Orion, IL

At the 2020 census, Orion was a Henry County village of 1,754 people whose name changed before the town had fully settled into itself. Charles W. Dean laid out the village in 1853 and first called it Deanington. The post office already used Orion, after the constellation, and residents won the name change in 1865. Railways arrived in the early 1870s, bringing enough growth for Orion to incorporate as a village in 1873. That is a lot of identity work for a nine-block town plan.

ATTRKen Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA / CC BY-SA 2.0

Orion’s old center still has the pieces you want in an Illinois village: Central Park, a historic music pavilion, a west water tower, schools, and a main street that remains part of daily life. The 1914 Deanington School served as both grade school and high school until 1972, and the village’s Orion Community Unit School District still carries the name forward. The surrounding Quad Cities add a modern twist: Orion is home to transmitters for several radio and television stations. So the village has two kinds of reach—old rail lines and new signals—both spreading outward from the same small Henry County center.