Tinker Swiss Cottage Museum and Gardens

Tinker Swiss Cottage Museum and Gardens preserves and shares the legacy of the Tinker family and inspires visitors to connect with history. 

Through our tours and special events, we hope to educate and entertain the public as well as bring awareness to our restoration and preservation of the Cottage. We also interpret and maintain the gardens and grounds kept by the Tinker family. 

Tinker Cottage strives to provide authentic Victorian history to the Rockford community while encouraging a little more playfulness in the museum experience.

Tinker Swiss Cottage is a historic house museum located in the heart of Rockford, Illinois. The museum complex contains the historic house museum, barn, and carriage house from the Tinker family.

The museum collection contains over 10,000 objects with over 98% of the collection obtained from the original objects of the occupants of the Tinker Swiss Cottage.  In addition, the property is the home of the founding site of Rockford and contains a Pre-Columbian Native American conical mound.