A Few Business House of Apple River, Illinois

Pretty shocked that some of these buildings were 1) still standing, and 2) that I could find them...but there are only so many buildings in a town of 366.

The village of Apple River, Illinois owes its existence to the Illinois Central Railroad–it flourished after the railroad routed their Iowa Division mainline through here in the 1850s. For a century the "meat trains" transporting cattle from Iowa's feedlots to Chicago's stockyards rolled through Apple River. A tidy little town grew up along the tracks, and in the early 1900s this little stretch of Baldwin Street was home to Freyhage’s Blacksmith and M.H. Ennor's jewelry store.

So, what's changed? Less than you'd expect–on the left, Freyhage's Blacksmith is (superficially) untouched, although I imagine an anvil has not been struck here in a century. The unidentified commercial building next door has also hung on, gaining a little porch over the years. Ennor's jewelry store is gone, but two out of three is more than one could expected. I suspect those vibrant green and red hues were artistic license rather than an accurate depiction of how these buildings were actually painted.

This area was part of Illinois' lead mining region centered on Galena. Thousands of settlers arrived here in the 1830s hoping to seize native land. The federal government obliged, coercing local tribes like the Ho Chunk, Sauk, and Fox into signing unbalanced treaties that the settlers and US government promptly violated. At that time, the main settlement in this part of Jo Daviess County was actually a few miles away–the village of Millville.

Millville was a minor boomtown on the Apple River itself, but it withered by the 1870s after the railroad bypassed it, eventually totally washed away in a flood in 1892. However, since the ruins of Millville are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it's weirdly easier to learn about long-disappeared Millville than the actual extant village of Apple River. 

The railroad created Apple River and the decline of railroad traffic coincided with an emptying out of the town, a trajectory familiar to many rural Midwestern towns. The Illinois Central Iowa Division tracks through Apple River brought the livestock of Iowa to the Chicago stockyards, but by the 1950s the "meat trains" (kind of a gross phrase, but that's what they called them) were losing out to refrigerated trucks. Meat traffic disappeared in the 1970s with the Chicago Stockyards closing in 1971, and the Iowa Division mainline diminished: the IC spun it off, re-acquired them, and was then itself acquired by CN. Freight rail still rumbles through Apple River, carrying grain and ethanol, but nothing like in its heyday. The town’s population followed a similar trend, peaking at 1,100 in the 1800s followed by a long decline into the 300s.

Further reading:

• Millville Town Site NRHP Registration Form

History of the Illinois Central Railroad Company and representative employes; a history of the growth and development of one of the leading arteries of transportation in the United States, from inception to its present mammoth proportions, together with the biographies of many of the men who have been and are identified with the varied interests of the Illinois Central Railroad : Railroad Historical Company : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

802 p. 29 cm

Internet Archive

I made it into a .gif.