Ronald Reagan's Birthplace

What a wonderful place to visit! Besides all of the different historic pieces and pictures, Joan is a wealth of knowledge and stories! Make the trip - it's worth it!!!

A piece of american history. Nice little town in the middle of nowhere. Really worth spending an hour or so. Does not dramatically increase your travel time but adds a bunch to tavel memories bank.

Amazing. The history and the memorabilia are stunning. And the volunteer tour guide was one of the best guides I have ever encountered. It is worth the trip.

A wonderful museum with very kind and helpful staff. Thank you Carol!

Tampico counts eight hundred people inside its borders. I can see a two story brownstone marked as Reagan's birthplace. Maybe a midwife came to help the mother deliver Ronald? The closest hospital in Princeton must have been too far away. People were born at home in that time, I guess. Over a century ago, February 6th, 1911 was a different world entirely.nThe honor of being Reagan's birthplace hasn't improved the downtown in any marked way. I count two taverns and a funeral parlor in this corn silo town. Reagan's family lived above a store when he arrived in the world. In the line seven brownstones, I don't see a single indicator that anyone lives upstairs. I noticed lights on in the windows of only one brownstone on the western side of Main Street.nnA bell tower tolled the arrival of Six in the evening. I decided to walk the main street, looking at the storefronts, reading the signs. Across the street from the family’s apartment, Reagan’s father worked as a clerk for a store owned by the Pitney family. Nell and Jack Reagan became known as actors at Burden’s Opera House. I went looking for the house at 102 Main, only to find a park kept up by the local Lions Club. As expected, I discovered that the opera house caught fire in 1923.nnReagan, the man who I learned to hate in college, became a rather real young man to me as I walked his street. The feeder canal of the Hennepin Canal flowed about one and a half miles east of Main Street. It opened in 1907, four years before Ronald Reagan’s birth. Reagan learned to swim in the canal according to one of the signs. Later, Dutch the lifeguard saved seventy-seven people from drowning in the Rock River at Rockford.nnLined with concrete, the Hennepin canal and its feeder canal found use as a swimming pool. The water arrived fresh from the Rock River, the water flowing from Rock Falls, Illinois. Now, all the signs forbid swimming. I find that prohibition a sad story, a lovely canal made unusable for swimming by farm pesticides and fertilizers, arriving in the runoff water.nnSeriously, I want to know if Dutch ever performed at Burden Opera House with his parents.