Bishop Hill State Historic Site

Bishop Hill State Historic Site was the site of a utopian religious community founded in 1846 by Swedish pietist Eric Janson in Bishop Hill, Illinois. The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency operates four surviving buildings in the village as a state historic site located within the Bishop Hill Historic District, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1970, and listed as a National Historic Landmark in 1984.

Visitors can enter the 1848 Colony Church (1848), part of which was once used as single-room apartments by colony residents and which features a museum about Bishop Hill's history and reproductions of Colony artifacts, the 1850s Colony Hotel, the 1850 Boys Dormitory, and the mid-1850s Colony barn.

The state also owns the village park with a gazebo and memorials to the town’s early settlers and Civil War soldiers.

A museum building houses a collection of paintings by colonist and folk artist Olof Krans.

Famous quotes containing the words bishop, hill, state, historic and/or site:

    “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
    —Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)

    “O happy, happy each
    man whom predestined fate
    leads to the holy rite
    of hill and mountain worship.”
    —Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)

    “If there is a gratification which I envy any people in this world it is to your country [Italy] its music. This is the favorite passion of my soul, and fortune has cast my lot in a country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism.”
    —Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)

    “The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces—in nature, in society, in man himself.”
    —Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)

    “That is a pathetic inquiry among travelers and geographers after the site of ancient Troy. It is not near where they think it is. When a thing is decayed and gone, how indistinct must be the place it occupied!”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)