Graue Mill & Fullersburg Woods Forest Preserve

Posted on August 22, 2018 by admin

Not long ago I was passing through the western suburbs, not too far from where I lived — and it feels a little strange to put it this way — around the turn of the century. Since I had a little extra time, I decided on a whim to visit the Graue Mill and Museum.

Re-visit it. The last time I was there, I remember pushing one of my daughters in a stroller. I don’t remember which one. In either case, that was a while ago. Around the turn of the century.

Graue Mill is a water-powered grist mill on Salt Creek in DuPage County, dating from the 1850s. The machinery inside is elaborate, restored to operation, and still grinding small quantities of grain that the museum sells. I didn’t go inside this time, but pondered the handsome exterior of the mill.

As well as its large water wheel.
“Frederick Graue was born in Germany, came to the United States and settled in Fullersburg, Illinois, in 1842,” the museum’s web site says. In 1849, he purchased the site of a sawmill that had burned down, along with his partner William Asche, and constructed a gristmill there. Asche later sold his share to Graue.

“Limestone for the basement walls was quarried near Lemont; bricks for the rest of the walls were made from clay from the Graue farm and fired in kilns near the mill site; flooring, beams, and posts were from white oak timbers cut along the I&M canal. The four one-ton buhrstones used for grinding were imported from France. After the gristmill opened in April 1852, it ground wheat, corn and other grains produced by local farmers.

“The mill was a major center of economic life during the 19th century and was also used by Fred Graue to hide runaway slaves on their journey to freedom in Canada.”

In the 20th century, the now-obsolete mill fell into ruin, but it was restored in the 1930s by none other than the CCC. Specifically, Troop V-1668, made up of veterans. These days, the mill is part of the Fullersburg Woods Forest Preserve, which is a unit of the DuPage County Forest Preserve District. The village of Fullersburg, for its part, was never incorporated and doesn’t exist as a modern entity.

This is Salt Creek next to the mill, which gives it its power.
Salt Creek, despite its name, is really more of a river in this part of DuPage County, but never mind. It joins the Des Plaines River in Cook County, which later joins the Illinois and then of course the Mississippi.

I had time enough to take a stroll on one of the paths through Fullersburg Woods Forest Preserve, not too far from the mill.

Along the way, the path takes you past other views of Salt Creek, slightly upstream from the mill.
Past summer fields. The years do go by like so many summer fields.
And a handful of well-maintained CCC structures.
Though I didn’t capture any of the activity with my camera, the paths of Fullersburg Woods are very popular with dog walkers and their dogs.

Songbird Slough

Posted on March 28, 2017 by admin

Sometimes a name on a map is intriguing enough to inspire a visit to the place. So it was with Songbird Slough, a part of the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County. Charming name. When we went on Friday afternoon, it was toward the end of a pleasantly warm day, the kind you get sometimes in March (but not too often).

The Forest Preserve District says that “the 393-acre preserve is a part of a large glacial kettle formation that is the low point for a 1,000-acre watershed that drains the surrounding urban area. Songbird Slough is a combination of natural and constructed wetlands, fishing ponds, restored prairies, and meadows.”

Still a little ahead of the greens of spring, but not a bad place for a stroll, especially in 70-degree temps.
“This urban retreat serves as a nesting spot for numerous grassland and song birds, and is a great spot for wildlife viewing, especially during waterfowl migration season,” the forest preserve continues. Not that many highly visible birds around on Friday, but there were a few.
We left at about 6 pm for a 20-minute or so drive home. By the time we got home, it was 10 or even 15 degrees cooler. The sudden drop was the beginning of a cold, wet, generally unpleasant winter-spring mix of a weekend.

Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery (Or, I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghost)

Posted on September 1, 2016 by admin

By the end of August, summer’s a little tiring, but I’m also not glad to see it go. Odd how that works. Back to posting again on September 6.

As if I hadn’t seen enough cemetery grounds for the day last Saturday after I visited the Oak Woods Cemetery, I decided before going home to fulfill a longstanding ambition and see Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery in south suburban Bremen Township. Going all the way to the south suburbs just to see Bachelor’s Grove has always been a stretch, but I was already further south than I usually go, making the cemetery relatively close.

Bachelor’s Grove is known for one thing locally, and maybe even in the wider world: ghosts. Graveyards.com’s Illinois page, which usually includes fairly sober assessments of burial grounds, says the following:

A small, abandoned graveyard in the southwest suburbs has been called the most haunted place in Chicago — and one of the most haunted places worldwide.

This is Bachelor’s Grove.

WARNING: Do not go in or near Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery at night. Do not go in or near Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery at Halloween, or for several weeks before or after that date. You will be arrested and charged with trespassing.

The author of graveyards.com recommends that you don’t go to Bachelor’s Grove at all.

How do we know the place is haunted? Same way we know anywhere is haunted: people say it is. If I sound skeptical, I am. Not necessarily about the reality of noncorporal beings, but about the tales of Bachelor’s Grove. It’s easy to tell stories about an abandoned graveyard in the woods, especially if those woods happen to be in a suburban area where teens are looking for places to hang out undisturbed.

On the other hand, I’m not skeptical that forest preserve police — Bachelor’s Grove is on forest preserve land in our time — might go looking for nighttime visitors. The cemetery has an indisputable history of wankers showing up to vandalize the stones. Otherwise I can’t see that visiting the cemetery counts as trespass, since the point of a forest preserve is public use.

To get to Bachelor’s Grove, you park at one of the Rubio Woods Forest Preserve parking lots on the north side of the Midlothian Turnpike (143rd), and then cross that road not far to the west. A trail leads into the woods from the south edge of the turnpike. A sign on a chain between two posts says NO ENTRY, but I took that to mean vehicular traffic, since the path is wide enough for a car.
I’ve read that this is the former route of the Midlothian Turnpike. If so, that would have taken traffic next to the cemetery, which is about a fifth- or a quarter-mile walk away. The cemetery itself presumably predates any modern paved road, having been founded, according to Graveyards.com, in 1864. The most recent burial was supposedly in 1965, but in any case it never was a large or populous necropolis. Instead of a city of the dead, more like a hamlet of the dead.

Older pictures of the cemetery, such as at Graveyards.com, depict a unkempt place, but on August 27, 2016, I found a well-maintained graveyard, at least in terms of undergrowth control, surrounded by a tall, newish chain-link fence, but with no gate. There are no signs telling you the name of the place or anything else.

Could be that the forest preserve is now taking a “broken windows” approach to discouraging vandalism. That is, if the grounds look cared for, people are less like to do further damage. There’s still plenty of evidence of earlier damage, however, such as tumbled-down tombstones.
Evidence of wankers with spray paint, too.
Many of the stones merely look old and weather-worn, some of them beyond deciphering any names or other information.
Others have held up better, or maybe are more recent replacements.
The cemetery clearly has living visitors who do the opposite of vandalism. People have left items for the “Infant Daughter” at the largest stone in the graveyard, with the name Fulton on the other side. According to Graveyards.com, a descendant of these Fultons was the last trustee of the cemetery, turning it over to the forest preserve district in 1976.
I was the only living person at Bachelor’s Grove early that afternoon, but as I was leaving the forest preserve, I saw a man and a woman headed in the direction of the cemetery. So I guess there’s often a trickle of curious visitors. Unless I saw a couple of really life-like haints, down to the sunglasses and baseball caps.

Greener and Greener

Posted on May 10, 2016 by admin

The greening of northern Illinois happens every spring, but I never get tired of it. Here are a few views on Saturday of the Poplar Creek Forest Preserve, a place we’ve been going for some years.

There are expanses of grass at the forest preserve.
Along with thickets.
The blooming dogwood.
And the eagerly exploring dog, mostly exploring with her nose.
Provided, of course, you take the dog out for a special-treat walk among the May greenery.

The Mallard Lake Trail, Near the West Branch of the Du Page River

Posted on February 28, 2016 by admin

I noticed a sign today at Mallard Lake Forest Preserve, which we haven’t visited in nearly a year.

Uh-oh. I don’t think that sign was there last year. But now there’s evidence that the dread zebra mussel has invaded these waters, as it’s hopscotched across the lakes of the world. Wiki tells me that the mussel has come from its native lakes of southern Russia to be a pest in North America, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Sweden.

It’s no trifling matter. The Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries tells us that, “Many water treatment and power facilities must now treat their systems to keep them free of zebra mussels, beaches must be periodically cleaned of decaying masses of dead zebra mussels, and bottom-dwelling organisms and fisheries have been negatively impacted. In the United States, Congressional researchers estimated that zebra mussels cost the power industry alone $3.1 billion in the 1993-1999 period, with their impact on industries, businesses, and communities over $5 billion.”

Fortunately, zebra mussels don’t invade the land to attack casual walkers on forest preserve paths. That’s all we wanted to do today, because once again the weekend was unusually warm for February, nearly 60 degrees F.

Instead of simply circumambulating Mallard Lake, we also walked along a spur called the Mallard Lake Trail, which leads to a municipal park called Heritage Park, which is part of subdivision I know nothing about. For a quarter of a mile or so, Mallard Lake Trail seemed remote, though it was an illusion, helped by the day’s strong winds, which muffled the sound of traffic off in the distance.
Within view of part of the trail is the West Branch of the Du Page River.
It might have been a natural-flowing stream at one time, but it has the look of a man-made channelization at this point. By the time we got here, the middle-of-the-woods illusion was punctured by houses in the background, and a school off in the other direction.
The West Branch of the Du Page River flows quite a ways south — including through downtown Naperville — to meet the Du Page River in Bollingbrook, Ill. The Du Page joins the Des Plaines at a place called Moose Island in Channahon, Ill., but very near there the Kankakee River joins the Des Plaines and they all form the mighty Illinois River, a direct tributary of the Mississippi just north of St. Louis.

So you might say we took a stroll in a very small part of the Illinois River watershed, which includes all of the little cricks and rivulets around here.

Pit of Winter, and No Place to Toboggan

Posted on January 17, 2016 by admin

According to online sources, the temperature outside as I post is zero degrees Fahrenheit, with small negative numbers expected in the near future. Tomorrow will see highs in the positive single digits. So here we are, in the pit of winter.

Twenty-eight Januaries ago I was tramping around at one of the Du Page County Forest Preserves, maybe Blackwell Forest Preserve in Warrenville. I used drive out from the city periodically to visit a friend in Warrenville, usually on a Saturday. During the warm months, I’d help him tend his large garden, receiving a share of the produce.

In the winter, I forget what we did, besides watch videos and — on January 23, 1988 — visit a snow-covered forest preserve as the snow fell. I had my camera, and it was during a period when I was taking black-and-white pictures. We happened across a closed toboggan run.

I can’t pin it down now, or rather don’t want to spend much time at it, but I’m fairly certain that the local forest preserves closed their handful of toboggan runs sometime not long before I took the picture. Probably it was the expense, or the liability, or both.

The Last of the Summer Weekends. Maybe.

Posted on September 28, 2015 by admin

On Friday afternoon, we took the dog for a walk at Poplar Creek Nature Preserve. A balmy afternoon. Most of the tree foliage is still green, but includes distinct tinges of yellow or brown. Goldenrod blooms profusely, and so do white daisy-like flowers, along with a larger version that’s lavender-colored, but not actually lavender. The tall grass is brown, the short grass green. The cicadas still buzz and the grasshoppers still hop.

The Woodfield Mall was busy in its own way on Saturday afternoon. I can’t remember the last time I was there, but it’s been a while. There’s a certain amount of renovation going on in the common areas, but nothing that affects the flow of people too much. A number of stores displayed Star Wars merchandise in highly visible ways. I haven’t been keeping track, but that must foreshadow a movie along those lines.

Sure enough, a line in the Sunday Tribune Arts and Entertainment section tells me that, “As a new Star Wars movie looms [interesting choice of verbs], many of the franchise’s original fans are as devoted as ever.” Guess the merch is partly for them and their offspring. As far as I’m concerned, the first three movies, while very entertaining in their time, need to go in a box labeled Things of the Past.

Most of Sunday was overcast, so I wondered whether I was going to see the lunar eclipse. A couple of hours before dark, however, the clouds cleared away, and at about 8:30 I went out to see the shadow of the Earth falling on the Moon. At about 9, Yuriko, Ann and I were out, and then again 15 minutes later for totality. The dog was out, too, but typical of dogs, she didn’t give a fig for the celestial phenomenon (no smell involved, I guess). The copper moon was a pretty sight, but it didn’t look any bigger than usual to me.

In time for the eclipse, the Atlantic posted these images, marvels of 20th-century manned space exploration. These images are more recent marvels of (mostly) unmanned space exploration.

Lilly was at a friend’s house on Sunday evening, so I did what you do these days, and sent her a text about the eclipse. Later she said she’d seen it. I’m also glad to report that at least two neighboring families on my block were out to see it, too. I noticed that while taking the garbage out under the dark copper moon.

Palatine Prairie Nature Preserve

Posted on June 24, 2015 by admin

I’ve driven by the edge of the Palatine Prairie Nature Preserve and the adjoining Riemer Reservoir Park many times, traveling on N. Quentin Rd. in Palatine, Ill. Last Thursday, I decided it was time to stop and take a look at the place on foot. It happened not be raining, but the evidence of frequent rain was all around in the lush greens of this particular patch of Illinois greenspace.
That makes it look like the middle of nowhere. It’s no such thing. At the northern edge of the Palatine Prairie is the Union Pacific Northwest line of the Metra commuter rail system (not the line I usually take). Here’s a train bound for Crystal Lake at least, and maybe further northwest, and making the prairie a little less quiet.

Not that the place is quiet. The roads aren’t far away. Palatine Prairie is the northern section of the greenspace; the somewhat larger Riemer Reservoir is to the south, and they’re separated by the small W. Wood St. A trail winds through both, and it’s a pleasant walk when it isn’t raining or too hot. The weather was just right for us last week.

The greenspace that isn’t completely given over to prairie also includes a disc golf course. Guys were out playing disc golf. They seemed pretty serious about it, too.
I’ve never played the game myself, though in the connected basements of Branscomb Quad at VU, we tossed frisbees at some kind of goals. Maybe the corridor doors, but I don’t think the rules were very well refined.

Ants!

Posted on May 18, 2015 by admin

Ah, spring. When ants scurry through vast cities and elk eat weeds. We took a walk in the Ned Brown Forest Preserve (Busse Woods) on Saturday, among the flush of new green trees and carpets of light purple flowers in the undergrowth (phlox? They have five petals). Just next to the paved path I noticed the largest ant hill I’ve ever seen, distinguished by dark earth a bit darker even than the surrounding rich Illinois soil.

It had a rectangular shape, about 10 feet by four: 40 square feet of ant hill surface. Puny by world standards, but still big. A close look revealed a multitude of active mid-sized black ants. I don’t know exactly what kind, but does that matter? (They’re all bent on world domination.) Someone had put three footprints in the ant hill, probably just to stir up the ants. The ants marched through the foot-sized depressions without any trouble.

Wonder how deep it went. If a cursory investigation’s any indication, a fair ways down. Something I didn’t know existed: ant hill casts.

Other insects are emerging. The season’s first mosquito landed on my arm. It was sluggish, and in a moment I snuffed out whatever existence it enjoyed as a mosquito. But more of its ilk will soon be on the wing. At Busse Woods in particular, which is marshy in a lot of places, and sporting a lot of puddles, since it’s been raining nearly every other day lately.

We saw larger creatures too. Elk Grove Village maintains a small herd of elk in a large fenced enclosure near the intersection of Arlington Heights Road and Higgins Road. Usually they’re off in the distance, but on Saturday they were near the fence and easy to see: three males with short horns still, three females. Mostly going about ruminant business. They seem fond of dandelions.

Opening Notes of Spring

Posted on April 13, 2015 by admin

The opening strains of the northern Illinois spring symphony have begun. The grass greened up almost overnight last Thursday after a sizable amount of rain. Large puddles were left over, too, though that’s not necessarily a harbinger of spring.

After a few days, it was merely a soggy, muddy patch. The dog enjoys the mud. She’s been with us two years now.

We took a walk with the dog at the Poplar Creek Forest Preserve on Saturday, and I heard throaty frogs awake and (presumably) singing for a mate. On Sunday, I heard the faint strains of “Turkey in the Straw” from my office, and went to the front door to take a look. Sure enough, it was an ice cream truck.

Speaking of spring: A note to Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Hillary Clinton, and Marco Rubio (so far): I don’t want to hear about your efforts to become president. It’s the spring of 2015. I don’t even want to hear about it in the spring of 2016. It can wait till the fall of that year. Except maybe the candidacy of Vermin Supreme.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Forest Preserves