Illinois Route 71
State highway in central Illinois, US
Illinois Route 71 is a 66-mile-long (106 km) southwest-to-northeast state highway in north central Illinois. It runs from the end of Interstate 180 in Hennepin to U.S. Route 34 in Oswego. This is a distance of 69.37 miles (111.64 km).
Route description
Outside of Hennepin, the road stretches east to an intersection with Interstate 39 near Oglesby, paralleling I-39 to the north for several miles on a concurrency with Illinois Route 351 before turning eastward again near LaSalle-Peru.
Between LaSalle-Peru and Ottawa, Route 71 parallels the south bank of the Illinois River and passes Starved Rock State Park. It then crosses the Illinois River on a simple four-lane girder bridge. It overlaps Illinois Route 23 through downtown Ottawa and U.S. Route 6 east from Route 23 before intersecting with Interstate 80. From here it continues to the northeast, passing through Norway, Newark, and Yorkville. Its eastern terminus is near downtown Oswego at an intersection with U.S. Highway 34 and Wolf's Crossing Road.
The now-defunct Prairie Parkway project, a limited-access highway, would have had an interchange with Route 71 southwest of High Point Road near Yorkville.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Illinois Route 71” as state highway in central Illinois, US. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as state highway in central Illinois, US. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 22, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1068603. Authority coordinates are 41.410, -88.744. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Illinois Route 71” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.