High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In the U.S. state of Illinois, Interstate 74 is a major northwest-southeast Interstate Highway that runs across the central portion of the state. It runs from the Iowa state line at the Mississippi River southeast to the Indiana state line east of Danville, Illinois. This is a distance of 220.34 miles (354.60 km). The highway is officially named after Everett McKinley Dirksen, a Republican Senator and U.S. Congressman from Pekin from 1933 to his death in 1969.