The streets slope steeply, unnaturally for the Midwest. Brick buildings line the narrow downtown like a model railroad town someone forgot to outgrow. But this wasn’t always a tourist stop. Galena was once more powerful than Chicago. In the 1840s, it was the queen of the lead trade—full of steamboats, wealth, and ambition. It pulsed with energy then, with over 10,000 people and a river that hadn’t yet silted shut. There were hotels, theaters, and talk of it becoming a major city. You can still feel that confidence in the bones of the place.
Chicago won the race, of course. The railroads passed Galena by. The mines gave out. The water became too shallow to matter. And Galena faded. But it never collapsed. It never had the money to tear itself down and start over, so it just… stayed. Frozen in red brick and wrought iron. A museum that never had to be built.
I found myself fascinated by the way the city folds so many stories into such a compact space. This town once produced nine Union generals. Nine. And not just footnotes, either—Ulysses S. Grant himself lived here. He came to Galena in 1860, broken and quiet, selling leather in his father’s shop. By the war’s end, he returned a hero. The citizens gave him a house, white with green shutters, perched above the town like a second chance.
Abraham Lincoln spoke here—twice. Charles Sumner, battered and unbowed from the Senate floor, once stayed in town. Susan B. Anthony gave a speech at the DeSoto House Hotel. Oscar Wilde, in a velvet suit and withering wit, dined there too. Galena collected people the way its shops now collect curiosities.
What I love most is how the town doesn’t shout about it. The plaques are there if you want them. The museum staff will tell you everything, but they won’t chase you down. The town trusts that the curious will find the stories. And the stories are everywhere.
The DeSoto House still stands, its balconies heavy with history. Grant’s campaign headquarters. The very railings from which he waved. The old Market House, the Washburne home, Turner Hall—they’re not just preserved, they’re used. History isn’t behind glass here. It’s in the bricks, in the rhythm of the streets.
It struck me how many people come here from Chicago—seeking something. Quiet, perhaps. A slower pace. But I think it’s more than that. They come to reconnect with the past—not the mythic, romantic past, but something humbler. A place where history happened not in grand gestures but in borrowed homes, in speeches made from second-story windows, in a saddle shop where a forgotten man remembered how to lead.
Galena is a town shaped by ambition and rescued by preservation. It has survived not through expansion, but through memory. And for those of us who visit, it offers something rare: the chance to walk through a place where America paused, looked around, and quietly changed course.