When the AWA Came to Boylan: Rockford’s Forgotten Wrestling History

When I was a kid, professional wrestling belonged to weekend mornings. Before wrestling became a billion-dollar national entertainment industry, it arrived in the house through a local television station with a relatively simple proposition: watch these men threaten, boast, cheat, bleed, and settle their grudges in the ring. The heroes and villains seemed enormous on television, but they were not impossibly far away. The same wrestlers we watched on Saturday morning could turn up a few miles away at the gymnasium of Boylan Catholic High School.

For many Rockford residents who grew up during the 1970s and early 1980s, this was professional wrestling: Verne Gagne, Nick Bockwinkel, The Crusher, Baron von Raschke, Mad Dog Vachon, Bobby “The Brain” Heenan, Greg Gagne, Jim Brunzell, Ken Patera, Bobby Duncum, Larry Zbyszko and a succession of other strange, colorful men passing through town. Long before WrestleMania transformed wrestling into a national spectacle, Rockford was a regular stop in the territory of the American Wrestling Association.

Before Wrestling Went National

The American Wrestling Association was founded in Minneapolis in 1960 by wrestler and promoter Verne Gagne. At the time, professional wrestling did not operate as one national business. The country was divided into regional territories, each with its own television program, champions, arenas and recognizable group of wrestlers. Promoters generally respected one another’s geographic areas, allowing each organization to develop a loyal local audience.

The AWA’s territory was centered in Minnesota but extended across much of the Upper Midwest. Minneapolis and St. Paul were its heart, while Chicago, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Winnipeg, Omaha and numerous smaller Midwestern cities formed a network of recurring stops. Rockford’s location made it a natural part of that circuit. It was close enough to Chicago and Milwaukee to fit conveniently into the wrestlers’ traveling schedule, yet large enough to support its own audience.

The AWA’s weekly syndicated television program supplied the stories. Television matches introduced the wrestlers, established rivalries and usually gave the stars an opportunity to demolish lesser opponents. Interviews intensified the feuds and promised revenge. The program was not the final product so much as an advertisement for the next live card. After watching the conflict develop on television, fans could purchase a ticket and see it continue at Boylan.

This relationship between television and the local arena was the foundation of territorial wrestling. The performers on the screen were neither distant movie stars nor characters who existed only inside the television. They traveled to the communities watching them. In Rockford, they stepped into a ring constructed on the floor of a Catholic high school gymnasium.

Boylan Catholic High School Becomes an AWA Stop

Boylan Catholic High School opened in 1960 at 4000 St. Francis Drive. Its gym was designed for school athletics, but it also provided the kind of practical, midsized building regional wrestling promoters needed. It could accommodate a substantial crowd without requiring the expense of a major arena. The wooden bleachers placed spectators close to the ring, where every shouted insult, referee’s warning and impact on the canvas could be heard.

Surviving wrestling records indicate that the AWA was holding events at Boylan by 1970. The promotion continued returning through the 1970s and well into the 1980s. That makes Boylan more than the site of an isolated wrestling exhibition. It was an established AWA venue and part of the promotion’s regular Midwestern route.

The surviving online record is incomplete. House shows were working events rather than programs created for permanent preservation. Results were reported unevenly, newspaper advertisements disappeared, and many cards were never filmed. Dates and match listings preserved by wrestling historians therefore represent only part of what occurred at Boylan. Nevertheless, the surviving records are enough to establish that nationally known wrestlers appeared in Rockford repeatedly over a period of at least fourteen years.

One surviving early Boylan lineup featured Larry “The Axe” Hennig defeating Billy Red Cloud, Don Muraco defeating Jack Bence, and the celebrated team of Nick Bockwinkel and Ray Stevens appearing on the card. These were not unknown performers assigned to an insignificant stop. Hennig was one of the AWA’s most imposing stars. Muraco would later become nationally famous in the WWF. Bockwinkel and Stevens, managed by Bobby Heenan, were among the most accomplished and despised tag teams of the era.

The Crusher Comes to Rockford

No wrestler represented the Upper Midwest more completely than The Crusher. Born Reginald Lisowski in Milwaukee, he fashioned himself into a beer-drinking, cigar-smoking workingman who trained by carrying beer barrels and dancing the polka. He referred to opponents as “bumps” and promised to pound them until they became “da woist.”

The character was exaggerated, but it was perfectly suited to places such as Milwaukee, Chicago and Rockford. The Crusher did not present himself as an untouchable celebrity. He was the loudest man at the neighborhood tavern, transformed into a folk hero. A working-class crowd could understand him immediately.

On January 10, 1975, The Crusher teamed with Ivan Putski at Boylan to challenge AWA World Tag Team Champions Nick Bockwinkel and Ray Stevens. Bockwinkel and Stevens retained their championship. Even in the fragmentary record, the match illustrates the quality of wrestling Rockford received: four major stars contesting the promotion’s world tag-team title in a high school gym.

Bockwinkel and Stevens embodied everything The Crusher opposed. They were composed, technically proficient and openly superior. With Bobby Heenan speaking on their behalf and interfering whenever necessary, they were ideal villains. Their victory did not end the argument. It gave the audience another reason to return.

Nick Bockwinkel: The Champion Rockford Loved to Hate

Nick Bockwinkel eventually became the defining AWA champion of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He won the AWA World Heavyweight Championship from Verne Gagne in 1975 and held the title four times. Bockwinkel was unusual among wrestling villains. He seldom needed to scream. Wearing tailored suits and choosing elaborate words, he calmly explained why he was wealthier, more intelligent and more accomplished than the people booing him.

He was also one of the finest technical wrestlers of his era. That combination made him an especially effective champion. The audience might despise his arrogance and Bobby Heenan’s interference, but it could not easily dismiss his ability.

One documented Boylan card placed Bockwinkel in the main event as AWA World Heavyweight Champion, evidence that Rockford was included in the championship circuit. The AWA did not merely send an assortment of preliminary wrestlers to Boylan. Its principal championship and leading performers came with them.

Bockwinkel’s presence also connects the Boylan story to a major turning point in wrestling history. During the early 1980s, Hulk Hogan became the AWA’s most popular hero and repeatedly challenged Bockwinkel. Hogan appeared to win the championship on more than one occasion, only for the decision to be reversed. Hogan left for the World Wrestling Federation in late 1983 and soon became the face of wrestling’s national expansion.

The stars Rockford fans knew from the AWA did not disappear. Many of them became central figures in the WWF’s rise. Hogan, Bobby Heenan, Gene Okerlund, Jesse Ventura, Adrian Adonis, Ken Patera and numerous others had already learned their craft and developed their characters in the AWA.

A Packed Gym in 1980

One of the best-documented Boylan events occurred on March 8, 1980. Promotional records identify a four-match AWA card at the school and report attendance of 3,168—an impressive crowd for a high school gymnasium.

One of the advertised matches placed Dino Bravo against Chris Markoff. Bravo was a powerful young wrestler who would later become a prominent WWF villain. Markoff was a veteran who worked a Russian character during the Cold War era. The card was promoted with the phrase “The Mad Dog Bites Again,” indicating that Mad Dog Vachon was another featured attraction.

Vachon was among the most recognizable figures in AWA history. Bald, scarred and wild-eyed, he seemed genuinely dangerous in a way few later television wrestlers could duplicate. He snarled through interviews, attacked opponents without warning and looked as if he had wandered into the building from somewhere wrestling rules did not exist.

A crowd of more than 3,000 at Boylan shows how deeply the AWA was embedded in Rockford entertainment. This was not a handful of enthusiasts gathered in a nearly empty building. The gym was filled by people who had followed the wrestlers on television and wanted to experience the spectacle in person.

Another surviving database entry documents an AWA card at Boylan on September 27, 1980. The individual results available online remain incomplete, but the date confirms that the March event was not a one-time visit. The promotion returned to the same building later that year, continuing the familiar cycle of televised provocation and live resolution.

The Boylan Cards During the 1980s

The AWA continued promoting events at Boylan as wrestling entered its national boom. By this period, the roster contained a mixture of established veterans and younger wrestlers who would soon become nationally famous.

A particularly strong card took place on July 20, 1984. Tony Atlas defeated Larry Zbyszko in 12 minutes and 14 seconds. Billy Robinson wrestled Curt Hennig to a twenty-minute time-limit draw. That pairing alone is historically remarkable. Robinson was internationally respected as one of wrestling’s greatest technical practitioners. Hennig, the son of Larry “The Axe” Hennig, was still developing into the performer later known nationally as “Mr. Perfect.”

Another documented 1984 visit featured a nine-team battle royal won by The Crusher and Baron von Raschke. The same card included Jimmy Garvin defeating Raschke. Battle royals were ideal attractions for local shows because they placed a large portion of the roster into the ring at once. For a child sitting in the Boylan bleachers, nearly every wrestler seen on television could suddenly be present in the same chaotic match.

The partnership of The Crusher and Baron von Raschke was especially memorable. Raschke had spent years terrifying audiences as a goose-stepping German villain who incapacitated opponents with “the claw.” By the 1980s, he had become a beloved eccentric. In 1984, Raschke and The Crusher won the AWA World Tag Team Championship, turning two of the promotion’s most recognizable veterans into an unlikely heroic team.

Other stars who passed through the AWA during Boylan’s wrestling years included the High Flyers—Greg Gagne and Jim Brunzell—along with Jesse “The Body” Ventura, Bobby Duncum, Ken Patera, Jerry Blackwell, Rick Martel, Brad Rheingans, The Road Warriors, Shawn Michaels and Marty Jannetty. Not every one of them can presently be placed on a surviving Boylan card, but together they formed the television world Rockford viewers associated with AWA wrestling.

Why a High School Gym Worked

Looking back from the era of stadium shows, elaborate entrance videos and international streaming, a professional wrestling card in a school gym may sound small. In practice, the building’s limitations created much of its power.

There was no great distance between the audience and the performers. Spectators could see the wrestlers’ expressions, hear what they said to one another and watch Bobby Heenan look over his shoulder before committing some act of treachery. Children could crowd near the aisle as their heroes entered. Villains had to walk through the same hostile audience they had spent weeks insulting on television.

The smell of the gym, the squeak of shoes on the floor, the folding chairs, the concession stand and the school bleachers were all part of the experience. Wrestling inserted its imaginary world into an entirely familiar Rockford setting. For a few hours, the Boylan gym was no longer primarily a place for basketball games and school assemblies. It was an arena where world championships, revenge and personal honor were supposedly at stake.

Territorial wrestling also depended upon repetition. The AWA came back. Wrestlers returned with different partners, championships and grudges. A young Curt Hennig could appear before becoming a champion. A hated Baron von Raschke could return years later as a hero. The audience aged along with the performers and carried the history of earlier matches into every new card.

Television Made the World; Boylan Made It Real

For those of us who watched the AWA on weekend mornings, the television program established a complete moral universe. The Crusher was right. Nick Bockwinkel was smug. Bobby Heenan was lying. The referee had somehow failed to see the most obvious act of cheating in the building. Next week, perhaps, justice would finally be served.

Boylan made that world tangible. The people inside the television arrived in Rockford, climbed into a ring and performed only a few feet from the audience. This was the great strength of territorial wrestling: it was both imaginary and intensely local.

Rockford was not watching a generic national product manufactured somewhere else. It occupied a real place on the AWA map. The city’s fans were part of the circuit that sustained the promotion, and Boylan Catholic High School was one of the buildings where the weekly television stories became live community events.

The End of the Territory

By the middle of the 1980s, the territorial system was collapsing. Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation used cable television, aggressive syndication and nationally promoted events to enter markets that had once belonged to regional companies. Many of the AWA’s most valuable performers left for the WWF, where they became familiar to a much larger audience.

The AWA attempted to compete with major events such as SuperClash and WrestleRock, but it could not reproduce the WWF’s national momentum. Attendance declined, television distribution weakened and the company ceased operations in 1991.

What disappeared was not simply one wrestling promotion. An entire relationship between television, geography and community disappeared with it. Wrestling became larger, more polished and more widely available, but it became less local. The chances that the world champion seen on television would appear a few weeks later in a nearby high school gym diminished dramatically.

Remembering AWA Wrestling at Boylan

Today, Boylan Catholic High School remains one of Rockford’s most familiar institutions, but its role in professional wrestling history is rarely mentioned. For more than a decade, however, its gymnasium hosted some of the most important performers of the territorial era. The Crusher, Nick Bockwinkel, Ray Stevens, Ivan Putski, Mad Dog Vachon, Dino Bravo, Tony Atlas, Larry Zbyszko, Billy Robinson, Curt Hennig and Baron von Raschke are among the names connected to surviving Boylan records.

There are almost certainly more cards still waiting to be reconstructed from newspaper advertisements, programs, ticket stubs and the memories of people who attended. Wrestling’s local history often survives in fragments because no one thought a handbill or newspaper advertisement would someday become historical evidence.

But the larger story is already clear. Rockford had a regular place in one of professional wrestling’s most important regional territories. Thousands of local fans watched the AWA on weekend mornings, then had the opportunity to see those same wrestlers in person at Boylan.

For the children watching at home, the distance between ordinary Rockford and the fantastic world of professional wrestling was not very great. It was only a drive across town.

SECOND NATURE Brings Salvaged-Metal Animals and Haiku to Rockford Art Deli

Rockford sculptor Michael Zant, artist and poet Tré, and Rockford poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg will present SECOND NATURE: Salvaged Metal Sculpture & Haiku at Rockford Art Deli during Fall ArtScene, October 2–3, 2026.

SECOND NATURE brings together Zant’s salvaged-metal animal sculptures and original haiku by Tré and Vaultonburg. Created from reclaimed and repurposed materials, each sculpture will be accompanied by two poems—one written by each poet in response to the animal it depicts.

The exhibition celebrates the wild lives around us, the possibilities hidden in discarded materials, and the idea that everything deserves a second nature. Zant’s weathered metal animals are joined by the compressed observations of haiku, allowing sculpture and poetry to approach the same creature from different directions.

The presentation will remain deliberately simple. Each poem will be printed in black Garamond on cream paper and mounted on a small pale wood tile placed beside the sculpture. The repeated combination of salvaged metal, unfinished wood, cream paper, and black type allows the poems to become part of the exhibition without altering or competing with Zant’s sculptures.

SECOND NATURE is also a benefit for Wild Roots, a Rockford-area organization working to preserve and promote the region’s native prairie. Ten dollars from every copy of Vaultonburg’s 2026 haiku collection, Vanished Roads, sold at Rockford Art Deli during the exhibition will be donated to Wild Roots.

Vaultonburg is the founder of Rockford’s Zombie Logic Press and co-founder of Wolf Twin Books with Tré. His recent haiku have appeared in journals in the United States, Canada, England, Wales, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Tré created the cover and interior illustrations for Vanished Roads and is now contributing original haiku to SECOND NATURE.

SECOND NATURE: Salvaged Metal SculptureMetal Sculpture & Haiku
Michael Z Zant + Tré + + Thomas L L. Vault Vaultonburg
Rockford Art Deli
402 East State Street, Rockford, Illinois
October 2–3, 2026
5–9 p.m. both evenings
Free admission
A benefit for for Wild Roots

 

The Mystery of the Harvey Wallbangers Toaster

For nearly two years, one of the strangest little mysteries in downtown Rockford kept repeating itself in a tiny garden outside Harvey Wallbangers. I would be walking past and notice that somebody had found a discarded household appliance, carried it to the garden, and plugged it in. Not merely dumped it there or arranged it as some sort of joke. They plugged the thing in, and it would be running.

Over those two years I saw fans, heaters, dehumidifiers, radios and even a mini refrigerator. Every couple of weeks, it seemed, another orphaned appliance would appear and be given one final, inexplicable tour of duty in this little patch of downtown Rockford. The strangest part was that I never once saw the person doing it. I walked through this area constantly, often enough that you would think eventually I would catch the mysterious appliance operator in the act, but I never did. I would simply arrive one day and discover that the garden had acquired another machine. It would remain there humming, blowing, heating, cooling or playing until somebody unplugged it or the thing finally shorted out. Then it would disappear, and eventually something else would take its place.

One day it was a toaster. My friend and Hike You! collaborator, photographer Ryan Davis, took the photograph reproduced here. The toaster sits in the foreground, filthy and weather-beaten, with downtown Rockford rising behind it. There is one important detail that isn't readily apparent in the photograph: the toaster was on. Its little indicator light was glowing. There was something simultaneously ridiculous and strangely moving about it—a toaster sitting outside in a garden, nowhere near a kitchen, without bread or breakfast or any conceivable reason to exist there, nevertheless continuing to perform the job it had been manufactured to perform. Someone had plugged it in, so it toasted.

Ryan and I eventually paired the photograph with the haiku, “power outage— / the stars resume / their old jobs.” It became one of the 24 pieces in our exhibition Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford. In some ways, this photograph gets very close to what the entire project is about. For more than six years, Ryan and I have walked Rockford and paid attention to things that would be incredibly easy not to notice. We weren't particularly interested in documenting the city's official landmarks. Plenty of people can photograph a building and tell you when it was constructed. We became interested in what happens when you walk through the same place long enough that the ordinary begins to become mysterious.

That might mean a bicycle dredged out of the Rock River, an abandoned office chair on Broadway, something left in an alley, weeds reclaiming an object, or some accidental arrangement nobody intended anyone to regard as meaningful. They are little pieces of evidence that somebody was here five minutes ago or twenty years ago, moments in which the city seems briefly to rearrange itself into a poem. And sometimes, apparently, the poem is an electric toaster sitting in a garden.

The toaster also illustrates something I've come to believe after years of walking these same streets: familiarity and attention aren't opposites. You don't necessarily exhaust a place by returning to it. Sometimes you begin seeing more of it. That's also an important part of the Prairie Zen idea that has gradually developed around much of my recent haiku. You don't have to travel to some officially designated beautiful wilderness to encounter mystery. The strange, funny, melancholy or beautiful thing worth noticing might be sitting beside a sidewalk you've walked a hundred times. The trick is noticing it before it disappears.

Ryan Davis and I have selected 24 of these encounters for Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford, which will be shown at RevHaus during Fall ArtScene 2026. The exhibition combines Ryan's photographs with my haiku and short texts, following six years of walking through Rockford and watching the familiar city gradually become new, strange and occasionally magical. The exhibition also offers a preview of our forthcoming Hike You! book.

Of all the photographs in the exhibition, I have a particular affection for the toaster because I still don't know the answer to the most obvious question. For almost two years, somebody maintained this peculiar little ritual in downtown Rockford, bringing abandoned appliances to this garden and plugging them in, and despite all the miles we walked, I never caught them doing it. I don't know who they were, what they thought they were doing, or whether there was any explanation beyond their own amusement.

Maybe that's better. Rockford has explained enough of itself already. It can keep the toaster.

 

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.