Roscoe's
Daily Encourager

Roscoe is a village in Winnebago County, Illinois, along the Rock River. It is in a suburban area of the Rockford, Illinois Metropolitan Statistical Area. As of the 2020 census, the village population was 10,983. Native American tribes originally inhabited the region. Stephen Mack, Jr. was the first white settler in the Roscoe area. He was married to Hononegah, a respected Native American woman from one of the surrounding tribes. His original outpost eventually became Macktown. William Talcott arrived to the area later and, after a disagreement with Mack, settled on the other side of the nearby river within the present village of Roscoe. Citizens who lived in Macktown would frequently travel across the river to Roscoe but in 1851, the bridge from Macktown to Roscoe washed away. The bridge had been built with funding from Stephen Mack and its destruction, along with Mack's death in 1850, led citizens to permanently move to Roscoe. In northern Illinois, Macktown is the only community from the 1830s that is still standing without subsequent development.