Illinois
Five historic landmarks in Illinois, across four eras of American history. Start with Cahokia Mounds, Lincoln Home and Robie House.
- Landmarks
- 5
- Eras
- 4
Pictured Cahokia Mounds
Skubasteve834 · CC BY-SA · via Wikimedia Commons
Landmarks in Illinois
- Indigenous America
Cahokia Mounds
Collinsville, IL
Cahokia Mounds preserves the remains of the largest and most sophisticated ancient city north of Mexico — a Mississippian metropolis that flourished a thousand years ago on the Mississippi floodplain.
Civil WarLincoln Home
Springfield, IL
The Lincoln Home in Springfield, Illinois, is the only home Abraham Lincoln ever owned — the house where he lived for seventeen years as a lawyer, state politician, and family man before the presidency transformed his life and the nation's.
The 20th CenturyRobie House
Chicago, IL
With its dramatic cantilevered roofs sweeping low over ribbons of art glass windows, Robie House announced a fully American architecture, breaking decisively from European tradition to celebrate the flat horizontal lines of the Midwestern prairie.
Gilded AgePullman National Historical Park
Chicago, IL
George Pullman set out to build a workers' utopia on Chicago's South Side, a meticulously planned company town that would eliminate the vice and squalor of industrial slums.
The 20th CenturyFrank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio
Oak Park, IL
The home and design laboratory where a 22-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright invented the Prairie Style, and the place he abandoned in a scandal that reshaped both his life and the trajectory of American architecture.
Historical Essays
Indigenous AmericaBefore Columbus: The Great Cities of Ancient North America
A city of earthen pyramids on the Mississippi, great houses in a desert canyon, villages built into cliffs, and a pueblo still lived in after a thousand years — North America's oldest urban places.
Old USA Editors · 2 min read · September 28, 2026
Gilded AgeGilded Age America: The Mansions and the Mills
The Vanderbilts built palaces in Newport and the Blue Ridge; the workers of Lowell and Pullman built the fortunes behind them. Four landmarks show both sides of America's industrial boom.
Old USA Editors · 2 min read · September 28, 2026