Ottawa
"Ottawa hosted the very first Lincoln-Douglas debate in a square that still looks almost exactly the way it did in 1858."
The town where Lincoln and Douglas held their very first debate, sitting at the confluence of the Illinois and Fox Rivers just downstream from the canyons of Starved Rock. Lia and I stood in the same square where thousands once gathered to hear two men argue about the future of the country.
Ottawa sits where the Fox River empties into the Illinois River, and it holds a specific, weighty piece of American history: on August 21, 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas held the first of their seven famous debates right here in Washington Square, drawing a crowd estimated at over ten thousand people to a town that had barely seven thousand residents at the time. We stood at the bronze statues marking the spot on a quiet weekday morning, trying to imagine a crowd that size packed into a square that, honestly, doesn’t look big enough to hold it.
Washington Square and downtown Ottawa
The square itself remains the heart of downtown, ringed by well-kept nineteenth-century buildings, a scale model of the original debate platform, and a small museum a block away that walks through the full context of that summer’s political tour. What struck us most was how unchanged the geometry of the square felt — you could stand where the crowd stood and genuinely picture the scene, which isn’t true of most historic sites this old.
The rivers and glass sand legacy
Ottawa’s other, stranger history is written into the ground beneath it: exceptionally pure St. Peter sandstone deposits here made the town a center of American glass manufacturing for over a century, supplying sand for everything from window glass to radium-dial watch faces, an industry that later became infamous for the “Radium Girls” case involving factory workers poisoned by glow-in-the-dark paint. We learned the story at the same small museum, sobered by it, then walked down to the Illinois River where paddlers were launching toward Starved Rock’s canyons just upstream, the water doing its best to lighten the mood.
Getting There
Ottawa is about ninety minutes southwest of Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway airports via I-80 and I-39. A car is essential — the square, riverfront, and nearby Starved Rock State Park are all a short drive apart with no public transit connecting them.
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