Explore the Dowling House, Galena’s oldest house

2 min read

9 months ago Leo S

Paint-peeled walls, 19th-century furnishings, and even lead-poisoned ghosts.
All stuff you might find at the 1826 Dowling House in Galena, Illinois.
One popular description of Galena is “the town that time forgot”, and the area was first settled by Europeans in the 1690s, after French trappers discovered lead there.
The old shuttered, brick and limestone buildings were built at a time when the city was the lead mining capital of the world, the major commercial port on the upper Mississippi, as well as the wealthiest city in the State of Illinois. At the peak, it boasted of a population of over 14,000, and locals built homes, institutions, and commercial buildings that were sturdy, handsome, and meant to last.

Located about 160 miles west of Chicago, the bucolic town, literally meaning “sulfide of lead” in Latin, was once home also to the lead-trade magnate John Dowling, and his home is now the oldest in Galena and, probably, also the oldest structure in the entire state!
Wooed by the town’s lead rush, the prospector first arrived in the same year with son Nicholas in tow, actually still 20 years before the notorious California gold rush.
Originally mined by the native Sac and Fox peoples, the area was formally established by Congress as the “Upper Mississippi Lead Mine District” in the early 1800s, and by 1826, Galena had been formally established.
But probably didn’t you known that, by 1845, the district was producing 85 percent of the country’s lead!

The Dowling House was a dual-use residence, with its downstairs that served as a trading post, once the only trading post in the city, while the upstairs as living quarters which hosted many fur traders in years past.
The house was eventually abandoned, but then scooped back up by the city in the 1960s and renovated into a museum, and today several outfits, such as Haunted Galena Tour Company, offer tours along from the Dowling House itself to other spooky, historic structures in town, filled with dark stories, famous ghosts, and legends linked to this one-time boom town.