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:
“I think a bishop who doesn’t give offence to anyone is probably not a good bishop.”
—James Lawton Thompson (b. 1936)
“I have felt darkness lead me by the hand
Over the hill to greet the singing dawn....”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker’s to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour ... was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“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)
“It’s given new meaning to me of the scientific term black hole.”
—Don Logan, U.S. businessman, president and chief executive of Time Inc. His response when asked how much his company had spent in the last year to develop Pathfinder, Time Inc.’S site on the World Wide Web. Quoted in New York Times, p. D7 (November 13, 1995)