100 Fun Facts About Illinois

Illinois's border was pushed north in 1818 to reach which Great Lake?

Lake Michigan frontage came from territorial delegate Nathaniel Pope, who had the border pushed north; the strip he added holds Chicago, which would otherwise have grown up outside Illinois.

Illinois calls itself the Land of Lincoln, but in which state was Abraham Lincoln born?

Kentucky is where Lincoln was born in 1809; his family moved to Indiana when he was seven, and he reached Illinois only at 21.

Illinois's official motto pairs 'National Union' with which phrase?

State Sovereignty comes first in the motto, which irked the Unionist official who redrew the seal in 1868: refused leave to swap the phrases, he twisted the banner so that Sovereignty reads upside down.

Long glossed as 'tribe of superior men', the name Illinois really comes from a Miami-Illinois phrase meaning what?

He speaks the regular way is the linguists' gloss of irenwe·wa; French explorers learned the name second-hand from Ojibwe-speaking neighbours and spelled it their own way.

Which village, Illinois's first state capital, now sits west of the Mississippi with a Missouri ZIP code?

Kaskaskia was cut off in 1881 when a flood moved the Mississippi into a new channel east of the village, so its 21 residents (2020 census) can reach the rest of Illinois by road only through Missouri.

Springfield became Illinois's capital in 1839, replacing which town that had held the job for two decades?

Vandalia was also where the National Road, the first federal highway, came to a halt: federal money ran out in 1839 and it was never pushed on to the Mississippi.

What nickname did Abraham Lincoln and his fellow Sangamon County legislators earn while winning Springfield the state capital?

The Long Nine were two senators and seven representatives who all stood about six feet or taller; Lincoln led their push in 1837 and moved to Springfield himself weeks after the vote.

In 1876 two Chicago criminals were caught trying to do what at Lincoln's tomb?

Steal his body for ransom was the plan: a counterfeiting gang wanted its jailed engraver freed, but one recruit was a Secret Service informant, and the coffin now lies under ten feet of concrete.

The 1908 Springfield race riot directly led to the founding of which organization?

The NAACP grew out of a call for a national meeting that reformers, appalled by the mob violence in Lincoln's home town, issued on the centennial of his birth in February 1909.

Which open-faced sandwich of toast, meat, French fries and cheese sauce originated in Springfield?

The horseshoe was first served at Springfield's Leland Hotel in 1928 with ham instead of today's usual hamburger patty; a half portion is called a pony shoe.

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 is said to have started in a barn belonging to which family?

The O'Learys' cow took the blame for over a century, though nobody knows what really happened in the barn; Chicago's City Council formally cleared Catherine O'Leary in 1997.

The Great Chicago Fire left about 100,000 people homeless; roughly how many did it kill?

About 300 people died, although a third of the city lay in ruins; the Peshtigo fire that broke out in Wisconsin the same night killed well over a thousand.

Under what name did Chicago's 110-story Willis skyscraper open in 1973?

It was the world's tallest building for nearly 25 years, and the retractable glass boxes on its 103rd-floor Skydeck are called The Ledge.

Chicago reversed the flow of its river in 1900 chiefly to protect what?

Drinking water for the city came from the lake the river emptied into, sewage and all; a canal finished in 1900 turned the flow inland toward the Illinois River instead.

For which holiday is the Chicago River dyed green each year?

St. Patrick's Day dyeing began by accident, when plumbers were using a green dye to trace illegal waste pipes emptying into the river; their union still runs the event.

Chicago's World's Fair of 1893 marked the 400th anniversary of what?

Columbus's arrival in the Americas in 1492 was the occasion, but the fair ran a year late: its buildings were dedicated in October 1892 and the gates opened only in May 1893.

Which ride made its debut at the 1893 Chicago fair?

The Ferris Wheel was built to rival the Eiffel Tower, star of the 1889 Paris fair: it stood 264 feet tall, and each of its 36 cars could carry up to 60 riders.

Chicago's Home Insurance Building, completed in 1885, is often called the world's first what?

Skyscraper is a generous word for a ten-story block, but William Le Baron Jenney carried most of its weight on a metal frame rather than thick masonry walls, the idea later towers were built on.

Deep-dish pizza was invented in 1943 at which Chicago restaurant?

The style puts the chunky tomato sauce on top of the cheese, and 'stuffed' pizza with a second dough layer came along in the 1970s.

The name Chicago is usually traced to a Miami-Illinois word for what?

A wild onion relative, the pungent ramp, grew thickly here, and a French visitor in 1687 said the place was named for it; another reading ties the name to the related word for skunk.

The first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction took place in 1942 under the stands of which Chicago venue?

Stagg Field had sat largely unused since its university gave up football in 1939, so Enrico Fermi's team built their reactor in an old racquets court under the stands.

Fermilab near Batavia is famous for physics and for a herd of which animal roaming its grounds?

Bison came with founding director Robert Wilson, a Wyoming native who started the herd with a bull and four cows.

Which is the official state bird of Illinois?

The northern cardinal is the state bird of seven states, more than any other species, and Amtrak's Chicago to Washington train is called the Cardinal because it serves six of them.

Thanks to an elementary school project, which food became Illinois's official state snack?

Popcorn got the title after second and third graders at a Joliet elementary school proposed it with their teacher's help; hundreds of Illinois farms grow the crop.

What is Illinois's state fossil, a Mazon Creek oddity nicknamed after the amateur collector who found it?

The Tully monster so baffled Field Museum scientists that it was simply named for collector Francis Tully; they still can't agree whether it was a vertebrate, a mollusc or something else.

Which Illinois town claims that 99 percent of the world's canned pumpkin is produced there?

Morton owes the boast to its Libby's cannery, the brand behind the vast majority of America's canned pumpkin, and it throws a four-day Pumpkin Festival every September.

What is the name of Cahokia's ten-story central platform, the largest man-made earthwork north of Mexico?

Monks Mound is named for the French Trappist monks who settled nearby and gardened on its terraces in the early 1800s, centuries after the city that built it had emptied.

Black Hawk, whose 1832 war was fought in Illinois and Wisconsin, was a leader of which nation?

Sauk families followed Black Hawk back across the Mississippi, apparently hoping to reclaim their homeland; a 23-year-old volunteer named Abraham Lincoln served against them without ever seeing combat.

Ronald Reagan grew up in Dixon, but in which small Illinois town was he born in 1911?

Tampico was the family's home twice: Reagan was born in an apartment there, lived in Chicago, Galesburg and Monmouth, came back, and settled in Dixon only in 1920.

While an Illinois state senator, Barack Obama also taught constitutional law at which university?

University of Chicago law students had Obama as a lecturer for twelve years, until he won his US Senate seat in 2004; he had first come to the city as a community organizer.

The name of Nauvoo, the Mississippi city built by Joseph Smith's followers, comes from which language?

Hebrew gave Joseph Smith the word, which echoes Isaiah's 'How beautiful upon the mountains'; within five years his new town on the river was among the largest cities in Illinois.

In 1849, French followers of Étienne Cabet moved to Nauvoo to build what?

A utopian socialist commune called Icaria took root in the town the Mormons had left; in 1856 its members rebelled against Cabet's autocratic rule, and the founder departed with a minority of followers.

Which Union general was a Galena shop clerk when the Civil War began?

Ulysses S. Grant had moved to Galena only in 1860 after failing at farming and real estate; the town now counts him first among the nine Civil War generals who lived there.

To which Mississippi River city did John Deere move his steel plow business in the late 1840s?

Moline put Deere on the river after he judged his first Illinois workshop badly placed for transport; the Vermont-born blacksmith's steel plow cut sticky prairie soil that clogged cast iron.

The Twinkie, invented in Schiller Park, switched to vanilla cream when wartime rationing hit which original flavor?

Banana cream filled the first Twinkies in 1930, when baker James Dewar wanted work for shortcake machines that stood idle outside strawberry season; the vanilla stand-in proved more popular.

Route 66 began in Chicago and, after 2,448 miles, ended in which California city?

Santa Monica became the end of the line only in 1936, when the road was extended west from downtown Los Angeles; the whole route was decommissioned in 1985 once interstates had bypassed it.

Which team did the Cubs beat to end their 108-year title drought?

The Cleveland Indians led three games to one before the Cubs won three straight, the last in ten innings after a rain delay had stopped play with the score tied.

The curse supposedly placed on the Cubs by tavern owner William Sianis in 1945 involved which animal?

A goat named Murphy came with Sianis to Game 4 of the 1945 World Series; in the usual telling the pair were made to leave, and he declared the Cubs would never win again.

In 1988, Wrigley Field became the last major-league ballpark to install what?

Floodlights first lit a Cubs home game on 8 August 1988, but rain stopped it after three and a half innings, so the first official night game came the following evening.

How many White Sox players did Commissioner Landis ban for life after the 1919 World Series scandal?

Eight players were banned the day after a Chicago jury acquitted them all; 'Shoeless' Joe Jackson stayed on the ineligible list until MLB reinstated the group in 2025.

The Chicago Bears began as a company team for a starch maker in which Illinois city?

Decatur's Staley starch company gave George Halas $5,000 to take the team to Chicago in 1921, on condition that it kept the Staleys name for one more season.

Which team broke the Bulls' 72-win record in 2016?

The Golden State Warriors went 73-9 in 2015-16 and then lost the Finals; the 72-win Bulls had finished the job, beating Seattle for the title.

The Blackhawks take their name from a nickname for what?

A World War I Army division, the 86th 'Blackhawk', gave the team its name: founder Frederic McLaughlin, a Chicago coffee tycoon, had commanded one of its machine-gun battalions.

What is Illinois's highest natural point, on private farmland and rising just 1,235 feet, called?

Charles Mound lies in the Driftless Area, a corner the last glaciers never ground flat; its owners let hikers up on only a few weekends a year.

The Illinois River, about 273 miles long, joins the Mississippi near which town?

Grafton marks the spot, northwest of downtown St. Louis; the river's upper valley was carved by catastrophic glacial flooding known as the Kankakee Torrent.

What was Mosaic, created at the University of Illinois's NCSA in 1993?

A web browser that showed pictures in line with the text, Mosaic brought the web to the general public; programmer Marc Andreessen then left Illinois to co-found its rival Netscape.

O'Hare Airport is named for Edward 'Butch' O'Hare, who was the U.S. Navy's first what in World War II?

Flying ace status and the Medal of Honor came from a single 1942 flight defending his carrier from bombers; his father, once Al Capone's lawyer, had helped convict the gangster.

Metropolis, Illinois has a 15-foot bronze Superman, and a second statue nearby honours which character?

Lois Lane's statue is modelled on Noel Neill, who played her on television; the town has called itself Superman's hometown since 1972, and its newspaper is the Metropolis Planet.

A 170-foot water tower trademarked 'The World's Largest Catsup Bottle' stands in which Illinois city?

Collinsville's council turned the tower down when the plant's owner offered it in 1993, so volunteers raised $80,000 to repaint it; it joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.

Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald's in April 1955 in which Chicago suburb?

Des Plaines got only the ninth McDonald's: the McDonald brothers had started in California, and Kroc, at first just their franchise agent, bought them out in 1961.

Cloud Gate, Anish Kapoor's mirrored sculpture in Chicago's Millennium Park, goes by which nickname?

The Bean got its nickname from the public while it was still being built, a name its sculptor called stupid. Its 168 welded steel plates show no visible seams.

Which chain known for frozen treats opened its very first store in Joliet, Illinois, in June 1940?

Dairy Queen grew out of a trial sale in Kankakee, where shop owner Sherb Noble sold more than 1,600 servings of the new dessert in two hours. Noble then opened the Joliet store himself.

Which Christmas comedy used a real brick house in Winnetka, Illinois, for its exterior scenes?

Home Alone shot its exteriors at the Winnetka house, while the flooded-basement scene was filmed in the empty swimming pool of a nearby high school.

Which touring basketball team with a New York name was formed on Chicago's South Side in 1926?

Harlem Globetrotters was a name picked by promoter Abe Saperstein because Harlem was then seen as the centre of Black American culture. The team's first players came from Chicago's Wendell Phillips High School.

Robert Wadlow, honoured with a life-size statue in Alton, Illinois, holds the all-time record as what?

Tallest person in recorded history, Wadlow stood 8 feet 11 inches when he died at 22. His elementary school had to build a desk to fit him.

Which Christmas character was created in 1939 for a free booklet from Chicago retailer Montgomery Ward?

Rudolph first appeared in a booklet written by store employee Robert L. May, and Montgomery Ward handed out 2.4 million copies of the story in its first year.

Joseph Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois, used a coffee mill to shape his 1874 design for which invention?

Barbed wire made Glidden's name: he twisted another strand around the barbs to hold them in place and called the patented design The Winner.

Which chocolate treat was reputedly created at Chicago's Palmer House hotel for the 1893 World's Fair?

Brownie lore credits socialite Bertha Palmer, who asked the hotel's pastry chef for a sweet smaller than a slice of cake that fitted a boxed lunch. It came with walnuts and an apricot glaze.

A 1968 ruling keeps which fast-food chain 20 miles from a family restaurant in Mattoon, Illinois?

Burger King was already the name of the Hoots family's Mattoon restaurant, registered in Illinois in 1959. The national chain got the rest of the country but not that circle.

Which seeds top the bun of a Chicago-style hot dog loaded with mustard, relish and sport peppers?

Poppy seed buns reached the Chicago dog through the city's Jewish bakeries. Tradition is just as firm about what stays off: many vendors refuse to offer ketchup.

Which Chicago Bears running back, nicknamed Sweetness, broke Jim Brown's career rushing record in 1984?

Walter Payton finished with 16,726 rushing yards, and the NFL's Man of the Year Award for community service now carries his name.

Which Chicago production company, its name a piece of wordplay, did Oprah Winfrey found in 1986?

Harpo Productions is Oprah spelled backwards, and Harpo was also the name of her on-screen husband in the 1985 film The Color Purple.

Which Chicago improv theatre, opened in 1959, launched Bill Murray, Tina Fey and Stephen Colbert?

The Second City took its self-mocking name from the title of a series of New Yorker articles about Chicago by A. J. Liebling.

Which name is given to the Tyrannosaurus rex at Chicago's Field Museum, sold at auction for $8.3 million?

Sue is named after Sue Hendrickson, the fossil hunter who found the bones in South Dakota in 1990 while the rest of her group had gone into town to repair a truck.

Which Grant Wood painting has belonged to the Art Institute of Chicago since winning a prize there in 1930?

American Gothic took only the bronze medal and $300 in a competition at the museum, where one judge dismissed it as a comic valentine. The man was modelled by the artist's dentist.

Which Bill Murray comedy, set in a small Pennsylvania town, was shot almost entirely in Woodstock, Illinois?

Groundhog Day's makers scouted more than 60 towns before settling on Woodstock, where a private house played the inn in which the weatherman wakes every morning.

Which 1980 comedy opens with John Belushi's character being paroled from Joliet Prison?

The Blues Brothers bought 60 used police cars at $400 each for its big chases, and most of them were destroyed by the end of filming.

Which music festival, begun by Perry Farrell as a 1991 farewell tour, settled in Chicago in 2005?

Lollapalooza was conceived as a send-off for Farrell's band Jane's Addiction. It toured for years before being retooled as a festival with a fixed lakefront base.

Which Chicago crime boss was jailed on tax charges two years after the St. Valentine's Day Massacre?

Al Capone was convicted on five of twenty-two tax counts and sentenced to eleven years in federal prison. The evidence included his own admissions of income, made in failed talks to settle his tax bill.

Chester, Illinois, hometown of cartoonist E. C. Segar, has a six-foot bronze statue of which character?

Popeye stands in a park named for Segar, who is said to have based several characters on people he knew in Chester. Statues of Olive Oyl and Wimpy have since joined him around town.

Which famous film computer says it became operational at a laboratory in Urbana, Illinois?

HAL 9000 dates his own activation to 12 January 1992 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. His calm voice belonged to Douglas Rain, cast after the first choice sounded too American.

Which sport began at Chicago's Farragut Boat Club in 1887 with a rolled-up boxing glove for a ball?

Softball began as horseplay among fans waiting on a football score: a Yale man threw the glove at a Harvard supporter, who swung at it with a stick. It was first called indoor baseball.

Which name for Chicago's downtown business district matches the circuit of elevated train tracks around it?

The Loop may be older than the elevated tracks: one account traces the name to cable car lines that circled the same blocks from 1882.

Which bank robber was shot dead by federal agents outside Chicago's Biograph Theater in July 1934?

John Dillinger was given up by a brothel owner who traded the tip for help against her deportation and wore an orange dress so agents could spot her. She was deported anyway.

Which real Illinois team do Geena Davis and Madonna play for in the baseball film A League of Their Own?

Rockford Peaches teams won four league championships in real life, though not the 1943 final the film puts them in: the real club never played in it.

Which Chicago sandwich of thin-sliced roast meat on French bread may be dunked whole in its cooking juices?

Italian beef goes back to the city's Italian-American immigrants, and by one account it was invented in the 1920s to serve at weddings. The crusty roll is what survives the dunking.

Which Upton Sinclair novel grew out of seven weeks of research in Chicago's Union Stock Yards?

The Jungle so alarmed its readers that public pressure produced the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

Which international sporting movement held its very first games at Chicago's Soldier Field in July 1968?

Special Olympics drew about 1,000 athletes from the U.S. and Canada to that first meeting, and a 30-foot sculpture in a plaza beside the stadium now marks where it happened.

Which Nobel Prize-winning novelist was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb just west of Chicago?

Ernest Hemingway edited his Oak Park high school's newspaper, then spent six months as a reporter for The Kansas City Star before enlisting in the Red Cross.

Which pioneer of Prairie School architecture set up a studio in his Oak Park, Illinois, home in 1898?

Frank Lloyd Wright settled in Oak Park in 1889 and reshaped the look of the village, where his Unity Temple and his own studio are now visitor attractions.

Which animation pioneer was born in 1901 on Tripp Avenue in Chicago's Hermosa neighbourhood?

Walt Disney was raised largely in Missouri, but returned to Chicago as a teenager in 1917 when his father bought stock in a jelly producer there.

Which Chicago newspaper ran the mistaken 1948 front page declaring Thomas Dewey the winner over Harry Truman?

Tribune printers had been on strike for about a year, which forced an earlier press deadline, so the first edition went out before most of the results were in.

Olney, Illinois, holds a count every October of its famous albino population of which animal?

Squirrels with white fur, by local tradition, began as a saloon's window display in Olney and were set free when Illinois outlawed keeping wildlife in confinement.

Which Illinois city, ringed by levees, sits where the Ohio River flows into the Mississippi?

Cairo was named after the Egyptian capital because the meeting of the two rivers recalled the Nile Delta. It also has the lowest elevation of any place in Illinois.

Galena, Illinois, takes its name from the main ore of which metal, the basis of its early mining boom?

Lead in its natural sulfide form is the mineral galena, and French explorers had noted deposits of it in the Upper Mississippi Valley as early as 1658.

Which co-founder of Chicago's Hull House became the first American woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?

Jane Addams shared the 1931 prize and is recognised as the founder of the social work profession in the United States. Hull House served poor, largely immigrant families.

Which Illinois River state park takes its name from a legend of a besieged band of Illiniwek?

Starved Rock, the legend says, is the butte where Ottawa and Potawatomi warriors trapped the Illiniwek around 1769, in revenge for the killing of the Ottawa leader Pontiac.

Which Illinois city is show-business shorthand for mainstream taste, in a saying often traced to vaudeville?

Peoria appears in films, books and adverts as the stand-in for the heartland, and the famous question about it is often wrongly credited to Groucho Marx.

Which Illinois town beside Bloomington took its name from the teacher-training university located there?

Normal was laid out as North Bloomington in 1854 and renamed for Illinois State Normal University. A normal school was a college that trained teachers.

Which dance music genre was pioneered in Chicago clubs by DJ Frankie Knuckles, known to fans as its godfather?

House is said to take its name from the Warehouse, the Chicago club where Knuckles was the resident DJ and the dancers were mostly Black gay men.

In which Illinois town was Latter Day Saint founder Joseph Smith killed by a mob that stormed the jail in 1844?

Carthage Jail was holding Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum when an armed mob stormed its upper room. The church he founded bought the building in 1903 and runs it as a historic site.

Which passenger ship rolled over while tied to a dock in the Chicago River in 1915, killing 844 people?

Eastland may have been made even more top-heavy by lifeboats added under a law passed after the Titanic sank. She had been chartered to take Western Electric workers to a picnic.

Which particle, the most massive elementary particle observed, was discovered at Fermilab near Batavia in 1995?

Top quark measurements proved useful well beyond the discovery: the particle is so massive that its properties let physicists estimate the mass of the Higgs boson indirectly.

Which Chicago label, home to Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry, had its famous studio at 2120 South Michigan Avenue?

Chess drew the Rolling Stones to its studio on their first U.S. tour in 1964, and they named an instrumental they cut there after the address.

Which trader of Black African descent is regarded as the first permanent settler of what became Chicago?

Jean Baptiste Point du Sable settled near the mouth of the Chicago River around the 1780s and sold his holding in 1800 for 6,000 livres. The city now honours him as its founder.

Which Chicago district was built as a model company town for workers making railroad sleeping cars?

Pullman's founder cut wages after the Panic of 1893 but kept rents in the company-owned homes unchanged, and the 1894 strike that followed still carries the town's name.

The oldest surviving house of worship of which religion stands beside Lake Michigan in Wilmette, Illinois?

Baháʼí Faith followers began their first temple in Ashgabat, in what is now Turkmenistan, but Wilmette's is the oldest still standing. It was not dedicated until 1953.

Which river forms the southern part of the border between Illinois and Indiana before joining the Ohio?

Wabash floods have shifted the channel several times, leaving cutoffs that lie wholly in one state, so both states generally treat the middle of the river as the border.

What is the name of the deadliest twister in American history, which tore across southern Illinois in 1925?

Tri-State Tornado is a name earned by its track of about 219 miles, which ran from southeastern Missouri across southern Illinois and into Indiana.

Which Galesburg-born poet won Pulitzer Prizes for both his poetry and a biography of a president?

Carl Sandburg was born in a three-room cottage to parents of Swedish ancestry and spent his mid-teens working as a porter in a Galesburg hotel barbershop.