Starved Rock Harley Grinchmas Toy Drive

About this event

When Windy City Motorcycle Company took the Ottawa store over from Tom and Sara Eiden, who had bought it in 2000, it kept the name. That was a choice. Starved Rock is one of very few dealership names in the country that comes with a legend attached, and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources is careful to say the legend is not supported by archaeology or by history.

The story goes that after Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa was killed by a Peoria warrior in 1769, a band of Illinois people besieged by the Potawatomi climbed a hundred-and-twenty-five-foot sandstone butte above the river and were held there until they starved. Their descendants are the Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma. The French had put Fort St Louis on top of the same rock in 1682, for the command it gave them of the water.

The toy drive itself is a December-shaped occasion held in November, under the dealership's own Grinchmas name. Behind it are eighteen canyons cut by glacial meltwater, moss on the walls and waterfalls that only run after rain, and two roads worth the trip out: Illinois 71 along the bluffs and 178 across the river at Utica.