In far northwestern Illinois, flat Midwest fields rise up into broad vistas and steep folds in a landscape carved by water rather than bulldozed by glaciers. Here, a town with a modest population of 3.600 welcomes nearly a million visitors a year.

Tourism isn’t the first boom to come to Galena, though. The picturesque town has outsized importance in U.S. history because it was a boomtown in the 1800s, when miners dug out lead ore to be smelted and used for bullets, paint, pipes and more. 

Galena shipped out lead for Civil War bullets but as well as generals, including Ulysses S. Grant, who became the 18th President of the United States. This rich history is told at the Galena & U.S. Grant Museum, housed in the Italianate 1858 Daniel Barrows mansion on Bench Street.

The mansion might sound fancy, but it wasn’t built to be a museum. Visitor parking is frustratingly limited on Galena’s narrow streets. About a quarter of the museum’s visitors can’t climb the steep staircase from the first floor to the majority of exhibits. And it’s impossible to adequately climate-control the 14,000 precious artifacts and documents in the museum’s collection.

By the time Tessa Flak became director of the Galena-Jo Daviess County Historical Society in 2021, the organization had been working to solve these problems for almost 20 years. They acquired a prominent property adjacent to the Ulysses S. Grant home, a popular state historic site but still didn’t have enough money to build a new museum.

Flak worked with Daniel Payette of the Blackhawk Hills Regional Council to apply under the City of Galena for a U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA) grant. In 2022, they were awarded a grant for $1.8 million, 35 percent of the museum’s total costs. The historical society also redesigned the museum, re-aligning it and using local limestone to shave more than a million dollars off expected costs.

“The new museum isn’t just about history,” Flak said. “It’s a vital economic driver, expected to boost local revenue, create jobs and attract visitors,” Two separate economic development studies have found that the new location will more than triple the number of visitors to the museum, resulting in $1.7 million dollars of additional economic activity in the community.

The historical society also leveraged the EDA grant for an additional $450,000 grant from the Illinois Economic Development tourism attractions program and $576,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This second grant will fund an archival room, museum-grade exhibition cases and safe transport of the museum’s collections, including its showpiece, “Peace in Union,” an iconic 9×12-foot painting of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox.

Flak explained that the new museum will teach visitors about natural history, First Peoples, lead miners, European settlers, the boomtown history of the 1820s to the 1870s, Galena’s role in the Civil War and how people were able to preserve the community’s architecture and character.

“The impact to the community is huge,” Flak said. “Just to be able to better showcase all the artifacts that we have, to be able to save those pieces. It’s not only their history, but a lot of their ancestors’ history.”

Rotating exhibits will focus on women of Galena and Galena’s neighborhoods. “As we move forward, there’s going to be new ways of telling the stories, whether it’s technology, rotating exhibits or temporary exhibits,” Flak said.

Another rotating exhibit will showcase Galena’s rich and painstakingly researched Black history. “We have so much information that we are going to showcase different individuals throughout the year,” Flak said. “We have a lot of information. Maybe not a lot of artifacts, but there’s so many stories to tell.”

With a contractor selected, the historical society was set to break ground on the new museum in spring 2025. About a week before signing the construction contract, Flak learned that the federal grant they had received was frozen. 

The historical society turned to supporters with an urgent appeal. “With construction costs rising every day, time is of the essence… Let’s keep the momentum going!” Flak wrote on social media.

Within a week, Flak learned that the grant would undergo additional review. A few days later, funding was released.

Despite the whiplash, Flak is grateful the long-sought project can proceed. “We’ll be able to better tell the stories,” Flak said. “Most of our visitors today are 50-plus in age. We hope to be more family-friendly and have hands-on exhibits and more interactive experiences, so that everybody, no matter the age, can be a part of the museum.”