Bishop Hill

Bishop Hill was founded in 1846 by Swedish immigrants who followed the preacher Erik Jansson to America to escape religious persecution and build a communal society based on shared property and shared labor. Named for Jansson's home parish in Sweden, the colony rose quickly on the open prairie, and at its height it was home to hundreds who lived, worked, and worshiped together.

The colony broke ground on land that had been the homeland of Native nations of the region, including the Sauk and Meskwaki and the peoples of the Illinois Confederacy, whose descendants today are enrolled in the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma. The Swedish settlers cleared and farmed the prairie and built in the sturdy communal style they knew, raising the brick and frame structures that still stand at the heart of the village.

The colonists were skilled builders, and their work endures. The great Colony Church, with its plain upper sanctuary lit by tall windows, and the enormous Steeple Building, dormitories, a hotel, workshops, and a store form an ensemble of nineteenth-century communal architecture rarely preserved so completely anywhere in the country.

These buildings were designed for a shared life, with communal dining halls and dormitory sleeping quarters that reflected the colony's ideals. Several are now state historic sites and museums, letting visitors step into rooms that once fed and housed an entire cooperative society, a physical record of how such a community actually lived day to day.

The colony's early years were hard, marked by disease, a cholera outbreak, and the strain of building a new society from nothing on the open prairie. The founder Erik Jansson was shot and killed in 1850 in a dispute, and leadership passed to a board of trustees who kept the communal system going for another decade.

By the late 1850s the experiment came apart. Financial troubles and internal disputes led the colony to dissolve and divide its property among the members in 1861, ending the communal era after just fifteen years. But the villagers stayed, and the buildings remained, which is why the physical colony survives even though the utopian society itself did not.

One of the colony's lasting treasures is the folk art of Olof Krans, a colonist who painted vivid, naive scenes of daily life at Bishop Hill, the sowing and harvesting, the rows of women planting corn, the portraits of settlers. His paintings are among the finest folk art of nineteenth-century America and are displayed in the village, giving faces and scenes to the colony's story.

Bishop Hill today keeps its Swedish heritage alive through craft shops, a bakery, and festivals that fill the streets through the year with music, food, and traditions carried from the old country. It is a quiet, lived-in place rather than a theme park, and that authenticity, a real village still inhabiting its founders' buildings, is exactly its appeal.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.