Two Illinois Points of Interest

Posted on July 30, 2020 by admin

For years, I’ve seen the following two points of interest routinely included on road maps of Illinois. At least, on Rand McNally and Michelin: the Norwegian Settlers State Memorial and the Wild Bill Hickok State Memorial.

When it comes to points of interest on commonly available road maps, there must be just a touch of the arbitrary in their selection. Just a touch, because certainly mapmakers have their editorial standards. Still, I see those (typically) red dots and wonder not only what it is, but also why is that on the map and not something else?
Guess being a state memorial or monument helps land a place on maps. (That link is part of a larger list.)

One goal of our recent trip was to avoid large highways, which we mostly did until we headed for home, when we wanted a more speedy return. When heading out, we kept to smaller roads. One of these was Illinois 71, which passes through the unincorporated community of Norway.

Not far from Norway is the the Norwegian Settlers State Memorial. It’s an example of the plaques-on-rocks school of memorial design, along with a wooden structure, and U.S. and Norwegian flags.
“This Memorial commemorates the 1834 settlement at Norway, Illinois — the first permanent Norwegian settlement in the Midwest,” says the State Historic Preservation Office. “A departure point for many Norwegians who settled other parts of the Midwest, Norway became known as the ‘mother settlement.’ The monument, dedicated in 1934, honors the community and its founder, Cleng Peerson (1783-1865).”

Peerson got around. Though he led immigrants to the New World, he didn’t seem to be interested in settling for more than a few years at a time himself. According to Wiki, he even spent time in Bishop Hill among its Swedish settlers. I guess he had no hard feelings against those oppressors of the Norwegian people. He ended up in Texas in the mid-19th century, as a lot of people did.

Why three stones? One from 1934 memorializes the 100th anniversary of the settlement of Norway, Illinois. Another from 1975 memorializes the 150th anniversary of Norwegians first coming to America en masse. The King of Norway came for that occasion. And yet another (also 1975) notes that part of Illinois 71 is the Cleng Peerson Memorial Highway.

That’s not all. The wooden structure — which I assume is an homage to Norwegian design — has text front and back. Three separate plaques on the front, dated 1980, tell the “Norsk Story,” that is, Norwegians coming to America.

Two more plaques on back (from 1982, bicentennial of Peerson’s birth) offer more detail about the memorial, including lines about Lester Severskie (1918-82) who was “dedicated to the preservation of the Norwegian heritage of Norway, Ill.”, a list of the Norwegian heritage organizations in the U.S. as of 1982 (I had no idea there were so many), and a few lines to thank Olav V, members of the Norwegian government, and so on and so forth.

This has to be the wordiest memorial I’ve ever encountered. It’s the memorial equivalent of a logorrheic movie star upon winning an Oscar. I usually enjoy reading obscure plaques, but these tried my patience, especially in the high heat of July. (The rest of my family was sitting in air-conditioned comfort in the car.)

Even so, I’m glad I stopped. Especially because I noticed that behind the memorial is a small cemetery. The Cleng Peerson Memorial Cemetery, according to one source (who spells cemetery wrong), though I didn’t see any signs or plaques at all about it, just the headstones. According to another source, it’s the Nelson Cemetery.

Whatever the name, it must be an active local cemetery. At least one burial was fairly recent.
Peerson himself isn’t there. He’s buried near Clifton, Texas.

In a different context, you might call Peerson an empresario, along the lines of Stephen F. Austin in Texas, except that he was merely a leader of immigrants, not someone who was granted land by an existing government. Except that in the end, he was granted land by Texas, but for services rendered in populating the state with hardy Norwegians, not as an incentive to bring them.

Returning from the Illinois River Valley on Sunday, I made a point of stopping at the Wild Bill Hickok State Memorial in Troy Grove, Illinois. Wild Bill isn’t buried there either. He died in Deadwood, after all, and he rests there in Boot Hill.

Rather, the memorial marks the birthplace of James Butler Hickok, scout, spy, lawman, soldier, marksman, gambler, showman, folk hero, and dime novel and movie and TV character. It’s at the center of an open patch of land where the Hickok family home once stood, and includes one plaque and one bust.
The state of Illinois erected the plaque in 1929, and it wasn’t shy about lionizing Wild Bill. It needed a proofreader, too.
“He contributed largely in making the West a safe place for woman [sic] and children,” the plaque says in part. “His sterling courage was aways [sic] at the service of right and justice.”

The bust is more recent. I had to look it up, because I couldn’t find anything on site — not a word — to say who created it or when.
The state of Illinois says a “log-carved bust” of Hickok was added in 1999, but that’s no wooden bust. It took a little looking, but I found out that “in 2009, an attractive bronze bust of Hickok by artist William Piller was placed in the park. It replaced a carved wooden bust that had been in place 10 years but had severe weather damage,” according to the Danville, Illinois, Commercial-News.

Though it was a hot day, I wasn’t quite done with Troy Grove, pop. 230. A building near the memorial caught my eye. (The rest of my family was sitting in air-conditioned comfort in the car.)
Bank, eh? Well, not any more. Still, it’s a handsome little building. A detail toward the top further got my attention.

A logo marker apparently left by the Bankers Electrical Protection Co. of Minneapolis: a guard dog close to a money bag. The company seems to have specialized in bank vaults and other security features for banks of yore. You know, the sort of banks at risk from unauthorized withdrawals by the likes of the Cream Can Gang.

Besides a few images, I haven’t found out much else about BEPCo. (as it surely would be called now), mostly since I don’t feel like it. Enough to assume that it went out of business or was acquired by another security company long ago. Yet traces remain, in stone no less.

Oglesby Sights

Posted on July 29, 2020 by admin

Sizable towns cluster around the Illinois River in north-central Illinois like so many stones on a necklace: Morris, Ottawa, LaSalle, Peru, Spring Valley, Princeton. Then there’s Oglesby, which isn’t so sizable, at about 3,500 people. The place is named after the long-ago Illinois governor, whom I’ve encountered before in Decatur and Chicago.

We became acquainted with Oglesby last weekend because we stayed overnight in a motel in the town, to take advantage of its proximity to Starved Rock SP and Matthiessen SP, though we decided not to visit the latter.

To become acquainted with the town, you can drive down the east-west Walnut St. for about two miles. On Sunday morning, I went out for gas early, which also meant looking around. Lilly joined me.

The town post office on Walnut looked about as WPA as can be. Being Sunday, we couldn’t go in and look at the 1942 mural, “The Illini and Pottawatomies Struggle at Starved Rock” by Fay E. Davis, which is said to be quite something.

Soon we arrived at this structure, which would loom over Walnut St., except that it’s set back a few hundred feet and behind a fence. The fence is pretty new.
An old enough ruin to sport fully grown trees in its midst. An interesting enough ruin to be fenced, though I figure local teens have no problem getting in when the mood strikes.

The blackened sign is just barely legible.

LEHIGH PORTLAND CEMENT COMPANY OGLESBY

That’s all I needed to find out more about this industrial ruin. For decades, Oglesby lived by the extraction and processing of minerals, especially the manufacture of cement and concrete.

The Chicago Cement Co. started operations on the site in 1898. Lehigh, a Pennsylvania company, acquired Chicago in 1916 and ran the plant until 1963. Apparently Lehigh decided at that time that modernization of the plant wouldn’t be worth the expense, and so closed it.

I have to report that cement and concrete production in the area isn’t dead yet. Illinois Cement Co., which is across the river in LaSalle, still seems to be in that business, and related hard-stone entities dot the map: the Mertel Gravel Co., Ladzinski Concrete Finishing Co., Lafarge Aggregates, Wenzel Concrete Works and Ruppert Concrete, to name a few (and those last two are in Oglesby).

The above image is only a part of the ruin.
Even that doesn’t depict the whole of it. Note how far it goes back when you look on Google Maps. We were looking at the property from about where I’ve put a blue dot.
“This looks like the most interesting thing in Oglesby,” I told Lilly. Too expensive to tear down, I figure, so there it stands, letting the decades take their toll.

Down Walnut to the east was something almost as interesting, and cement related, too.An intriguing bit of work in a small public park — Lehigh Park — donated by the company to the town in 1945 (the side plaque says that). Turns out the work is one of a genre of memorials, awarded by the Portland Cement Association, with examples wherever cement is or was made. They’re made of cement, of course.

“Cement ‘Safety Follows Wisdom’ monuments, first presented in 1924, for perfect safety records at cement plants,” says the Historical Marker Database. “The winning design came from an Art Institute of Chicago team directed by sculptor Albin Polasek.” (I’ve happened across his work before.)

Do a casual search and you’ll find Safety Follows Wisdom stones all over the country. It’s something I had no inkling of until I drove down a main street in a small town and — more importantly — got out of the car and looked around. The devil might be in the details, but I find that the joy of traveling is in the details.

Ottawa Sights (Not the One in Canada)

Posted on July 28, 2020 by admin

We arrived in Ottawa, Illinois, on Saturday in time for lunch. We decided on carry-out from Thai Cafe on Columbus St., which seems to be the only Thai joint in town. At a population of 18,000 or so, maybe that’s all Ottawa can support.

We took our food to Allen Park, a municipal park on the south bank of the Illinois, and found a picnic shelter. The river’s large and on a weekend in July, home to a lot of pleasure craft.
Sometimes, the river must be angry, such as on April 19, 2013. Got a lot of rain in northern Illinois about then, so I believe it.

Downstream a bit is the Ottawa Rail Bridge, which rates a page in Wikipedia. The current bridge dates from 1898, though it was modified in 1932.

Two large metal sculptures rise in the park, both by Mary Meinz Fanning. The red one is “Bending.”
The yellow one is “Reclining.”
“Fanning was the driving force behind the creation of the red and yellow steel sculptures at Allen Park by the Illinois River in Ottawa,” says a 2010 article in The Times, which seems to be a local paper.

“The 40-foot-tall sculptures, which weigh 17 tons each, were erected in 1982 and 1983 from parts of the 1933-built steel girder Hilliard Bridge that was demolished in 1982 to make way for the present-day Veterans Memorial Bridge. Fanning died of illness Nov. 4, 1995, in Ottawa at age 48.”

Just as you enter the park, you also see a wooden sculpture: one of artist Peter Toth’s “Whispering Giants,” which I’d forgotten I’d heard of till I looked him up again. The one in Allen Park is Ho-Ma-Sjah-Nah-Zhee-Ga or, more ordinarily, No. 61.

Looked familiar. I realized I’ve seen one before —
That one is Nee-Gaw-Nee-Gaw-Bow or No. 59, and we saw it by chance in Wakefield, Mich. about three years ago. Apparently the artist has put up at least one in each state.

Ottawa has a place in U.S. history mainly for two things. One that the town is happy to celebrate: the first Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858. The other is the awful story of the Radium Girls, poisoned by luminous paint at a clock factory in Ottawa in the early 20th century. For a long time, there was no public acknowledgment of that incident. Now there is. But I didn’t know the Radium Girls have a statue in town (since 2011), so we missed that.

We didn’t miss the site of the Lincoln-Douglas debate, which is in the shady, square-block Washington Park.
Lincoln and Douglas are there as part of a fountain to memorialize the event. They were cast in bronze in 2002 by Rebecca Childers Caleel.
It would have been more pleasant if the fountain were on, but maybe it was dry for public health reasons in our time. The noontime heat was oppressive, so we didn’t have a leisurely look-around the area as much as we might have otherwise. There are other memorials in the park, and plenty of historic structures nearby, forming the Washington Park Historic District.

Those buildings include the Third District Appellate Court Building (1850s), the Reddick Mansion (1850s), the Ottawa First Congregational Church (1870), Christ Episcopal Church (1871), and a Masonic Temple (1910). A few blocks away, the LaSalle County Courthouse looked interesting, too, but we only drove by.

I managed to take a close look only at the former Congregational Church building.

Gothic Revival in brick. These days, the church is part of the Open Table United Church of Christ.

Starved Rock State Park ’20

Posted on July 27, 2020 by admin

Hot-and-sweaty weekend until a steady warm wind came on Sunday afternoon, a baby sirocco you might call it, and blew away the humidity. That left the golden glow of dusk warm but dry.

All of us, dog included, took an in-state overnight (30-hour) trip over the weekend, with Starved Rock State Park as the prime destination. Been a while since we’d all been there together, but each of the girls had visited with friends in more recent years.

That isn’t a postcard of mine, though if the state sold it at the park, I’d buy one.

The 2,630-acre Starved Rock SP hews close to the south banks of the Illinois River in LaSalle County, its distinctive topography a creation of long-ago floods and glacial movement. The state acquired the land in 1911 and (of course) the CCC did park infrastructure work during that agency’s short existence. It’s a popular place, more so now than ever. Guess that’s because driving destinations are the thing at our moment in history.

We waited until after the highest early afternoon heat had passed on Saturday to take our hikes. Late afternoon was still steamy, but tolerable, especially under trees. When we came to this fork, we took the path to French Canyon.
It isn’t long before the French Canyon walls rise around you.
Before long, you reach a waterfall. Just a trickle in late July.
Doubling back to the fork, we then followed a trail that’s mostly boardwalk, plus a lot of stairs that I didn’t document.
To the view from Lover’s Leap.
The nearby Eagles Cliff vista, looking upriver.
Look a little downriver and you see why the Illinois is so wide just below Eagle Cliff.
The Starved Rock Lock and Dam, also known as Lock and Dam No. 6, completed in 1933 and operated by the Army Corps of Engineers.

We might have walked further into other canyons after that, or up to the Starved Rock feature, but the heat and stair climbing spent our energy. Mine, anyway. We ought to go back some cooler day in the fall. I’ve been visiting the place since the late ’80s and still haven’t seen some of the other canyons.

Landhaus Elfriede

Posted on July 26, 2020 by admin

This is a beaten-up 8 x 8-inch print, very old itself, of an image I’m pretty sure my father took when he was in Europe with the U.S. Army in the mid-50s. I haven’t found the source image, probably a b&w negative, though I haven’t been looking very hard.

I brought the print home from a recent visit to San Antonio, especially taken with the composition. Moves right up from solidity and the Earth to misty mountains in the Sky. And — those haystacks. What a shot. Dad must have liked the image, too, or he wouldn’t have enlarged it (I’m assuming he did).

No note of time or place is on the back, but it was enough to for me to think, Somewhere in Germany, ca. 1955.

The other day I looked at it closer, and noticed the words written on the building: Landhaus Elfriede.

German all right. Something to put into a search engine. I was mildly surprised to find an existing establishment of that name near Fitzmoos, Austria. Or as its web site says, “ein paar Autominuten vom Zentrum Filzmoos.”

The building pictured on the web site is some different from my father’s image, though their roofs are compellingly similar. You could argue — and I am going to argue — that the similarity is close enough, with any differences between the two attributable to rehab, renovation or fix-up-the-damn-thing efforts over the last 65 years. Now it rents apartments on a short-term basis.

It’s also reasonable to think my parents stayed there while on leave, because of course they did — it’s in the Alps, for crying out loud (and near Salzburg, besides). I like to think the mountains behind the Landhaus Elfriede, which are only faintly pictured in Dad’s photo, mightily impressed my parents, who grew up among hills and flats but not mountains.

Thursday Mishmash

Posted on July 23, 2020 by admin

Warm and dry lately. Very warm sometimes. Luckily, our deck has an umbrella for shade.

Spring on Jupiter or Mars? Never mind, here’s summer on Saturn. At least in its northern hemisphere. Seasons are long there are probably don’t involve relaxing moments on back yard decks. Anyway, a thing of great beauty.“This image is taken as part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) project,” the NASA text says. “OPAL is helping scientists understand the atmospheric dynamics and evolution of our solar system’s gas giant planets. In Saturn’s case, astronomers continue tracking shifting weather patterns and storms.”

For contrast, an older observation of Saturn. Another thing of beauty.
Plate X from The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings 1881-1882, these days posted at Wikimedia.

Closer to home, at Schaumburg Town Square.
The sculpture is “Rubber Tipped Crane,” by Christine Rojek. Installed in 2012. Lilly said she hadn’t remembered seeing it before, but I did. Rojek also did “Ecce Hora” not far away.

Our latest Star Trek episode — we’re still watching about one a week — was “Squire of Gothos,” an early example of kidnap Kirk (and maybe Spock and others) and make him (them) outfight or outwit some adversary. This was a particularly good example of that kind of plot, including a deus ex machina ending that actually worked pretty well.

Our latest movie: The Shining. I hadn’t seen it since it was new. I remember it drew in some crowds in the summer of ’80, because when we got to the theater, only front-row seats were available. So I got to experience the Overlook Hotel in all its surreal, horror-infused glory as an enormous wall of light towering over me.

Always good to watch Jack Nicholson do what he does, in this case descend into homicidal madness. I also thought Shelley Duvall’s parallel track — her increasing freaked-out-ness, you might say — was on target. Her character has been mocked as whiny and weak, but she and her son survived.

So the movie holds up fairly well (and I don’t care at all what Stephen King thought of it). Still, not Kubrick’s best. What could possibly top Dr. Strangelove or 2001? But worth watching again after 40 years.

Springfield Park

Posted on July 22, 2020 by admin

Another few days, another late afternoon walk around a suburban pond. The strolls might be merging into one warm green blur already. They certainly will after the passage of time.

The walk this time was at Springfield Park, which isn’t in the capital city of that name, or any other Springfield, but instead in Bloomingdale, Illinois. It’s a village park with sports facilities, a community garden and a large pond with an irregular figure-8 trail around it. We walked about a mile and a half all together, at least according to my phone. Somehow that’s often the length.
In fact, it’s pretty much sports park on one side, open-water marsh on the other. With an adequate number of benches. You can’t always count on finding those.Lots of July wildflowers, of course.
Views from the south end of the pond.
A boardwalk.
Wouldn’t be much of a suburban marsh without a boardwalk over the flora somewhere.

Go West, Young Woman

Posted on July 21, 2020 by admin

Lilly posted it, so I might as well repost it here.I believe she’s making a good choice.

Gray Farm Park & Conservation Area

Posted on July 20, 2020 by admin

On Saturday, we had high heat and wall-of-water thick humidity. I woke to a bit of thunder on Sunday morning, followed mostly by drizzle. By Sunday afternoon, sunny conditions were back, but not so much heat. Or humidity. Chamber of commerce weather, as an old colleague of mine used to call it.

Today was a little hot for ideal c-of-c weather, but I like it. Cicadas have returned in the late afternoons, followed by just a hint of crickets after dark. We still have fireflies.

One late afternoon last week we went to Gray Farm Park & Conservation Area, which is 47 acres tucked away off any main street here in the northwest suburbs. Even though it has a large water feature, I expect it’s mostly unknown except to nearby residents.
I know about it because I troll maps. The only kind of trolling I do. We entered the park from Cloverdale Lane, and then walked as far as the elementary school.
Much of the park is an open field, though some is a long pond edged by metal bracing.
The conservation area — which is mostly large open-water cattail marsh — is behind tall grass this time of year.
Though if you look carefully enough, you can find a path through the tall grass just behind the nearby elementary school. The path leads to a boardwalk.
The boardwalk dead ends before long, but it does offer a view of the much larger pond — the cattail marsh. A grassy view, but a view all the same.
I’ve read that Gray Farm is a good place for bird watching. But my impulse to watch birds doesn’t go much beyond, hey, that’s an interesting-looking bird. What’s it called? I don’t know either. Never mind.

Keith Jarrett, Piazza del Campidoglio

Posted on July 19, 2020 by admin

July 16, 1983, was quite a day for me. In the morning my friend Steve and I visited the Castel Sant’Angelo (the Mausoleum of Hadrian), followed by an afternoon at the Vatican. As in, the Vatican Museums, the Sistine Chapel and finally St. Peter’s itself, including a climb to the dome.

That should have been enough for any day, but at some point, Steve spotted a poster advertising an outdoor concert by Keith Jarrett that very evening at the Piazza del Campidoglio. I would have blown it off, having only a faint notion of who he was, but Steve knew more and insisted we go. It was standing room only.

Remarkably, I found a recording of that concert on YouTube.

The recording is about 25 minutes long. Not because whoever recorded it didn’t capture it all, but because right in the middle of things, the known-to-be-prickly Jarrett — maybe bothered by the persistent ambient noise of the setting — stormed off, never to return.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Monthly Archives: July 2020