Roscoe, Illinois

City: Roscoe

County: Winnebago

State: Illinois

Lat/Long: 42.4000, -89.0000

Roscoe is a village in northeastern Winnebago County, Illinois, approximately twelve miles northeast of Rockford. Prior to 1835, Potawatomi and Winnebago Indians used the area as a hunting ground. The first white settlers arrived in 1835, and by 1840, fifty people were living in the area. In the 1840s, residents built churches, a woolen factory, gristmill, distillery, and other businesses, and in the 1850s, the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad built a branch that passed through Roscoe, transforming it into a thriving commercial center.

Dorothy Hunter with Doris Hunter Tropp, Images of America: Roscoe (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2013), 7-8; Charles A. Church, Past and Present of the City of Rockford and Winnebago County, Illinois (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1905), 11.