About SHBA

The project was planned as a double-track electric railway between Belleville and East St. Louis. An Illinois Supreme Court opinion reviewing the line’s right-of-way records says grading was substantially complete by September 1898 and that the double-track railway was operating continuously and daily by May 1, 1899.

The line was therefore in service several years before Signal Hill Park was platted in 1904. The surviving trolley photograph shows that the railway was not simply nearby infrastructure: Signal Hill Place had its own named stop.

The Methodist congregation’s own heritage account describes those open-air Sunday school classes as the beginning of its community role. A published history of Belleville uses 1913 as the formal date for both Signal Hill Lutheran and Signal Hill Methodist, listing the Methodist church at 45 South 95th Street.

Taken together, the records show that organized church life was growing beside the school and the young Boulevard within the first decade after the neighborhood was laid out.

East St. Louis had announced that its department would stop responding beyond the city limits. Belleville said it would serve nearby Country Club Place only if that subdivision joined the city. Signal Hill residents responded by creating a department of their own rather than choosing between annexation and no fire protection.

A Congressional Record tribute marking the department’s 60th anniversary said several hundred community members had volunteered over the years. It also credited Signal Hill with becoming Southern Illinois’s first department to acquire a thermal-imaging camera and the region’s first volunteer department to earn an ISO Class 3 rating.

The City of Belleville announced the recognition in its summer 2013 newsletter. The city’s comprehensive plan repeated it the following year while discussing neighborhood gardens as a way to improve access to healthy food and open space.

That plan also identified a Signal Hill Community Garden, connecting the countywide health recognition to a specific neighborhood project.

The $350,000 project was owned by the City of Belleville and funded through the federal Safe Routes to School Program. Its purpose was twofold: provide students with a safer way to reach Signal Hill School and add a recreational path for West Belleville residents.

The finished route included a 12-foot-wide asphalt trail with aggregate shoulders and a signalized pedestrian crossing at Wesley Drive.

The county appropriated $1.1 million for the reconstruction. The approved work called for six inches of asphalt pavement over an aggregate base, along with concrete curbs, sidewalks, and related improvements.

In July 2017, the County Board unanimously approved separate resolutions removing the Boulevard segments from the county highway system. The small section around Belleville’s western city limit transferred to the city; the longer section from Foley Drive to that limit transferred to the Centreville Township Road District.

The June gathering was held in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and included singers, poets, and speakers who shared experiences of racial injustice in Belleville. Ten Signal Hill young people read short biographies of unarmed Black people who had been killed and asked the crowd to say their names.

Organizers said the location mattered because of Signal Hill’s own history. News coverage placed the march 27 years after a national 60 Minutes report examined racial tension between Signal Hill and neighboring East St. Louis, making the 2020 event a deliberate public response within the community itself.