Old sketches illuminate story of old Interurban

History enthusiast and artist Brian Nolan was having trouble finding many people with extremely clear memories of the Interurban rail system.
Instead, he found the memories — actually nearly 45 sketches — but not the person who recorded them about 100 years ago.
“A young boy in 1910 started riding the Interurban and as he was traveling he made sketches,” says Nolan, who was shown the collection of sketches by one of the historians at the La Salle County Historical Society in Utica, where Nolan sells his own sketches, prints and cards of historical sites of La Salle County and the Illinois & Michigan Canal.
Nolan has spent the past four months traveling from Spring Valley to the Joliet area, trying to stand in the same locations where the sketches were made and taking photographs of the present-day locations to match up to the scenes created a century ago.
Now the Morris man has created a DVD based on the old pen-and-ink, pencil and colored pencil drawings as well as his photos and an occasional sketch of his own made from the same views as the early doodler. He will present his findings and DVD at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 22 at Grundy County Historical Society Museum in Morris, and hopes to provide more programs (and sell DVDs) elsewhere.
He finds the early artist’s sketches historically significant because they provide views of the Interurban line that were not commonly photographed. For example, he said there are no sketches of commonly photographed scenes such as factory workers getting on and off the Interurban trolleys at Westclox in Peru.
One old sketch depicts an Interurban trolley obviously near the intersection of St. Bede Lane and the highway that links Spring Valley and Peru. Another depicted a trolley traveling over an arched, long-since-demolished bridge over the Fox River not far from Ottawa High School.
There are east and west views of Interurban trains crossing the canal on a bridge that spanned Split Rock between Utica and La Salle. He notes hikers on the canal towpath still can see a berm south of the canal that used to carry the Interurban trolleys to Utica. He found sketches and old photos of a Utica depot, and also was fascinated by sketches evidently made by the artist while on an Interurban trolley where the tracks headed south from Utica to a “Starved Rock station,” where passengers would disembark and take a boat to Starved Rock. One sketch clearly shows the Starved Rock butte, but, like all of the sketches, the focal point was the Interurban system, Nolan said.
Another sketch mapped out the Interurban system, which had several privately-owned, for-profit sections linking communities and which were interconnected from Rock Island to Chicago and to many other cities throughout Illinois.