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 know what I know, says the almanac.”
—Elizabeth Bishop (19111979)
“Mahomet made the people believe that he would call a hill to him, and from the top of it offer up his prayers for the observers of the Law. The people assembled; Mahomet called the hill to come to him again and again; and when the hill stood still, he was never a whit abashed, but said, If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.”
—Francis Bacon (15611626)
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“The site of the true bottomless financial pit is the toy store. Its amazing how much a few pieces of plastic and paper will sell for if the purchasers are parents or grandparent, especially when the manufacturers claim their product improves a childs intellectual or physical development.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)