Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Hall

The Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Hall, completed in 1909, is a handsome Neoclassical building in downtown Peoria that served as the meeting place for local Civil War veterans in the final years of their lives. The hall is now operated as a museum, and its interior retains much of its original character: portraits of officers, regimental flags, display cases of medals and personal effects, and the particular atmosphere of a room where old soldiers came to remember what they had survived.

It is a quieter and more moving experience than most Civil War sites, precisely because it focuses not on the battles but on the aftermath — the men who lived through the war and spent their remaining decades defined by it. The building itself is worth noting for its confident civic architecture, representative of the period when Peoria had money to spend on buildings that announced the city's ambitions.

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The Grand Army of the Republic was the veterans' organization of Union soldiers who fought in the Civil War. At its peak membership in 1890, it had nearly half a million members. By the time this hall was dedicated in 1909, the veterans were old men; by the 1950s, the last of them were gone. The organization dissolved in 1956 when its last member, Albert Woolson, died at 109. Peoria's GAR Hall survived because the city has maintained it as a museum and meeting space rather than allowing it to be converted or demolished — a small act of civic memory that has preserved one of the best-intact Civil War memorial spaces in the Midwest.

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