only two important seed houses. H. W. Buckbee, George S. Haskell & Company, Alneer Brothers and several smaller firms also operated here. One 1914 directory listed 51 prominent seed firms in the United States and France. Only three were in Illinois—and all three were in Rockford: Buckbee, Condon Brothers and R. H. Shumway.

For a time, the words “Rockford, Illinois” printed on a seed catalog were familiar to gardeners across the country.

The industry also proved unusually resilient. Seed sales increased during the Great Depression as families planted gardens to stretch their food supplies. The Victory Garden campaigns of World War II created another surge in demand. Whatever else was happening in the economy, people still needed to grow things.

Eight Hundred Drawers of Seeds

Leonard and John Condon retired in 1958. Leonard Condon Jr. took responsibility for the Shumway mail-order operation, while Ernie and Gertrude Smith ran the Condon retail business.

A 1978 newspaper account described Gertrude Smith standing before 800 drawers filled with seeds at the Condon Lawn and Garden Center. Eleven large storage barrels supplemented the drawers, and even that was reportedly insufficient for everything the store carried.

It is a marvelous final image of the old business: hundreds of drawers, barrels of seeds and the accumulated smell of fields and gardens inside a brick building on Cedar Street.

But the industry was consolidating. Large firms purchased smaller companies, regional operations disappeared and Rockford’s era as a seed capital came to an end. Condon Brothers closed and left Cedar Street in 1980. The Shumway operation departed in 1984.

The R. H. Shumway name survives today under different ownership, but its Rockford chapter is over.

The Building That Remembers

The Cedar Street complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2015 because of its importance to Rockford commerce and the American seed industry. It is one of the last substantial Rockford buildings directly connected to that history.

The building also occupies ground with an unexpectedly deep past. Before the seed plant was constructed, the area had served as part of an early west-side cemetery and later as the location of an Irish immigrant settlement known as Tipperary Patch. The railroad displaced the cemetery, industry replaced the settlement, and a seed company eventually rose over both.

Today, motorists can pass 624–642 Cedar Street without knowing that orders once arrived there from across the country, that workers cleaned and packaged untold quantities of seed inside, or that Rockford catalogs helped decide what grew in distant American gardens.

Rockford did not merely manufacture furniture, drills and cabinet hardware. For nearly a century, it packaged springtime and sent it through the mail.

Is This Really the Oldest House in Rockford?

 

Is This Really the Oldest House in Rockford?

There is an old stone house at 2127 Broadway that looks as if Rockford grew around it and forgot to explain itself.

Known as the Herrick-Logli Cobblestone House, it was built in 1847 by Elijah L. Herrick. It has frequently been described as the oldest surviving house in Rockford. That claim has been repeated so often that it has nearly hardened into fact—much like the house itself—but the City of Rockford now uses the more cautious description “one of the oldest surviving buildings in Rockford.”

That leaves us with a small but irresistible local mystery.

Is it actually the oldest house in Rockford?

Before trying to settle that question, the house deserves attention on its own merits. It is one of only a few surviving cobblestone houses in Illinois and an unusually intact example of a building tradition brought west from New York State. Cobblestone construction became particularly associated with communities near the Erie Canal, where thousands of rounded stones excavated during construction were readily available and skilled masons developed elaborate ways of arranging them.

Elijah Herrick came to Rockford from Massachusetts during the mid-1830s. It has been suggested that he passed through New York and learned about cobblestone construction there. Very little else is known about him, and it is not certain that he personally worked as a mason. The house he left behind, however, strongly suggests that somebody involved knew exactly what he was doing.

The exterior was constructed with carefully selected cobbles reportedly taken from the nearby Rock River. Behind that decorative surface is a heavier supporting wall of larger stones. Together, the walls are approximately fifteen inches thick.

The corners are reinforced and decorated with large blocks of Platteville limestone called quoins. The foundation is made from Galena dolomite. The house also retains the balanced proportions, low roof and orderly arrangement associated with Greek Revival architecture. A Victorian porch was added later, giving the front of the building a visible layer from another period.

In other words, this was never just a pile of river rocks arranged into the general shape of a house. It was a carefully designed structure made from several varieties of regional stone, combining practical frontier construction with a recognizable architectural style.

The Herrick house became Rockford’s generally accepted “oldest house” after another early residence disappeared. The Daniel Shaw Haight House, built in 1842, was demolished in 1967. Haight had established the settlement on the east side of the Rock River that eventually joined the west-side settlement associated with Germanicus Kent and Thatcher Blake. Losing his house apparently elevated the Herrick house into first place among the survivors.

But “oldest surviving house” is a surprisingly difficult title to award.

Dates attached to nineteenth-century buildings are not always exact. A property may have begun as a small cabin and later been rebuilt around. Tax records may identify when land changed hands rather than when a structure was completed. Oral histories can conflict with deeds, maps and architectural evidence. Buildings also move, expand and disguise their original forms under later additions.

That may explain why some historical accounts call the Herrick house Rockford’s oldest while official preservation material now stops at “one of the oldest.”

The uncertainty does not diminish the building. If anything, it makes the house more interesting. A definitive claim ends the discussion. A disputed claim gives Rockford something to investigate.

Which surviving house challenges it? Is there another structure containing an older cabin beneath a newer exterior? Does the disagreement concern the construction date, the definition of a house or the boundaries of Rockford when the building was erected? Somewhere in property records, early maps, tax rolls or an overlooked newspaper item may be the answer.

The Herrick-Logli Cobblestone House was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. It is also a designated Rockford landmark. Those protections recognize something more important than a numerical ranking: the building is a rare physical connection to Rockford before factories, furniture companies and expanding neighborhoods transformed the city.

Thousands of people travel Broadway without realizing that the river stones beside them have been holding up the same walls since 1847.

Whether the Herrick house is first, second or merely somewhere near the beginning, it has survived long enough to make the distinction almost beside the point.

Almost.

 

Whatever Happened to the Palace Shoe Service Neon Sign in Rockford?

For decades, a cobbler stood over North Main Street in downtown Rockford, hammering away at the same shoe. People who spent time downtown will remember the enormous Palace Shoe Service sign, the kind of elaborate commercial sign cities used to have before illuminated plastic rectangles became the preferred method of announcing that something was for sale.

The shoemaker on the sign wasn't always standing still. When everything was working properly, his arm moved through a three-part hammering animation. When the hammer came down on the shoe, two red neon sparks flashed at the point of impact. Then he raised the hammer and did it all over again. It was advertising, public art and mechanical theater rolled into one wonderfully unnecessary object.

And now it's gone.

Palace Shoe Service Goes Back to 1926

Palace Shoe Service was one of those increasingly rare Rockford businesses whose history could be measured in generations rather than years. Brothers Joseph and Jasper Giamalva opened the business in downtown Rockford in 1926. According to a history published by the Rockford Historical Society, the brothers had learned shoemaking in Sicily before eventually settling in Rockford.

Their first shop was on the east side of the 100 block of North Main Street. The Palace name wasn't an attempt to make shoe repair sound particularly luxurious. There really was a Palace nearby: the Palace Theatre. Four years after opening, the brothers moved across North Main Street to a location between the Orpheum Theatre and Simon Drug Store.

Downtown Rockford was a very different animal then. One Easter Eve Saturday during the 1930s, Palace reportedly shined 500 pairs of shoes in a single day, at ten cents a shine. Eventually Palace Shoe Service settled at 204 North Main Street, where generations of Rockford residents would know it.

Then Came the Cobbler

The famous Palace Shoe Service sign was built in 1950. It was approximately eight feet wide, and according to roadside-sign historian Debra Jane Seltzer, the shoemaker depicted on it was modeled after John Antunicci, who owned the business at the time.

The animation was what made the thing extraordinary. The cobbler raised his arm, brought the hammer down and two red neon sparks flashed where the hammer met the shoe. Then the sequence repeated. It must have been quite a sight when the neon and animation were completely functional, especially at night on a North Main Street filled with other illuminated theater and business signs.

The sign survived long after elaborate animated neon signs like it stopped being made. It even survived a move from an earlier Palace Shoe Service location to the later shop. By the 2000s and 2010s, it had become less an advertisement than a piece of Rockford folk art. Photographers noticed it. Travelers interested in old roadside America noticed it. Rockford residents certainly noticed it.

Restoring the sign, unfortunately, wasn't cheap. The business reportedly received estimates of $15,000 to $20,000 to bring it back to its former glory. For a family shoe-repair business, that was an enormous expense, so the old cobbler remained above North Main Street without being completely restored.

Ninety-Five Years in Downtown Rockford

Palace Shoe Service survived nearly everything downtown Rockford could throw at it. It survived the Depression, World War II, the decline of the traditional downtown shopping district, shopping malls and an era of inexpensive shoes increasingly designed to be thrown away rather than repaired. It even survived the Palace Theatre that had given the business its name. The theater was demolished in 1984.

Palace remained associated with the Giamalva family through four generations. In 2021, the Greater Rockford Italian American Association recognized the family and the remarkable longevity of Palace Shoe Service. By then, however, one of downtown Rockford's longest-running businesses was nearing the end of its story. After roughly 95 years, Palace Shoe Service closed.

Sometime afterward, the cobbler disappeared too.

RoadsideArchitecture.com, which documented the Palace sign over the years, records the business as closed and shows that by 2023 the famous sign was no longer there. That leaves a question that turns this from another piece of Rockford history into a Rockford mystery.

Where Is the Palace Shoe Service Sign?

An eight-foot-wide animated neon sign built in 1950 doesn't exactly disappear into someone's coat pocket. Somebody removed it from the building, but what happened after that?

Was it scrapped? Was it sold? Did a collector acquire it? Did someone connected with Palace Shoe Service save it? Is it hanging inside another building? Or is Rockford's hammering cobbler sitting quietly in a garage, warehouse or barn somewhere, waiting for somebody to remember him?

So far, I haven't found a reliable public source that answers that question. There is, however, reason to hope that "gone" doesn't necessarily mean destroyed.

Rockford has lost other spectacular old signs from its streets without necessarily losing the signs themselves. The signs at Parthenios Luncheonette at 132 North Church Street survived after the restaurant closed in 2010. Those signs had originally belonged to Hobson Drug Company and may have dated to the 1940s or earlier. One of the vertical signs once alternated between FOOD and DRUGS in neon. The signs were eventually removed in 2017, sold at auction and reportedly entered a private collection.

The old Der Rathskeller sign also survived the closing of the restaurant it advertised and was eventually sold to a private collector. Somewhere, pieces of the Rockford streetscape that many people assume vanished forever are apparently still out there.

Maybe the Palace cobbler is one of them.

Help Us Solve a Rockford Mystery

This is where Rockford Blog readers come in. If you know what happened to the Palace Shoe Service sign after the business closed, we'd like to hear about it. Maybe you knew the Giamalva family, worked downtown, saw the sign being removed or heard that somebody bought it. Maybe you've actually seen it since it disappeared from North Main Street.

And if you have old photographs of the Palace Shoe Service sign when the neon and animation were still working, those are part of this story too. There must be photographs scattered through Rockford family albums showing North Main Street when the cobbler was still hammering away above the sidewalk.

For more than seventy years, he stood above Rockford working on the same shoe. That's long enough to earn an ending to the story.

So, Rockford: whatever happened to the Palace Shoe Service cobbler?

 

The Red Whale and the Ghosts of the 500 Block of East State Street

There are places in Rockford that disappear, and then there are places that disappear almost completely.

The Red Whale is one of the latter.

Sometime around the end of the 1960s or beginning of the 1970s, a head shop called The Red Whale operated in downtown Rockford. People remember it. Period sources prove that it existed. But finding the ordinary details we expect to find about an old business—an exact address, the owner's name, when it opened, when it closed—is surprisingly difficult.

What survives is a tantalizing combination of documentary evidence, local memory, and, perhaps, the ghost of a red whale still painted on a wall.

And the trail appears to lead to the 500 block of East State Street.

The Red Whale Was Real

Let's start with what can actually be documented.

In 1972, Rockford hosted a concert at the National Guard Armory featuring Quicksilver Messenger Service, Blue Öyster Cult and Flash, the British progressive-rock band featuring former Yes guitarist Peter Banks.

Tickets cost five dollars.

A contemporary newspaper account listed four Rockford businesses where tickets could be purchased: The Red Whale, Impulse Two, Budget Tapes and Records, and Team Electronics.

That's fairly compelling evidence of what kind of cultural territory The Red Whale occupied. This wasn't a hardware store that happened to have an unusual name. It was part of the network through which Rockford's young music audience encountered the counterculture of the early 1970s.

Another contemporary source takes us even farther outside Rockford.

An Illinois underground newspaper advertised a large concert featuring Dave Mason, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Pure Prairie League, Linda Ronstadt and David Blue. The advertisement listed ticket outlets around Illinois:

Peoria had Budget Tapes & Records.

Pekin had Freak Boutique.

Springfield had Right-On Boutique.

Decatur had Crystal Ship.

Macomb had Red Caboose.

And Rockford had:

RED WHALE.

The company The Red Whale kept on that list probably tells us as much about the store as anything else we've found. These were the record stores, boutiques and head shops through which the youth culture of the period moved.

The Red Whale was part of that world.

But Where Was It?

This is where history becomes considerably less cooperative.

I have not yet found a period city-directory entry, advertisement, telephone listing or other primary source that establishes the Red Whale's street address beyond reasonable doubt.

So what follows should be understood as Rockford oral history rather than established fact.

The persistent local recollection places The Red Whale in the 500 block of East State Street, apparently upstairs in one of the buildings now occupied by either Social Urban Bar & Restaurant at 509 E. State Street or Abreo at 515 E. State Street.

That distinction matters, and until somebody turns up a directory listing or advertisement, I don't think we should pretend to know which address it was.

But there is an intriguing piece of physical folklore attached to the story.

People who had access to the upstairs portion of one of these buildings years after The Red Whale disappeared reportedly could still see the outline of a large red whale painted on a wall.

If anyone reading this has actually seen that whale—or better yet photographed it—I would very much like to hear from you.

Because if that story can be confirmed, Rockford may have a surviving piece of counterculture history hiding above one of its most familiar downtown restaurants.

The 500 Block

Maybe that's why The Red Whale interests me.

I live on this block.

Today the 500 block of East State is part of the downtown Rockford most people recognize as the restaurant and nightlife district. Social is at 509 East State. Abreo is at 515 East State. They occupy old commercial buildings whose histories extend far beyond their current occupants.

The businesses change. The buildings remember.

The block The Red Whale may have inhabited would have looked out on a very different downtown Rockford.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, downtown was still a genuine commercial center rather than a historic district trying to reinvent itself. State Street had department stores, restaurants, record stores, theaters, bars, clothing stores and all the strange little independent businesses that once occupied second floors and narrow storefronts in American downtowns.

And then the culture changed.

Long hair got longer. Psychedelic music arrived. Underground newspapers appeared. Incense burned. Black-light posters went up on bedroom walls. Rolling papers and pipes appeared beside records and leather goods.

Every decent-sized American city seemed to acquire a head shop.

Rockford apparently got a whale.

What Did They Sell?

Here again, caution is necessary.

Modern recollections specifically call The Red Whale a head shop, while another modern Rockford retrospective remembers it as one of the area's old record stores.

Those descriptions aren't contradictory.

A head shop around 1970 could sell records, posters, incense, jewelry, clothing, underground newspapers, patches, buttons and other counterculture merchandise alongside the smoking paraphernalia that gave the stores their name.

And we know The Red Whale sold—or at least distributed—concert tickets.

The surviving evidence therefore points toward something more interesting than simply a record store.

The Red Whale seems to have been one of the places where Rockford's emerging counterculture gathered.

A Store That Almost Disappeared From History

Here's the strange part.

Search for some long-gone Rockford businesses and you'll find photographs, advertisements, matchbooks, newspaper stories and dozens of people reminiscing about them.

The Red Whale barely exists online.

A Rockford-area record-store retrospective published decades later included it among ten remembered local record stores, but even the writer admitted he'd never heard of the place and asked readers for their memories.

In 2020, someone posted to the Rockford subreddit looking for information about “The Red Whale headshop” for an art project. They had apparently encountered exactly the same problem: they knew something had been there, but reliable information was difficult to find.

That's how local history disappears.

Not dramatically.

Nobody announces that a place is about to vanish from the historical record.

The sign comes down. Another business moves in. Somebody paints the room. The people who worked there move away or die. Photographs sit unidentified in boxes. Fifty years pass.

Eventually everyone knows somebody who remembers the place, but nobody can remember exactly where it was.

Somewhere Upstairs, a Whale

And that's why I keep coming back to that story about the wall.

Maybe someone will read this and say:

Of course it was at 509. I bought a poster there in 1971.

Maybe someone else still has a Red Whale shopping bag, business card, matchbook, newspaper advertisement or photograph.

Maybe a former employee is still in Rockford.

Maybe somebody knows who owned it.

And maybe, somewhere upstairs at 509 or 515 East State Street, beneath half a century of paint and renovation, there really is still the faint outline of a whale.

For now, that's where the historical record ends.

The Red Whale definitely existed.

It was operating in Rockford by 1972.

It was associated with records, the head-shop culture and major rock-concert ticket sales.

Local recollection places it somewhere in the 500 block of East State, likely in the building now occupied by Social or Abreo, although I have not yet found documentary evidence establishing which one.

And according to Rockford lore, long after the people and the merchandise were gone, the whale was still on the wall.

That's not quite enough evidence to close the case.

But it's more than enough reason to keep looking.