Swedish American: The Hospital That Began With One Dollar

 Swedish American: The Hospital That Began With One Dollar

Generations of Rockford residents have been born at SwedishAmerican Hospital, worked there, recovered there, and said goodbye to loved ones there. Its history is inseparable from the history of the city itself.

But SwedishAmerican began with something considerably smaller than a hospital: a single dollar enclosed in a letter to a Swedish-language newspaper.

SwedishAmerican Hospital in 2007. Photograph by IvoShandor

The Hospital That Began With One Dollar

On March 23, 1911, a Rockford mathematician named O. F. Nilson wrote a letter to Carl Hjalmar Lundquist, editor of the Swedish-language newspaper Svenska Posten.

Nilson believed Rockford needed a hospital established by its Swedish community. He proposed that every Swedish resident contribute one dollar a year toward the project. To demonstrate his commitment, he enclosed a dollar of his own.

Lundquist deposited the money at the Swedish-American National Bank and called a meeting of Swedish ministers to discuss the proposal.

From that single dollar, a hospital began to take shape.

On June 6, 1911, the Swedish-American Hospital Association received its charter from the State of Illinois.

Fundraising became a community undertaking. Letters circulated in Swedish and English, and residents organized picnics, bazaars, and concerts. By May 1912, the association had collected more than $4,000 in cash and secured another $8,000 in pledges.

A three-acre site on Charles Street was purchased for $11,500.

July 18, 1918: The First Patient

After seven years of organizing, fundraising, and construction, SwedishAmerican Hospital was completed on July 17, 1918.

The original building cost approximately $175,000 and contained 55 beds.

The following day, July 18, the hospital admitted its first patient, Mrs. J. G. Prowd. She underwent surgery and remained hospitalized for 11 days. Her bill came to $40.

On August 29, 1918, Clarence Pearson became the first baby born at SwedishAmerican.

Healthcare looked considerably different in those days. Antibiotics were not yet available. Pneumonia and other infectious diseases remained major threats. Private rooms with a bath cost approximately six dollars a day, and nurses at the top of the salary scale earned about $60 a month.

Within weeks of opening, the hospital would face an extraordinary test.

The Influenza Epidemic of 1918

In September 1918, the influenza pandemic struck Camp Grant, the enormous military training installation south of Rockford.

The outbreak spread rapidly through the camp and the surrounding community. Midway Village Museum's historical timeline records 323 civilian influenza deaths in Rockford.

SwedishAmerican had been open for only two months.

Its physicians and nurses were confronting a public health emergency at a time when effective treatments for many serious infections were extremely limited.

The epidemic demonstrated just how important additional hospital facilities had become to Rockford.

A School for Nurses and a Growing Hospital

SwedishAmerican established its nursing school in 1919, just one year after opening. Its first students graduated in 1922.

The school helped train generations of nurses who would serve Rockford and the surrounding region.

By the late 1930s, SwedishAmerican had become an established part of Rockford's medical and civic life.

In July 1938, the hospital celebrated its twentieth anniversary with a visit from Prince Bertil of Sweden, the son of Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf.

Approximately 6,000 people gathered on the hospital lawn for the occasion.

For Rockford's Swedish-American community, the celebration marked how far the institution had come since Nilson mailed his dollar to the local newspaper.

Pehr August Peterson and the Hospital's Swedish Roots

The Lake–Peterson House, photographed in 2013. The house was owned by hospital co-founder Pehr August Peterson and later donated to SwedishAmerican. 

One of the important figures in the hospital's early development was Pehr August Peterson, a Swedish immigrant who became a prominent Rockford furniture manufacturer and civic leader.

Peterson served as chairman of the hospital's board of trustees when the institution opened in 1918.

His former residence, the Lake–Peterson House, remains an architectural reminder of the city's Swedish-American history.

Originally constructed in 1873, the house was purchased by Peterson in 1918 and donated to the hospital in 1919. It later served as a residence for students in the hospital's School of Medical Technology.

Expansion, Heart Surgery, and a Changing Neighborhood

As Rockford grew, SwedishAmerican grew with it.

A west-wing addition completed in 1942 increased capacity to approximately 125 beds. Construction began on a five-story east wing in 1947, followed by a ten-story addition in 1963.

The hospital also expanded its medical capabilities. Open-heart surgery was introduced in 1971, and a regional cancer center followed in 1974. A modern emergency facility opened in 1979.

SwedishAmerican Hospital in 2012. Photograph by Jim Simonson

During the 1990s, SwedishAmerican began planning a major modernization of its campus. The project included rerouting Charles Street, which ran through the hospital complex.

The city agreed to the changes on the condition that SwedishAmerican help revitalize the neighborhood south of the hospital.

The hospital acquired 31 properties in a six-block area and committed $2 million to neighborhood improvements. Working with the city and Habitat for Humanity, it helped bring new housing to the area.

In June 2006, SwedishAmerican opened a $44 million, 94-bed heart hospital, further expanding its cardiovascular services.

From SwedishAmerican to UW Health

In 2015, SwedishAmerican joined UW Health, the academic health system based in Madison, Wisconsin.

The partnership connected Rockford patients with a broader network of medical specialists and services while retaining the hospital's presence in northern Illinois.

In September 2021, SwedishAmerican Health System announced that it would adopt the UW Health brand.

The original Rockford hospital retained its historic identity in its new name: UW Health SwedishAmerican Hospital.

The hospital remains at 1401 East State Street, continuing to serve patients throughout northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin.

The Dollar That Became a Hospital

It is difficult to imagine that a hospital of this size began with a single dollar enclosed in a letter to a Swedish-language newspaper.

But that is precisely how SwedishAmerican's story began.

The institution has changed enormously since 1918. Buildings have been added, medical treatments have advanced, and the hospital has become part of a much larger healthcare organization.

Yet the story of its founding remains distinctly Rockford: a community recognized a need, organized its resources, and built something intended to serve generations beyond its own.

O. F. Nilson's dollar did not build a hospital by itself.

It persuaded other people to contribute theirs.

And on February 7, 1969, one of the babies born at SwedishAmerican Hospital was me.

— Thomas L. Vaultonburg

 

Rockford on Eight Wheels: A Short History of the City’s Roller-Skating Rinks

Before roller skating became birthday-party entertainment, it was one of Rockford’s great social rituals. The city once had large skating palaces where teenagers dressed carefully, listened to live organ music, drank cherry Cokes afterward, competed in races and dances, and discovered who was willing to skate with whom when the lights went down.

The Ing

Rockford’s association with roller skating reaches back at least to Harlem Park, the amusement park that operated along the Rock River from 1891 until 1928. Among its roller coaster, carousel, dance pavilion, swimming pool and other attractions was a roller-skating palace. Very little appears to survive about the rink itself, but its presence shows that Rockford was already participating in America’s first great roller-skating craze before automobiles had taken over the city.

The most storied Rockford rink was the Ing Skating Palace at 115 North Second Street. The building began life in 1918 as the Inglaterra Dance Hall and became the Inglaterra Ballroom in 1935. In 1939 it was converted into the Ing Skating Palace, beginning a remarkably long run as one of the city’s gathering places.

The Ing was not merely a big empty room where people went around in circles. It had a maple floor, an Art Deco interior and balconies that reportedly gave it something of the appearance of a theater. At one time the building contained two skating floors: the large main rink and a smaller rink toward the rear. The smaller floor was later converted into a dance area with strobe lights.

In the 1940s, around 150 teenagers reportedly skated regularly at the Ing. They came from 7 to 10 p.m., knew one another and often finished the night at a soda bar with Green Rivers or cherry Cokes. It is difficult to imagine a more perfect surviving picture of teenage Rockford before television, shopping malls and phones became the principal forms of recreation.

Skating also involved more ceremony than most people would expect today. David Machek, who purchased the Ing in 1960, remembered boys arriving in black pants, white shirts and ties while girls wore dresses. An organist supplied the music, and the rink hosted both skating and dance competitions. Machek also discovered old photographs of the building’s marquee advertising Lawrence Welk and Jimmy Dorsey, reminders of its earlier ballroom life.

The Ing became less active during the late twentieth century. From 1987 through 1993 it was used primarily for private functions. Charles Rankin purchased it from David and Katherine Machek in 1993 and reopened it for weekend skating, although its busiest decades were behind it. The building survived into the 2000s but eventually deteriorated beyond repair. Today the rink is gone and the property is a parking lot.

Another rink remembered by longtime residents was the Johnson Roller Rink, reportedly built around 1946 at 1823 Cleveland Avenue. Its history is harder to document online than the Ing’s, and even its name sometimes appears as Johnson Rink or Rockford Lane Roller Rink in personal recollections. That uncertainty is part of the problem with recovering the history of everyday places: people rarely preserve the buildings where ordinary happiness happened. By the time historians become interested, the programs, photographs and admission tickets have often disappeared.

The roller rink nevertheless remained an important part of Rockford adolescence. It was a place children could occupy independently but under loose adult supervision—a temporary world of loud music, dim lights, rental skates, snack counters and continuous motion. Nearly everyone experienced the same hierarchy. Good skaters moved through the crowd as if gravity had made a special exception for them. Everyone else hugged the rail, fell publicly or tried to look casual while waiting for the next couples skate.

Two Rockford rinks continue that tradition. SkateCo operates at 3209 North Main Street with a 75-by-180-foot skating floor. Skateland operates at 4843 Stenstrom Road. Phil and Susie Smalley, who came to the Rockford area in 1992 and operated Skateland for 33 years, announced their retirement and the rink’s sale to a new family in late 2025. The business remained a skating rink—a reassuringly rare case in which a Rockford institution changed hands without immediately becoming a parking lot, warehouse or dollar store.

Roller rinks endure because they provide something increasingly difficult to find: public life without much purpose beyond being together. Skating takes just enough concentration to keep people in the moment, but not so much that they cannot talk, flirt, show off, listen to music or laugh when somebody falls. The building may be plain from the outside, but inside it becomes its own small illuminated city.

Rockford has lost the Ing, the Johnson and the skating palace at Harlem Park. Their maple floors, music and crowds have mostly passed into private memory. But the basic ritual survives at SkateCo and Skateland. The wheels have changed, the music has changed and nobody is required to wear a tie, but Rockford is still going around in circles—and, in this particular case, that is something worth preserving.

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.

 

The Rockford Files: The Tunnels Beneath the City

There are tunnels under Rockford. That’s the easy part. What they were for, where they go, and what might have happened inside them is where things get a little more Rockford.

For generations, stories have circulated about passages beneath the city. Ask enough longtime residents and eventually somebody will tell you about a tunnel beneath an old factory, school, hospital, downtown building, or seemingly ordinary basement. Some versions of the story are perfectly mundane. Others involve bootleggers, gangsters, the Underground Railroad, Cold War fallout shelters, secret entrances, and passages connecting buildings that nobody remembers ever being connected.

Tunnels and Trolls, anyone?

The interesting thing about Rockford’s underground legends is that, unlike many urban legends, they begin with something unquestionably real. There actually are tunnels beneath parts of Rockford. From there, however, the case file gets considerably thicker.

The Official Explanation

Rockford spent much of its history as a heavily industrial city. Enormous factories and complexes required steam, electricity, water, communications, and other services, and underground utility passages were a practical way to move some of those services between buildings. Rob Wilhelmi, a Brownfields Redevelopment Specialist for the City of Rockford, has publicly discussed being inside some of Rockford’s underground spaces and identified at least some of them as utility tunnels.

That explanation should probably solve the mystery. A tunnel connecting two old industrial buildings doesn't require bootleggers, secret societies, or supernatural intervention. It requires pipes.

But this is Rockford, and "there were pipes down there" was never going to be the version people remembered.

File #1: The Prohibition Tunnels

Rockford was not exactly an innocent little Midwestern village during Prohibition. Gambling, bootlegging and other illicit enterprises existed here just as they did throughout northern Illinois, so stories that underground passages might have been useful for moving liquor or people aren't inherently absurd.

Over the years, stories have attached themselves to various downtown basements and underground passages. In some versions, liquor traveled through them. In others, they allowed people to enter or leave establishments without being observed. Inevitably, the name Al Capone sometimes appears.

This last development should always trigger the historian's warning light. Across the Midwest, approximately every third mysterious basement built before 1935 eventually becomes an Al Capone hideout. An old tunnel plus Prohibition does not automatically equal Capone.

Still, secondary use of an existing utility or service passage during Prohibition is entirely plausible. Plausible and proven, however, are two different things. For now, much of the Prohibition tunnel story belongs in the file marked UNCONFIRMED.

File #2: The Underground Railroad

Another persistent category of Rockford tunnel story involves the Underground Railroad. This one deserves particular caution because Rockford and northern Illinois have genuine connections to abolitionism, making the stories sound immediately believable.

The problem is that Underground Railroad folklore has attached itself to old houses, cellars and tunnels throughout the Midwest. A strange room beneath an old building becomes a hiding place. A sealed doorway becomes an escape route. A tunnel becomes evidence that enslaved people passed through it on their journey north.

Sometimes documentary evidence supports those claims. Sometimes family histories provide credible clues. Other times somebody discovers a peculiar hole in a basement and Harriet Tubman gets involved by Tuesday.

Without documentation connecting a particular Rockford passage to Underground Railroad activity, the responsible conclusion is that the story is possible but unproven. The actual history of abolitionism is interesting enough without turning every nineteenth-century cellar into a secret station.

File #3: The Fallout Shelters

The Cold War added an entirely new underground layer to American life. Fallout shelter signs appeared on buildings. Civil-defense officials considered basements and other protected spaces potential refuges from radioactive fallout. Children practiced drills while adults contemplated the cheerful possibility that civilization might end before dinner.

Rockford participated in that culture like virtually every other American city. Underground areas beneath schools, public buildings, factories and other large structures naturally became associated with civil defense. Memories of those places survive, but memories also mutate.

A basement designated as a fallout shelter becomes a bunker. A bunker becomes a tunnel. A tunnel becomes part of a network. Give the story another thirty years and somebody can walk underground from one side of Rockford to the other without ever seeing daylight.

Which brings us to the big one.

File #4: The Secret City Beneath Rockford

This is the grand unified theory of Rockford tunnels: somewhere beneath the streets is an enormous interconnected system linking downtown buildings, factories, theaters, schools and government facilities. Depending on who's telling the story, the tunnels may extend for miles. Some are supposedly large enough for vehicles. Others allegedly cross beneath streets or even approach the Rock River.

The evidence for one giant interconnected underground Rockford is considerably less impressive than the stories about it. But this is exactly how urban folklore develops.

Imagine a real tunnel connecting Factory A and Factory B. Factory B has another service passage. A nearby building has a large basement. Three blocks away is an old fallout shelter. Someone's grandfather remembers walking through one of the tunnels in 1958. Somebody else's uncle remembers an entrance that was sealed during demolition in 1974.

Now add Prohibition. Add gangsters. Add eighty years.

Congratulations. Rockford has an underground city.

The exaggeration doesn't necessarily mean the people telling these stories are lying. Human beings connect fragments. Memories merge with things we've heard from other people. Buildings disappear, leaving behind stories that can no longer easily be checked. Eventually nobody remembers whether Grandpa actually walked through the tunnel or merely told a story about somebody who did.

The Truth Is Down There

And that's what makes the tunnels such a good Rockford mystery. Beneath all the embellishment is a physical reality. Rockford really did build underground infrastructure. Some passages survived long enough for modern people to enter them. Others presumably disappeared when factories were demolished, streets reconstructed and buildings redeveloped.

What happened inside every one of those spaces during the last century is another question entirely. A utility tunnel built for steam pipes doesn't stop being a utility tunnel because somebody once carried a case of illegal whiskey through it. Buildings acquire unofficial uses. People take shortcuts. Teenagers explore places they aren't supposed to explore. Employees discover doors and stairways that don't appear on the public tour.

That leaves enough uncertainty for the stories to survive.

Somewhere in Rockford, somebody still knows about a door in a basement. Somebody's father went through it once. Somebody remembers a tunnel being sealed. Somebody knows somebody who could supposedly show you where the entrance used to be.

And that's usually where the story ends.

For anyone tempted to conduct their own investigation, don't. Surviving underground industrial spaces can be private property and may contain asbestos, unstable structures, contaminated materials, standing water, electrical hazards and other considerably less romantic remnants of Rockford's industrial past. Trespassing through an abandoned tunnel is a poor way to discover that the most dangerous thing lurking beneath Rockford isn't paranormal at all.

So for now, the tunnels can keep some of their secrets. The documented passages belong to Rockford history. The bootleggers, hidden escape routes and vast subterranean networks remain somewhere between memory and folklore.

And somewhere beneath our feet, perhaps behind a bricked-over doorway nobody has opened in fifty years, there's probably another story waiting to be found.

THE ROCKFORD FILE REMAINS OPEN.

 

Needs More Sock Monkey: Rockford’s Accidental Icon

An inside joke among Rockford creatives is “Needs more sock monkey.” Because all work involving Rockford must apparently have The Symbol, a sock monkey, a screw, or the Rockford Peaches in it.

The sock monkey, at least, has earned the right to keep showing up.

Rockford’s connection to the familiar brown-and-white sock monkey begins with the Nelson Knitting Company, founded in Rockford in the late nineteenth century. The company manufactured work socks, eventually producing the distinctive Rockford Red Heel sock—the brown sock with the unmistakable red heel that would become the raw material for generations of homemade monkeys.

Needs more Sock Monkey!

The socks weren't originally toys. They were sturdy workwear, made for people who needed socks that could survive factories, farms, workshops, and long days on their feet. But somewhere along the way, people began turning worn or spare pairs into stuffed animals.

And the sock monkey was born.

Exactly who made the first sock monkey is difficult to establish. Homemade stuffed animals made from socks existed in various forms, and the idea developed through folk craft rather than through a single inventor sitting down and designing a commercial toy. What Rockford supplied was the sock that gave the most famous version its face.

That red heel changed everything.

Turn a Rockford Red Heel sock inside out, cut it, sew it and stuff it, and the red heel becomes the monkey's wonderfully oversized mouth. The sock's contrasting areas naturally lend themselves to the hands, feet and other features. The material itself practically suggests what it wants to become.

By the mid-twentieth century, the Nelson Knitting Company recognized what people were doing with its socks and began promoting the connection. Instructions for making sock monkeys were eventually included with packages of Rockford Red Heel socks, helping turn a regional homemade craft into an American folk-art tradition.

The company itself changed hands over the years, but the Rockford Red Heel sock survived. Today the socks are associated with the Fox River Mills brand, while the monkey they inspired has long since escaped the package.

Sock monkeys became children's toys, craft projects, collectibles, souvenirs and eventually nostalgia objects. There are antique sock monkeys and handmade sock monkeys, miniature monkeys and enormous monkeys. People have dressed them as brides, bikers, baseball players, soldiers, superheroes and probably every other occupation or character somebody could figure out how to fit into a pair of tiny pants.

Rockford, naturally, embraced the connection.

The sock monkey has become one of those peculiar local symbols that makes almost no sense until you know the story. It isn't a monument to an industrial titan or a famous battle. It's the descendant of a pair of work socks made in an industrial Midwestern city and transformed at kitchen tables into something funny and affectionate.

Which may actually make it a better symbol of Rockford than some of the official ones.

Rockford spent generations making things. Screws, machine tools, furniture, socks and countless other products came out of its factories. Most disappeared into the ordinary machinery of American life without anyone thinking much about where they came from.

One of those products grew ears, a tail and a big red mouth.

More than a century later, it's still hanging around.

And if you're designing something about Rockford and can't figure out what's missing, don't worry.

Somebody will tell you.

Needs more sock monkey.