Bloomington, IL
Central Illinois Regional Airport at Bloomington-Normal has a single 8,000-foot runway 11/29, Class D tower. Bloomington was the home of State Farm Insurance — founded in 1922 by retired Merna, Illinois farmer George J. Mecherle as the State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company, selling auto policies to other farmers at lower rates than the big-city carriers offered. State Farm grew into one of the largest insurers in the world; the corporate headquarters complex on the south side of Bloomington employs more than 14,000. Illinois State University, in Normal, was founded in 1857 as the first public university in the state — Abraham Lincoln, then a Springfield lawyer, drew up the school's organizing legal documents. The David Davis Mansion in southeast Bloomington was the home of Lincoln's closest friend and 1860 campaign manager; Davis later sat on the U.S. Supreme Court and was the executor of Lincoln's estate.
Caterpillar Inc. was created in 1925 by the merger of two California tractor companies — the Holt Manufacturing Company of Stockton and the C. L. Best Tractor Company of San Leandro. Holt had built the world's first commercially successful tracked tractor in 1904; legend has it that a Holt photographer watching the prototype crawl across a field said it moved "like a caterpillar," and the name stuck. The combined company moved its headquarters from California to Peoria in 1928 to be closer to its largest customer base, and Peoria has been the home of Caterpillar manufacturing and engineering for almost a century since. The Caterpillar Visitors Center opened in 2012 in a modern building on the downtown Peoria riverfront. Its centerpiece is a real Cat 797F Mining Truck — one of the largest production trucks in the world. The 797F carries a 400-ton payload, weighs 1,400 tons fully loaded, runs on 24-foot Michelin tires (each tire weighs 12,000 pounds and costs about $42,000), and burns one gallon of diesel per quarter-mile. Visitors can climb into the cab. The bed of the truck has been converted into a small theater — the "Future Theater" — where a film about Cat's role in global infrastructure plays. The Heritage Gallery traces the company from the 1904 Holt tractor through the British Mark I tank of WWI (which used Holt-style continuous tracks), through the Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal widening, the Three Gorges Dam, and into modern autonomous mining and electrification. Admission is free. The Center is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 3:30pm. Note: Caterpillar moved its corporate headquarters to suburban Chicago (Deerfield) in 2017 and again to Irving, Texas in 2022. Manufacturing, engineering, the world headquarters of the Cat Foundation, and most senior R&D remain in the Peoria area.
Starved Rock is the closest thing the Midwest has to a slot-canyon park. At the end of the last Ice Age — somewhere between 14,000 and 17,000 years ago — a catastrophic flood of glacial meltwater called the Kankakee Torrent ripped through this stretch of central Illinois. The flood found the softest layer of bedrock (St. Peter Sandstone, deposited as beach sand 470 million years ago) and gouged 18 narrow canyons into the south bank of what is now the Illinois River. The result is a 2,630-acre park of vertical sandstone walls, mossy seeps, and waterfalls fed by spring runoff — landforms that look like they belong in Utah, transplanted to the middle of corn country. It is the most visited state park in Illinois (over 2 million visitors a year) and was the state's second park, purchased in 1911 to keep it from being quarried for sandstone. The "Starved Rock" itself is a 125-foot sandstone butte at a bend in the Illinois River. Native American oral tradition says the name comes from an 18th-century siege — a band of Illiniwek warriors took refuge atop the butte to escape Ottawa and Potawatomi war parties avenging the 1769 killing of Chief Pontiac, and starved there. French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet passed through this stretch in 1673; the French built Fort St. Louis on top of the butte in 1682-83. The Civilian Conservation Corps built much of the trail infrastructure (stone stairways, shelters, the lodge) in the 1930s. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966. Immediately downstream of the butte is Starved Rock Lock and Dam — one of eight in the Illinois Waterway that take barges over the 163-foot drop from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi. Bald eagles winter on the open water below the dam; the park is one of the best eagle-watching sites in the Midwest December through February.
Abraham Lincoln arrived in Springfield in 1837 as a 28-year-old lawyer. He married Mary Todd here in 1842, raised four sons here, practiced law and rode the Eighth Judicial Circuit for nearly 25 years, gave the "house divided" speech here in 1858, and left for Washington as president-elect in 1861. After his assassination on April 15, 1865, the funeral train carried him back through eleven cities to Springfield. He has been here ever since. Lincoln's Tomb in Oak Ridge Cemetery is a 117-foot granite obelisk designed by sculptor Larkin Goldsmith Mead, built with public donations between 1868 and 1874. Lincoln is buried in a crypt under the obelisk along with Mary Todd and three of their four sons — Edward, William, and Thomas ("Tad"). Robert, the only one who survived to adulthood, served as Secretary of War under Garfield and is buried at Arlington. At the entrance to the tomb a bronze bust of Lincoln has a polished gleaming nose — generations of visitors have rubbed it for luck. Oak Ridge is the second most-visited cemetery in the United States, after Arlington. The Old State Capitol (1837-1840, served as the State House until 1876) is downtown — a low Greek Revival building of locally quarried Sugar Creek limestone. Lincoln gave the "A house divided against itself cannot stand" speech here on June 16, 1858, accepting the Republican nomination for the US Senate. He also lay in state here after his assassination. The current Illinois State Capitol (1888) sits two blocks SW — its dome rises 405 feet, 74 feet taller than the US Capitol in Washington, intentionally so. The Lincoln Home (Eighth and Jackson, ~6 blocks SE of the Old State Capitol) is the only home Lincoln ever owned. The Lincolns lived there from 1844 until 1861. It is now a National Park Service unit — Lincoln Home National Historic Site — and the surrounding four-block neighborhood has been restored to its 1860 appearance.
Benton County holds one of the densest concentrations of wind turbines east of the Mississippi. The Fowler Ridge project alone spreads 355 turbines across roughly 42,000 acres, with the neighboring Meadow Lake and Hoosier farms adding hundreds more. Built in phases beginning in 2008, the turbines turn the flat northwest-Indiana farmland into a working machine landscape — and a navigational one, their white towers and slow-turning blades visible for miles in clear air.