Henry Detweiller was a riverboat captain whose name is familiar to Peorians thanks to the street, park and marina named after him but there was more to his story than guiding steamships up and down the Illinois River.
Brian “Fox” Ellis, the storyteller/author from Bishop Hill, will portray Detweiller in a historical reenactment at Peoria’s Springdale Cemetery at 5 p.m. on Saturday. July 3.
“Everyone knows the Detweiller name but not many people know his story—and his story is brilliant,” said Ellis, who has presided over historical reenactments at Springdale for the past 20 years.
“Detweiller was an immigrant from France who came here with his family when he was 10 years old,” he said.
Detweiller was drawn to the Illinois River where he worked his way up to captain on a number of different steamboats, noted Ellis. “He served in the Civil War as part of the Union Army’s river fleet, delivering troops and supplies,” he said.
With the advent of the railroads after the war, boat traffic waned but Detweiller didn’t stray from the river, this time concentrating on an ice business that made him one of the wealthiest men in the region, said Ellis.
Detweiller first partnered with Nelson Woodruff, father of Edward Woodruff, Peoria’s longest-serving mayor, delivering ice cut from the river not only for customers in central Illinois but sending ice by barge to cities like Memphis, Nashville and St. Louis.
“He established a large ice warehouse where the Detweiller Marina is today. He sold ice to Anheuser-Busch, a brewery that preferred Illinois River ice to that from the muddy Mississippi,” Ellis said.
In addition to Detweiller, Ellis will also portray Louis Phillip Wolf, a politically-active journalist who helped design the Eastern Illinois University campus in Charleston. “He ran a German-language newspaper in Peoria, not a popular thing to do during World War I,” said Ellis.
“Barry Cloyd will portray Frank Hitchcock, a Civil War veteran and Peoria sheriff who helped capture the Demon of the Wabash, a serial killer, back in 1870,” he said.
“Hitchcock pioneered some of the detective work we now take for granted. Barry also wrote an original song he’ll perform for the program,” said Ellis, adding that Kim Holden would also be among the reenactors, portraying a Civil War nurse.
Tickets--$15 for adults and $5 for children 3 to 13--are available at 309tix.com or at the cemetery.
Ellis said research has already begun for the traditional fall reenactment program at Springdale slated for October.
He’s not worried about running out of material. “There are 70,000 people buried there and they all have a story to tell. There’s also room for 50,000 more if you’re not feeling well.”
