LeClaire is the river town at the top of the Quad Cities — founded in the 1830s at the head of the Rock Island Rapids, home to the pilots who steered boats through them, and the birthplace of Buffalo Bill Cody. Today it is one of the fastest-growing communities in the metro, close to 4,800 people, and its nine-block Cody Road historic district along the Mississippi is a full-time visitor street: antique shops, galleries, restaurants, a winery, a distillery, and a brewery within a couple of blocks, the Buffalo Bill Museum and the Riverboat Twilight on Front Street, and tour buses that stop regularly.
That makes LeClaire unusual for a town its size. Sixty-plus historic storefronts face the river and get looked at all day; the I-80 exit 306 node on the north end has three hotels, a bank, a clinic, and a YMCA under construction; Pleasant Valley schools run three buildings in town; and Tug Fest, Eagle Fest, Vettes on the River, and Christmas in LeClaire put visitors on the sidewalks in every season. Downtown and Wisconsin Street are both in the middle of multi-year street reconstructions, which means construction dust on facades and glass through 2027.
The housing tells the same two-part story. Roughly a fifth of LeClaire's homes were built before 1940 — the river pilot houses and their neighbors, brick and frame — and about a third since 2000, in subdivisions like Johnson Farms and Pebble Creek climbing the bluff. Old wood windows on one street, two-storey glass and big decks on the next. We're based in Eldridge, about sixteen miles west, under half an hour away.
