Bishop Hill Historic District

Bishop Hill is a village in Henry County, Illinois, where a historic district of nearly 85 acres preserves the work of a Swedish utopian colony. Members of a fundamentalist religious group, in conflict with the Church of Sweden, began emigrating in 1846 and adopted a communal way of life modeled on the primitive church. They erected fifteen large structures between 1846 and 1861, of which twelve remain nearly unaltered. Among them was the Big Brick, 200 feet long and four stories high, with 96 rooms and a communal dining hall. The buildings are mainly Greek Revival and rise sharply from the prairie. When the colony's property was divided in 1861, families received the rooms they occupied, an early form of condominium ownership. The district is valued as an example of immigrants adapting to a new land, and as the first major Swedish settlement in America since the Delaware Colony. Most residents descend from the original settlers, and Swedish traditions continue.