Walking in Reagan's Footsteps

Dixon does not oversell its most famous son. What it has instead is a small, honest set of sites — a rented house, a park, a courthouse lawn — that add up to a genuinely good day for anyone curious where Ronald Reagan actually grew up.

Ronald Reagan was born in Tampico, in Whiteside County, and spent the years that shaped him thirty-five miles east in Dixon, Lee County. Both towns are small, both keep their Reagan sites modest and well cared-for rather than turned into anything glossy, and both sit close enough together — and to a handful of other genuine Lincoln Highway and railroad history in between — that a single day covers all of it comfortably.

The house on Hennepin Avenue

Start at the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home & Visitors Center, the restored house the Reagan family rented from 1920 to 1923. Tours run April through December, Thursday through Saturday, 10am to 3pm, with the last tour leaving at 3pm sharp — worth building the rest of the day around that window rather than the other way around. Group tours and special events are available separately, by appointment.

A short walk from the house, Reagan Peace Park holds a twenty-foot “Wings of Peace and Freedom” sculpture by Nick Tanev, murals, and a replica of the Berlin Wall — a compact, quiet stop that recognizes Reagan’s presidency rather than his boyhood, and a natural pairing with the house tour on the way to the riverfront.

The riverfront and the highway

Down at the Rock River, the Dixon Lincoln Highway Interpretive Gazebo covers ground the Reagan sites don’t: built in 2009 through the Illinois Interpretive Gazebo Project, its panels tell the story of the Dixon Arch, the 1919 Transcontinental Motor Convoy that a young Dwight Eisenhower rode with, and how the first coast-to-coast highway in America came to run straight through the middle of this particular town — context that makes the rest of Dixon’s downtown read differently once you know it.

Lowell Park, two hundred and forty acres on the Rock River and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is where the Reagan story turns into local legend: he worked here as a lifeguard through seven summers as a teenager and is credited with saving 77 lives from the river. The park today has hiking trails, a nature center, boat launches and fishing, and is worth an hour on its own even without the history.

Downtown, the Old Lee County Courthouse — a Classical Revival landmark completed in 1901 and still housing county offices and the County Board meeting room — carries a marker on its lawn recording a campaign speech Abraham Lincoln gave on the site, which makes it the one stop on this route where two very different Illinois politicians overlap.

Out to Amboy and the Lincoln Highway

Twelve miles south, the Amboy Depot Museum is the Illinois Central Railroad’s former divisional headquarters — an architecturally distinctive brick and cut-limestone building on the National Register of Historic Places, fully restored inside and out down to its eight chimney caps. The museum complex takes in a freight house, a fully restored one-room country schoolhouse, a retired steam engine and a caboose, all on the grounds of the old rail yard, and holds artifacts covering both Amboy’s history and the railroad’s.

Further along the Lincoln Highway corridor in Franklin Grove, the H.I. Lincoln Building is an 1860 limestone landmark built by Henry I. Lincoln, a distant relative of Abraham Lincoln, and now the national headquarters and interpretive center of the Lincoln Highway Association — exhibits on America’s first coast-to-coast highway, local art and regional visitor information, open weekends seasonally through October and by appointment otherwise.

Finish in Tampico

Thirty-five miles west, the Ronald Reagan Birthplace in Tampico is the apartment above a storefront where Reagan was born on February 6, 1911, restored to the period and operated by the Tampico Area Historical Society as a self-guided exhibit of photographs, memorabilia and interpretive displays on his childhood and family life. Seasonal hours run daily April through October (10am–4pm Monday through Saturday, 1–4pm Sunday) and weekends only in March, so it is worth checking the season before making the drive out.

For the fuller two-day version of this route, with meals and drive times worked in, see the 48 Hours in Reagan Country itinerary.