Nauvoo State Park

The third day of our Labor Day Weekend trip for 2025 brought us to Nauvoo State Park in Nauvoo, IL. This park is about 4 hours and 20 minutes southwest of Chicago, or 2 hours south of the Quad Cities.

This park is very small, only 148 acres located right in the middle of the town. If you are looking at google maps without the satellite view on, it doesn’t even look like there’s greenery there (despite the location being accurate). The town of Nauvoo is right on the Mississippi River, but the park itself does not actually have river access. This is just one of the things that makes this park a bit unusual.

Everything about the town of Nauvoo is linked to this history of the Mormon church, including the name. “Nauvoo” is a Hebrew word meaning “beautiful place”. Before this, it was known as Quashquema, which is a Fox Indian Word meaning “peaceful place”. Within the park,there is a house built by Mormons in the 1840s, which is now a museum. We arrived a little early in the day, and it was not open yet, but it looked well maintained and even still has Nauvoo’s first vineyard right outside.

There is a small lake within the park, and the one hiking trail loops around it. It is 1.5 miles long, and does feature some good views of the forest and the lake. Unfortunately, we had a couple issues. First, a lot of the trail goes up and down, since the lake is a low point. In order to manage this, most parks will build in some kind of stairs, or will have engineered the trail to have better traction. What Nauvoo did to manage this was put down a black netted material, and then filled that with gravel. In theory, this should have given us the traction to navigate the trails, but in practice the gravel was too loose and going down especially felt treacherous. Second, this park also had an overgrowth problem. It was so bad at one point that we couldn’t even see the trail through the plants. When that happened, we felt the best course of action was to turn around and head back the way we came.

We happened to visit during the annual Grape Festival, and the park was extremely crowded with visitors that day. The festival includes rides, entertainment, arts and crafts for sale, as well as a car show. We had intended to walk around the festival for a bit after hiking, but it was so crowded in the park alone, that we decided to just go straight to the winery after we got back to the car.

We visited Baxter Winery, just a few minutes away from the park. This is Illinois’ oldest winery, established in 1857. We managed to get here early in the day, before crowds residual from Grape Fest could stop by. We were able to try a wide variety of their wines in the tasting room, before we each got a glass and enjoyed it outside on their patio.

We had pretty high expectations for Nauvoo SP, and it was truly unfortunate that we ran into an overgrowth problem again. We were very surprised to have that particular issue, especially with how many people were at the park. If you are in the area, it is probably worth a brief visit, but we don’t know that you could make a full day out of hiking here, unless it is very early in the season before all the plants have had the chance to fully bloom.