Something that I have noticed since becoming involved in the Historical Society many years ago, is that there are a large number of residents and citizens who have a very limited knowledge of the many points of Chillicothe’s history. The recent Ride the Rails event sponsored by Iowa Interstate RR and the Chillicothe Fire Protection District reminded me of this fact once again. Several people participating in the Train Ride event came to tour the Rock Island Railroad Museum. Each commented with a smile on their face as they said, “I’ve lived here my whole life and I didn’t know this was here. I didn’t know we had two museums here.” Then they would say how great the artifacts and history contained in the Depot and Caboose are. Similar comments are heard at the Main Museum on Fourth Street.

Railroad history can place proper recognition of the railroads upon our town. Chillicothe remained a river town from its beginning until 1854 when the first railroad began operations. Several businessmen in Peoria started the real development of Chillicothe in 1849–1850. The primary figures were Tobias Bradley, Samuel C. Jack, Henry Truitt, and Nathaniel Cutright. This group of men with others first opened businesses in Chillicothe in 1850. Two years later, this same group joined with others to form the Peoria & Bureau Valley Railroad (P&BVRR). The goal was to build a railroad on the west side of the Illinois River, avoiding the need to build a bridge over the Illinois River and connect the Peoria business community to its Chicago and eastern counterparts. The line would connect to existing east-west lines in Bureau County, 46 miles north of Peoria. The P&BVRR Charter was approved February 12, 1853, and construction began soon after. The P&BVRR group, headed by Isaac Underhill, included Chillicotheans Henry Truitt, Nathaniel Cutright, and John and Hugh Moffitt as investors and as future beneficiaries of the growth of business the railroad would bring. Truitt’s growing grain buying business and Cutright’s role in lumber would expand and the Moffit’s stood to earn sizeable sums through the sale of land for the railroad right-of-way as it passed through Chillicothe township, Marshall, and Putnam counties.

Sheffield and Farnam Company, a leading railroad construction company completed the railroad by October 1854 including a single track and any depots and maintenance facilities required. The construction cost was $1,568,000 ($971,232,305 in 2023). The directors wisely acknowledged they did not know how to run a railroad. They leased the entire system to the Chicago Rock Island and Pacific Railroad (C.R.I.P RR) on April 14, 1854, for $125,000 ($62,600,000 in 2023) semiannually, in perpetuity.

The very first train (a celebration train of an engine and one passenger car) racing from Bureau to Peoria at the astonishing speed of 15 mph arrived to a large crowd awaiting in Peoria late on the night of November 7, 1854. The Rock Island RR began operations on February 1, 1855. The last Rock Island passenger train passed over the rails in 1978.

Horses and stagecoaches gave way to the steamboat as the primary means of commercial travel. The steamboat was the dominant mover of freight and passengers for the next 45 years. The train whistle would become the death knell for the steamboat era. Railroads were not limited to terminals on the river; they could reach places where riverboats couldn’t. The expanding railroad industry demanded a larger workforce and brought large numbers of laborers into river towns. Slowly, the dominant labor pools were railroaders who brought their families to those towns. It was just a matter of time for river towns to become railroad towns. So, the answer to the question of whether Chillicothe is a river town or railroad town depends on the historical timeline; it has been each at different times. Railroads are still active, even though to a much lesser degree, so most would say Chillicothe is a railroad town.