First National Bank-Ottawa

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There was a new first-quarter moon over Ottawa and LaSalle County when the First National Bank opened for business almost 140 years ago on June 1, 1865. That was an historical highlight of the bank's history, for those were moon-farming days when farmers in this predominantly agricultural community still depended upon the phases of the moon in deciding when to plant their field crops and gardens.In such a setting, the First National Bank was a pioneer in financial service to the community and a bellwether for other service institutions to follow. Ottawa had a population of only 6,000, being then just 12 years old as an officially chartered city. Farmers had had the U. S. Department of Agriculture for three years, but the department's influence and teachings had not yet spread to the prairies of Illinois. What is now the University of Illinois was not to open for another three years, in 1868, and as the Illinois Industrial University, and Ottawa was not to have a high school for another 13 years. When the school was established in 1878 it was the second one in the State of Illinois.Ottawa was one of the first Illinois cities to get telephones and electric trains (interurban), but the First National Bank opened for business 12 years before the telephone came to Ottawa in 1877 and six years before the first train came through the city on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad. The first train on what is now the Rock Island Lines had come through on only 12 years before the bank's opening. And it was only seven years before the opening of the First National Bank that Ottawa became everlastingly famous as the site of the first in the series of seven Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858.

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