Galena Main Street

Galena's Main Street is the reason most people drive out to this corner of northwestern Illinois. The street runs along the base of a steep hillside, its Greek Revival, Italianate and Federal storefronts packed shoulder to shoulder, with church steeples and mansions stacked on the terraces above. It looks the way it does because the town got rich early and then got bypassed: lead mining and river trade made Galena one of the most important places on the upper Mississippi in the middle of the nineteenth century, and when the river silted up and the railroad arrived in 1854, the commercial energy moved on. What was left was a town too prosperous to tear down and too quiet to rebuild. Today more than 85 percent of its buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and even the highway bridge was faced in limestone so that it would not disturb the view. Walking Main Street is free and needs no plan. Boutiques, candy and fudge shops, antiques, art galleries, tasting rooms, bakeries and a long run of restaurants fill the ground floors, and the Galena River Levee and its floodgates, built by the Army Corps of Engineers after the mid-century floods, sit just behind the commercial blocks. The DeSoto House Hotel anchors the middle of the street, the Davis Block (1846) is the first all-brick block building in town, and the Coatsworth Building is where Ulysses S. Grant clerked in his family's leather goods store in 1860. A visit here is as much about pace as about sights: it rewards strolling, side streets, stair climbs and unplanned stops.

The tourism board publishes a self-guided historic walking tour that groups 67 stops into five areas: Park Avenue along the river, the downtown commercial core, Bench Street with its courthouse, library and churches, the hillside mansions of Prospect Street, and the artisan lanes around Spring Street. You can use it as an outline, or simply walk Main Street end to end and then climb one of the public stairways to the upper streets.

The best single move is to go up. From the terraces of Bench and Prospect streets you look down onto the roofline of Main Street and across the river valley, and the scale of the town, a few dozen blocks squeezed into a ravine, finally makes sense. Along the way you pass the Jo Daviess County Courthouse, Grace Episcopal Church, the Galena Public Library and a string of private mansions built by mining and steamboat fortunes.

Timing matters. Summer and autumn weekends are busy, and Main Street is a slow-moving crowd from late morning until the shops close. Weekday mornings, early evenings and the shoulder months are far calmer, and many tasting rooms and restaurants still run in the cold months, when the brick streets look best under snow. Evening is its own visit, with lighted storefronts, a bar or a tasting room for each block and the bluff silhouetted behind.

Wear shoes that can handle slopes and steps, because Galena is built on a hillside. Parking along Main Street fills early, so most visitors leave the car at a lot on the edge of the district or at their lodging and walk. Pair this entry with the trolley for the orientation, the Grant Home for the headline story, and a winery or whiskey stop for the afternoon, and you have a complete first day.