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Postcards From Home


Swedish Lutheran Church

1326 Fifth Avenue From the archives of Rock Island’s First Lutheran Church comes this rare Real Photo postcard of one of its early buildings.  It was located on the southwest corner of 14th Street at 4th Avenue and was then known as the Swedish Lutheran Church.  Most of the information in today’s story comes from … [ Continued


Villa de Chantal East Library

2001 16th Avenue  This ornate room, identified as the East Library in the featured postcard, is located at the top of the stairs at the main entrance to Rock Island’s Villa de Chantal.  As the Real Photo postcard, from Shannon Hall’s collection shows, the room features highly decorated Gothic arches resting on Corinthian columns. There … [ Continued


South Park Chapel

1500 30th Street This early 1900s Real Photo postcard identifies the little L-shaped building with a huge entrance tower and belfry as South Park Chapel.  That was the first name of what is now Rock Island’s South Park Presbyterian Church.  One definition of a chapel is a small house of worship, usually associated with a … [ Continued


Sacred Heart Church

Fifth Avenue at 28th Street Over a century old, Rock Island’s Sacred Heart Catholic Church on Fifth Avenue at 28th Street has weathered its years very gracefully.  Indeed it takes a very close comparison of this early 1900s postcard with the church today to note any differences at all.  We could find only two. The … [ Continued


Rock Island Club (RNA)

226 16th Street  This postcard is identified as the home of the Rock Island Club, but it’s easy to tell that it was a home at one time.   Like many of Rock Island’s earliest residences, it was built near the center of town.  In the mid 1800s, our commercial area was located on First and … [ Continued


Masonic Temple

420 18th Street This circa 1915 postcard shows the Masonic Temple at the northwest corner of 18th Street and Fifth Avenue that had been built only two years earlier.  It looks the same today, with the only apparent changes being an added fire escape and a new lighted sign hung at the corner. The dream … [ Continued


Market Square

17th Street & 2nd Avenue One postcard story was about a 1906 view of the Market Square building decorated for the Farmers National Congress.  This is another postcard from the same era, but with a completely different view, that shows Market Square’s surroundings on 17th Street, looking south from Second to Third Avenues. In contrast … [ Continued


Log Raft on Mississippi

West from 15th Street  For over a century, the Mississippi River has been a means of conveyance, floating huge objects to a final destination.  Nowadays, it is barges, tied together and pushed by tugboats.  But from the Civil War until early in the 19th century, the main objects on the river were log rafts. Hundreds … [ Continued