Lowden State Park along the Rock River is open year-round and offers foot trails, more than 100 campsites, and a reservable cabin. In 1898, Chicago attorney Wallace Heckman and his wife invited a group of artists and writers to summer on their estate there, and with a lease agreement they established what became the Eagle's Nest Art Colony. Over time, the colony grew from a tent camp into a more permanent compound with a central dining hall, two studios, and a number of cottages, where resident artists and their families spent summers enjoying dances, games, outdoor recreation, and producing musical performances, lectures, plays, and elaborate pageants. Artists continued to gather at Eagle's Nest until 1942, when the last founding member died and the colony's lease expired. Soon afterward, the State of Illinois, assisted by local residents, purchased 273 acres including the colony for a memorial to Governor Frank O. Lowden, and the park was designated in 1945. In 1951, 66 acres of the park, including the original 15-acre art colony, were transferred to Northern Illinois University at Dekalb, and today the former colony, known as the Lorado Taft Field Campus of NIU, is used year-round for outdoor natural science classes. Long before the colony was established, poet Margaret Fuller visited the bluffs over the Rock River in 1843, named a spring below the bluff Ganymede Spring, and wrote her poem "Ganymede, to His Eagle" while sitting under a cedar on the bluff above; the Eagle's Nest Art Colony took its name from that tree, and an island in the river below is known as Margaret Fuller Island. From the late 1890s to the early 1940s, these bluffs provided recreation and inspiration for a summer artists colony associated with some of Chicago's most prominent early 20th century artists.

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Oregon, Illinois · USA