Quad Cities

• 1. Introduction

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  The Quad Cities is a region of five cities straddling two states along a stretch of the Mississippi River where the current runs not north to south, but east to west. Davenport and Bettendorf sit on the Iowa bank to the north. Rock Island, Moline, and East Moline face them from the Illinois side. For a place called the Quad Cities, the arithmetic has never quite added up. The name predates the fifth city, and by the time Bettendorf grew large enough to demand inclusion, the original name had already traveled far enough beyond the region that locals simply kept it. That tension between identity and reality runs through the entire history of this place. How did a cluster of river towns become a coherent metropolitan area with nearly half a million people? And what kept them from ever fully merging into one? The answers begin long before any of these cities existed.

• 2. River and Rapids

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  For fourteen miles between LeClaire, Iowa, and Rock Island, the Mississippi River crossed a series of finger-like rock projections protruding from both banks. Those rapids made the upper river treacherous for the steamboats that carried goods and people across the growing nation. The demand for skilled hands was enough to sustain a small economy. Pilots like Phillip Suiter, the first licensed pilot on the upper Mississippi, guided vessels through the rocky waters. When the river ran low, crews offloaded cargo and moved it by wagon overland past the worst sections. Suiter was well known enough that Abraham Lincoln later called him as a witness in a landmark legal case. Today those same rocks sit six feet underwater, submerged beneath a lake created by two locks and dams.

  In 1848, John Deere moved his plough business to Moline, drawn by the combination of river power and easy transportation. His business was incorporated in 1868 and remains the largest employer in the Quad Cities today. The rapids that once slowed steamboats had also made the river a reliable power source, and entrepreneurs recognized it. What the water gave, the railroads would later complicate.

• 3. Lincoln and the Effie Afton

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  The first railroad bridge across the Mississippi River connected Davenport and Rock Island in 1856, built by the Rock Island Railroad Company. It ended the slow seasonal ferry crossings and the ice bridges that served the area through winter. Steamboat operators watched with alarm. Their business model depended on the river remaining the dominant transport corridor, and a bridge that let trains cross unimpeded threatened everything they had built. On the 6th of May, 1856, just weeks after the bridge opened, a steamboat captain crashed the Effie Afton into it.

  The boat's owner, John Hurd, sued the Rock Island Railroad Company in what became known as Hurd v. Rock Island Bridge Company. The railroad chose Abraham Lincoln as their trial lawyer. Lincoln called Phillip Suiter, the veteran river pilot, as one of his witnesses, and eventually took the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where the railroad won. Legal historians have described the case as pivotal in Lincoln's career. It helped settle whether railroads could legally bridge navigable rivers, and in doing so, it accelerated the transformation of the American interior.

• 4. A Name That Outlasted Its Math

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  After the Civil War, the river towns that had been thoughtfully planned began to separate from speculative settlements that failed. By World War I, Davenport, Rock Island, and Moline were marketing themselves jointly as the Tri-Cities, three communities roughly equal in size clustered around the bend where the Mississippi turns west. The name fit. Then, during the 1930s, East Moline was elevated to equal status and the name shifted to Quad Cities.

  The National Basketball League, and later the National Basketball Association, ran a franchise in Moline from 1946 to 1951 still called the Tri-Cities Blackhawks, named in honor of the Sauk war chief Black Hawk. When an Alcoa plant east of Davenport opened in 1948, Bettendorf grew so quickly that residents and boosters considered renaming the region Quint Cities. The television station WOC-TV, now known as KWQC-TV, championed the cause, but Quad Cities had already traveled too far. When Bettendorf eventually surpassed East Moline in size, local officials faced pressure to swap one for the other. Instead, the Chamber of Commerce chose an inclusive approach, keeping the name while acknowledging all five cities. The count has remained officially ambiguous ever since.

• 5. Industrial Collapse and Rebuilding

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  Beginning in the late 1970s, the economic foundation of the Quad Cities cracked. The region's major agricultural manufacturers cut back or closed entirely. International Harvester shut down in Rock Island. Case IH left Bettendorf. John Deere, headquartered in Moline in a building designed by Eero Saarinen and completed in 1963, cut its workforce by half. Caterpillar closed factories at Mount Joy and Bettendorf in the 1980s. The layoffs hit communities that had organized their entire economic identities around those plants.

  Since the 1990s, governments, businesses, and non-profits began working to rebuild. Davenport completed a downtown revitalization project that included a river music history center and opened the Figge Art Museum, designed by British architect David Chipperfield, in 2005. Moline invested in the John Deere Commons and opened the Vibrant Arena at The MARK, a 12,000-seat arena, during the 1990s. In 2007, Davenport and Rock Island jointly won the title of most livable small city from the National Council of Mayors. In 2010, Forbes named the Quad Cities the most affordable metro in the country. In 2012, the metropolitan area was ranked among the fastest-growing regions in the nation for high-tech job growth, and the area earned the designation All American City that same year.

• 6. Sports and the Blackhawks Legacy

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  Rock Island's Rock Island Independents were a charter member of the National Football League in 1920. The first NFL game ever played took place at Douglas Park in September of that year. Football legend Jim Thorpe joined the team in 1924. The franchise ran from 1907 to 1926 before folding.

  The Tri-Cities Blackhawks joined the National Basketball League in 1946, their name a deliberate tribute to the Sauk war chief Black Hawk who had once led resistance to American expansion in this very region. Hall of famer Red Auerbach coached the team during their first NBA season after the NBL merged with the Basketball Association of America in 1949. After the 1950-51 season, the franchise moved to Milwaukee, then to St. Louis, and eventually became the Atlanta Hawks. Professional basketball returned during the 1980s and 1990s with the Quad City Thunder of the Continental Basketball Association. The Thunder played at Wharton Field House in Moline from 1987 through the 1992-93 season before moving to The MARK, and ceased operations permanently when the CBA folded in 2001.

  Minor league baseball has run continuously in Davenport since 1878, when the Brown Stockings first took the field. The current Quad Cities River Bandits, a High Class A affiliate of the Kansas City Royals, have played at Modern Woodmen Park since 1931. The park added a 110-foot Ferris wheel before the 2014 season and was voted the best minor league ballpark in America in 2013.

• 7. The Ground Beneath the Cities

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  Before any city was platted along these banks, the confluence of the Rock and Mississippi rivers had drawn indigenous peoples for thousands of years. At the moment of European contact, the Sauk and Fox tribes lived here and used the site as a principal trading place. Saukenuk, on the Illinois side, was the principal village of the Sauk and the birthplace of Black Hawk, who would become the tribe's war chief in the 19th century. In 1832, Sauk chief Keokuk and General Winfield Scott signed a treaty in Davenport after the United States defeated the Sauk and their allies in the Black Hawk War. Under that agreement, the Native Americans ceded six million acres of land in exchange for a much smaller reservation elsewhere. Black Hawk State Historic Site in Rock Island preserves part of what was once Saukenuk and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

  The African-American community in Davenport traces its roots back to the 1830s, when Iowa was still a free territory. The Jewish population in the region stood at roughly 1,800 to 2,000 in the 1950s and 1960s and has since declined to around 500 to 600. The Quad City Symphony Orchestra has supported a year-round performance schedule since 1916, and the Handel Oratorio Society, founded in 1880, is the second-oldest organization of its kind in the nation, presenting annual performances of Messiah at venues including the Adler Theatre in Davenport. The Adler began life as the RKO Orpheum Theater, which opened in 1931, designed by A.S. Graven of Chicago, whose other projects included the Drake Hotel in Chicago and the Paramount Theater in New York City.