Valley of Dreams
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. Less than a hundred miles north of this island lies a cornfield made popular by the movie Field of Dreams. It's not alone. Travel a hundred miles in any direction up or down the Mississippi Valley, and you will find the remains of dreams—of Edens and Utopias—wherever you go. As if the Mississippi itself were a magnet drawing dreamers to its banks. Go east for fifty miles out on the Illinois prairie, and visit Bishop Hill, a small knoll where in 1846, the Swedish religious visionary Eric Jansen and his followers built a communal society living in the fi...