IA to IL / Fort Madison, Nauvoo, and Hannibal

Road Trip to Wilmington, NC | Iowa to Illinois | Fort Madison, IA | Nauvoo, IL | Hannibal, MO | Pere Marquette State Park | Shawnee National Forest | September 2023

After spending most of July in Wilmington, NC, we agreed that would be our last visit together this year. And yet here we were, not even 2 months later, back on the road to Wilmington. I ended my last post in listing the reasons why we decided to drive again, so I won’t go over those, but our minds were mostly changed when we brought up the idea of driving South, maybe even as far as the Ozarks in Arkansas, and then heading East. We ended up changing those plans just for the sake of time and in the interest of being nice to our van. But let’s be real, we’ll probably find ourselves on the road to Wilmington many more times, so someday when we have more time we’ll take that trip.

We did stick with our original plan of going South before going East, driving South on US-218 to Fort Madison, IA so that we could cross the Mississippi River on a new-to-us bridge and get some new counties in Illinois. While driving towards the bridge, we spotted a fort on the side of the road and made it our first impromptu stop for this road trip. We got out to walk around the fort, the park, and along the river. While walking, we saw a riverboat docked and started wondering if there are cruises that travel the Mississippi from Minnesota to the Gulf. Is it too Midwestern of us to say that sounds like fun? Maybe an idea for when we’re too old to travel the way we do now.

The Fort itself is a reconstruction of an early 1800’s fort, built shortly after the Louisiana Purchase, and was one of the earliest European settlements in Iowa (Dubuque is slightly order). The Fort itself was not ideally situated, located along bottom land surrounded by higher bluffs and a fair distance away from the confluence of the Des Moines and Mississippi Rivers. This made it an easy target to the Sauk people, who, under the leadership of Black Hawk and during the greater context of the War of 1812, were able to lay siege and force the garrison to leave.

After our short stop, we continued on to the bridge, and ended up having to wait a bit as it was rotated to let a barge pass by. The bridge is normally a toll bridge, but they weren’t charging today — score! We entered Illinois and continued driving to our next stop in the town of Nauvoo.

Nauvoo is one of the most historic and significant sites to the Latter Day Saints, arguably rivaling Salt Lake City itself. After first founding his new religion in New York, Joseph Smith and his followers made several moves, experiencing persecution in many of them, before landing along the Illinois side of the Mississippi River in 1839. Over the next several years, Smith oversaw the construction of one of the first LDS Temples and was able to build up a significant following, even rivaling the population of Chicago. Such a large population held significant political clout, and Smith made strong allies and strong enemies. Eventually, the enemies won out, arresting Joseph Smith and his brother in nearby Carthage. There, while incarcerated, both were killed by an anti-LDS mob in 1844.

With the leader of the church dead, the church went into a crisis of succession resulting in many schisms, but the largest portion followed Brigham Young who immediately began looking for a new home, which he found in Utah. By 1849, most all of the members of the Church had left for the West.

We got out for short walk here, admiring the temple and nearby gardens. After walking around the temple, we continued driving further South to our campsite for tonight. Anywhere East of the Rockies usually gets a bad rap from van lifers or nomads for not having free camping aside from Walmarts or other businesses that allow overnight parking, but we put a lot of work into finding free or cheap spots in nature and are rarely disappointed. Tonight we lucked out tonight with a free spot right on the Mississippi River in a recreation area managed by the Army Corps of Engineers. There were a few others camping here, but we had plenty of space to ourselves to enjoy a quiet night on the river. The next morning, we enjoyed hearing a marching band practice at a nearby school as we made our tea and got ready for the day.

From here, we continued our drive South, covering some of the counties on the IL/MO border that we were missing. Our first stop of the day was across the Mississippi River in Hannibal, MO, at Riverview Park. I remember visiting this town with my family and seeing some of the Mark Twain sites, but as we were driving here I realized that that trip was exactly 20 years ago!

We spent a good portion of the morning sitting with Mark Twain, playing Pokemon, and enjoying the views from the bluffs before following the Mississippi River further South. In an effort to get as many counties as we could, we crossed the Illinois River in Kampsville via the free ferry before following that river to its confluence with the Mississippi. We stopped here at Pere Marquette State Park for lunch and views, though we couldn’t see the confluence from here. It was fun to think how less than a month ago, we had visited the Pere Marquette Memorial in Michigan’s upper peninsula, and today we found ourselves at the Southernmost point of his journey along the Mississippi River. It’s times like these that make our random rambling road trips so enjoyable for us, that we can happen upon these parallels and put more of a story together.

The road South from here follows right along the Mississippi river, which we were delighted to find very scenic; the road drove right along the base of tall white bluffs with great views across the river into Missouri. We definitely wouldn’t mind doing this drive again. After making it around St. Louis we stuck primarily to interstates in order to get to Shawnee National Forest. We briefly tried to camp near a waterfall trail, but found the road to be too rough, ultimately landing in an established campground.