Illinois bought the land for Black Hawk State Park in 1927. That's the date the Citizens to Preserve Black Hawk Park Foundation is counting from as it gets ready for a centennial in 2027. The purchase didn't produce a park right away. The Great Depression stopped development, and no real work started until 1933. That year about two hundred World War I veterans arrived on the bluff above the Rock River with the Civilian Conservation Corps.
They stayed about two years. The trails, bridges, plantings and most of the limestone lodge you pass on a fall walk at the corner of Rock Island's south side date from that short stretch. A citizen group formed in 1972 is a big reason the park still holds together today. Read that way, the woods at Black Hawk show the work of specific people, layered over a much older place.
Before the state bought it, the bluff was an amusement park
The roughly 200 acres Illinois bought in 1927 had been the Watch Tower Amusement Park. Bailey Davenport opened it in 1882 on a bluff east of Saukenuk, and it was the first amusement park west of Chicago. He put it at the end of a streetcar line to build ridership, and the fare included admission. Visitors got a merry-go-round, a shooting gallery, a toboggan slide and a roller coaster.
By the 1920s, bicycles and cars were taking riders off the streetcars. The Tri-City Railroad Company owned the park and closed it in 1925. The name Watch Tower survives in the lodge at the top of the hill. That's the one obvious link between the 1890s pleasure ground and the state park that replaced it two years after it closed.
The land meant something long before Bailey Davenport. Sauk and Meskwaki groups settled between the Rock and Mississippi rivers in 1735 and built Saukenuk. The Quad-City Times and QConline place the center of the village where 12th Street and 45th Avenue meet today. They put its population at more than 4,000 Sauk and Meskwaki people. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources gives a higher figure of over 5,000 and calls Saukenuk the largest city in Illinois in its time.
What two years of CCC work left behind
The men of CCC Company 1674 were stationed at what was then Black Hawk State Park. According to the May 2026 QConline feature, they cleared six miles of trails, built trail bridges, and planted thousands of trees, shrubs and wildflowers. They tore down the old Watch Tower Inn and built two-thirds of a new lodge from limestone quarried in LeClaire.
Then the money ran out. Illinois asked the CCC for more funding to finish the lodge and was turned down. In 1935 the company moved to Decatur. The building sat partly finished for years, and finishing it took most of a decade.
- 1927: Illinois buys the former amusement park grounds.
- 1933: About 200 World War I veterans arrive with the CCC and start on trails and the lodge.
- 1935: The company leaves for Decatur with the lodge about two-thirds built.
- 1939: The John Hauberg Museum of Native American Life opens in the lodge's west side.
- 1941: Illinois sets aside funds to finish the lodge.
- July 1942: The finished lodge is dedicated, with furniture, rugs and draperies from the Works Progress Administration.
Watch Tower Lodge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. The east end now has an exhibit on how the CCC built the park, so you can see the 1930s work explained inside the building it produced.
Trail mileage depends on who's counting. IDNR describes the 213-acre site as having over seven miles of hiking trails across a designated nature preserve, over bluffs and along the Rock River. QC Trails describes a marked network of six miles of moderate trails, which matches the six miles credited to the CCC crews. The foundation's park map names three routes: the Rock River Interpretive Trail at 1 mile, the Singing Bird Interpretive Trail at 0.7 mile, and the Black Hawk Trail at 1.4 miles. Those three add up to 3.1 miles. The rest of the network fills out the larger totals.
A museum built to show the life of Saukenuk
The CCC years shaped the museum too. State officials hired Sauk and Meskwaki artists to make life-size displays of a longhouse and a wickiup. When the Hauberg Museum opened in 1939, Black Hawk's great-granddaughter Esther Wacole and her family came to the opening. Their portraits from that visit still hang in a display.
Today the museum has a Sauk dugout canoe found at the mouth of the Rock River, a full-size recreated winter wickiup, and a smaller model of a summer longhouse. Julie Nelson, the site services specialist, has run the museum for eight years. She told QConline that some visitors expect it to focus on the Black Hawk War and the burning of the village in 1831. The one-room museum focuses instead on Saukenuk's culture, and its exhibits follow the seasonal work of the Sauk through the year.
"They have this fascinating, beautiful culture that existed here for so long. To only really focus on the two months where they were kicked out is a real disservice." Julie Nelson, to QConline
The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and closes from noon to 1 p.m. A handheld audio tour is free. Groups larger than 10 are asked to call ahead for a guided tour.
The 1972 fight that kept the park whole
The third layer is newer and easy to miss, because what it saved is the lack of a road. The Citizens to Preserve Black Hawk Park Foundation formed in 1972 to oppose a four-lane highway planned through the park. The group pushed for a different route, and that route became the Veterans Memorial Bridge at Carr's Landing. The quiet in the woods along the Rock River Interpretive Trail is there partly because of that campaign.
The foundation is still running the site's public programs half a century later. Its board chair, a retired Rock Island High School biology teacher named Moline, grew up in Branford, Connecticut. She told QConline that moving to a place with such recent Indigenous history led her to join the board more than 50 years ago. The group updates signage, helps with school tours, sets up tables at education fairs, and puts on free programs like Stroll Through Springtime. At that event, volunteers and visitors try to record every bird species on the site, including the woodpeckers and owls of the hickory grove. In 2007 the Illinois Bureau of Tourism named the site one of the Seven Wonders of Illinois, alongside Wrigley Field.
The foundation is also publishing a pamphlet for the nation's 250th anniversary. It's titled "A Piece of American History" and honors Black Hawk and the people of Saukenuk.
This fall's walk, and the night hike on Thursday
The foundation's next public evening comes just as the park enters its last stretch before the centennial. Holey Stumpkins runs Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. It includes a pumpkin-carving contest, an illuminated hike, and a wildlife puppet show at Singing Bird at 6:30 p.m. Admission is free. IDNR's October event roundup also lists it and sends readers to the site's Facebook page for more details.
For a daytime walk any other week:
- Park hours: sunrise to 10 p.m.
- Parking: the East, West, North and Singing Bird lots all have accessible spaces with ramps connected to sidewalks. Trail bridges and boardwalks are wooden planks.
- Restrooms: a posted notice says the restrooms near the fire pit at the north end are closed because of vandalism. Use the facilities near the Prairie Restoration, the Rock River picnic areas, or inside Watch Tower Lodge during regular hours.
- A route through the layers: start at the lodge's east-end CCC exhibit, then cross to the Hauberg Museum on the west end. Finish on the Rock River Interpretive Trail, the 1-mile route along the water.
The centennial schedule isn't out yet. In May, Moline said the board had spent the past few years preparing for the celebration, was still finalizing plans, and expected 2027 to be a "big year." Updates are most likely to appear on the foundation's website and the IDNR site page.
At Rainmaker Collective, we like places that hold this much Rock Island history, and we'll be following the centennial plans as the foundation announces them. If you're curious about the streets around the bluff or the neighborhoods that grew up near the old streetcar line, reach out. We're happy to share what we know.
