In September, during the Elgin House Walk, I found out that the 39th Annual Elgin Bluff City Cemetery Walk was coming up on the last weekend of the month. That sounded good. For me. Yuriko wasn’t interested, so on Sunday the 27th, I made my way solo to Bluff City Cemetery in Elgin.

I’d missed the previous 38 walks, but I had visited the cemetery before – 12 years ago. Long enough that another visit would not go amiss. It’s a good-looking cemetery.

I remember liking the sloping contour of parts of the cemetery. I still do.

As well as the scattering of mausoleums.

The cemetery was founded in 1889, in time to receive a good many old soldiers who did their part of the Union.

Along with veterans of other wars, even the one with Spain.

Bluff City is still active, with newer arrivals too.

The tour took groups of about 15 people to the graves of notable Elgin residents, where a volunteer actor, dressed in period costume, played the person. Such as William D. Nichols (d. 1891).

Note that under his name is “Frontier Guards.” The actor, David Santori, told us about the guards, who were an impromptu armed group assembled in the spring of 1861 in the dicey first weeks of the war to protect President Lincoln, before a more formal guard of actual Union soldiers could be dispatched for that purpose. Nichols was an engineer and inventor, but his membership in the guard is what he wanted to be remembered for.

Here is Miland Gieske (d. 1984), who as a young man in 1920 survived a building falling on him when a tornado struck Elgin. A fellow named Thomas Rieser played him, and a harrowing tale it was, too. He spent most of his career working in a funeral home, and the actor said his near-death experience gave him considerable empathy with the bereaved.

Other permanent residents of the cemetery evoked by the tour included Louise Logan (d. 1972), who organized relief during the Depression (played by Bernadette May or Tameron Keeffe); Trygve Rovelstad (d. 1990), a noted Elgin artist who designed, among other things, the U.S. Bronze Star medal, the 1936 Elgin Centennial half dollar, and the Pioneer Family Memorial on the Fox River (Steve Delaney); Nora Wagner (d. 1923), who, along with other young women, repaired a washed-out major Elgin road in 1908, as officialdom dilly-dallied at the task (Thea Delaney); and Jessie Sauceda (d. 2001), who arrived in Elgin as a child when she and her family fled the chaos of the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s (Estela Macias-Bonner).

My own favorite was Dr. Alban Mann (d. 1943), city physician and a force for public health (played by Don Gingold). In 1916, he figured out the source of a typhoid outbreak that killed 26 residents: the Elgin National Watch factory.

“The source of the contamination was traced by Dr. Mann to a leaky valve, which separated water from the watch factory’s reservoir on Watch Street and water taken from the river,” the Elgin Historical Society notes. “The leaky valve allowed river water seepage to contaminate water pumped to drinking fountains throughout the watch factory building.”

That incident came up during the talk about his life, as you’d expect. “Dr. Mann” also expressed astonishment that people are still skeptical about vaccines, which I’d say is a reasonable assumption about how the good doctor would react, were he magically aware of goings-on in our time. As has been pointed out, Dr. Mann, there’s still no vaccine for stupidity.