The Illinois Centennial Monument

Posted on September 10, 2014 by admin

Rain in the morning, sun in the afternoon, drizzle in the evening. At least that’s variety. And it isn’t cold yet.

Henry Bacon’s well known for the Lincoln Memorial, as well he should be. He isn’t very known for the Illinois Centennial Memorial Column, a.k.a., the Illinois Centennial Monument, in Logan Square in Chicago, which is on the Northwest Side. I’d never taken a look at it up close until recently.

It’s a little forlorn. One of those monuments with passed by thousands daily, noticed by few if any, and marked with a little graffiti just to drive home the point. Then again, it’s been quite a while since the 100th anniversary of Illinois’ statehood, which was in 1918.

It’s a Doric column, and according to one source at least, made up of 13 solid marble segments based on the same proportions and scale as the columns of the Parthenon colonnade in Athens (or Nashville, come to think of it). The eagle on top, done by sculptor Evelyn Beatrice Longman, evokes the one on the Illinois state flag.

She did the reliefs along the base of the column as well, depicting Indians, explorers, farmers and laborers.

Plus a few figures from Antiquity. I’m pretty sure that’s Hermes holding a train and a steamship, maybe offering them to the laborer holding the hammer, and it looks like Ceres is to the workingman’s left. On Hermes’ right – is that Eratosthenes? He looks Greek enough, and he’s got a globe, fitting for the father of geography and the first person to more-or-less figure out the circumference of the Earth.

It’s too much to expect an Illinois Bicentennial Memorial in a few years, but may this one can be cleaned and restored for the occasion.

Mother Jones in Mt. Olive

Posted on August 6, 2014 by admin

Gene Autry – the singing cowboy, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” Gene Autry – recorded “The Death of Mother Jones” early in his career: 1931, shortly after the death of labor agitator Mother Jones (Mary Harris Jones). It’s worth a listen.

For years I’ve been seeing the sign on the Interstate advising me that Mother Jones’ memorial is off Exit 44 in Mt. Olive, Ill., not far outside greater St. Louis, but it’s been a one-of-these-days destination. The day turned out to be July 27, 2014, our last day of the trip. I’d planned to have lunch at Crown Candy Kitchen in St. Louis, and remarkably enough, I didn’t have any trouble finding that establishment. But at about 1 on that Sunday afternoon, a line was out the door. Crown Candy might be good, but not that good.

So we pressed on into Illinois. I’d stopped for lunch in Litchfield some years ago, and had a good enough memory of that, so that was the target. But then I saw the Mother Jones sign, and a billboard for a diner in Mt. Olive, pop. 2,000-plus. A winning combo. We got off at Exit 44 and followed the signs to the Union Miners Cemetery, final resting place of Mother Jones and presumably a lot of mining men. This is the view from her memorial.

The view of her memorial.

Why Mt. Olive? The Illinois Labor History Society tells us that Mother Jones herself made the request a few years before her death.

A Special Request to the Miners of Mt. Olive, Illinois:

When the last call comes for me to take my final rest, will the miners see that I get a resting place in the same clay that shelters the miners who gave up their lives of the hills of Virden, Illinois on the morning of October 12, 1897 [sic], for their heroic sacrifice of [sic] their fellow men. They are responsible for Illinois being the best organized labor state in America. I hope it will be my consolation when I pass away to feel I sleep under the clay with those brave boys.

— Mother Jones

The monument was dedicated in 1936, and according to the society, “The cash raised for the monument was $16,393.25. All of the labor involved was donated. It stands 22 ft. high on a 20 x 18 ft. base. It is built of 80 tons of pink Minnesota granite. The name of the sculptor is lost from the record.

“The dedication was, itself, a monumental event. Five special trains and 25 Greyhound buses brought celebrants to Mt. Olive. Others came in private cars or hitch-hiked to the town. The crowd was estimated at 50,000. There were 32,000 in the line of march.”

The memorial also includes plaques to men killed in the Virden Massacre, which Jones mentioned, a gun battle in 1898 between union men and company guards over whether strikebreakers were going to detrain at a major mine in Virden. The miners prevailed, in that no one got off the train, but a number of them died. The names of the dead I saw included E.W. Smith, E. Kraemmerer and Joseph Gitterle. “General” Alexander Bradley has a plaque too, though he died in 1918.

“Who were the miners who led this fight? The best known was Alexander Bradley, a 32-year-old mule driver who worked in the Mt. Olive mines,” says Illinois Labor History… By the mid-1890s, Bradley had traveled widely throughout the Midwest, tramping with other unemployed miners to Chicago and taking part in the famous march to Washington DC of Coxey’s Army of the unemployed of 1894.

“In the course of the strike, ‘General’ Bradley, as he became known, developed a well-earned reputation as a colorful and charismatic figure. Arriving with his ‘troops’ in Collinsville, for instance, Bradley sported ‘corduroy trousers, a light blue coat, white shirt, brown straw hat, toothpick (narrow and pointed) shoes, at least three emblems of secret societies and several rings on his fingers…[as well as] a light cane or a furled umbrella.’ ”

More about Virden – “Hotter than San Juan Hill” — is here.

James “Pate” Philip and His State Park

Posted on July 7, 2014 by admin

The Illinois Department of Natural Resources tells us that “first-time visitors to James ‘Pate’ Philip State Park (formerly Tri-County) may initially wonder what the area’s specific feature is. After all, the land is predominantly farmland that had been tilled and grazed for years. The north branch of Brewster Creek flows through the property, but most of the streambed had been channeled to move water away from former agricultural fields. Along the north boundary of James ‘Pate’ Phillip State Park, starting in the east, a row of houses rises up like a wall against a sea of grasses. Further west along the boundary is an active gravel pit and by the Bartlett Park District sport field. To the west of the park, across Route 25, is a landfill in the process of being closed.”

I wondered something along those lines on Saturday, when we went to take a walk at James “Pate” Philip State Park (Philip is a retired state politico; I’ve never read an explanation for the nickname, but he’s always referred to by it).

I’ve seen the park on maps as a green blotch for some time now. It was created about 10 years ago. I assume it had been farmland until then, though housing development probably came close in the 1990s. Now the idea is to return it to prairie, and dechannelize the creek.

Seems like a good idea to me. The Prairie State doesn’t have quite enough prairie. Since we had cloud cover and only warm temps, it was a good walk. The park is mostly flat and lush in early July, with grasses almost as tall as a grown man and a lot of wildflowers – including clusters of tiny gorgeous orange blossoms that I don’t think I’d ever seen before. My natural history knowledge is meager, so I might not ever know what they’re called.

I was also intrigued by the fact that the park is within three counties: mostly Du Page, but also Cook and Kane. The tri-county border is, in fact, within the park. I don’t know if there’s any kind of marker, and we didn’t feel like walking far enough to see it, but maybe I’ll go look someday.

We also visited Pratt’s Wayne Woods on Saturday, just south of Pate Philip’s State Park, and took a walk around one of its bodies of water. It was to have been part of a state park, but that didn’t happen, and it’s now a part of the Forest Preserve District of Du Page County – at 3,400-plus acres, the largest chunk under its authority, in fact. The district says, “Pratt’s Wayne Woods Forest Preserve in Wayne is located on the outwash plain of the West Chicago Moraine. Made up largely of wetlands, this landscape combines calcium-rich water with wet sandy soil to support plant life more commonly seen near Lake Michigan.

“Today, the forest preserve is home to over 1,000 species of native plants and animals. Below the savanna’s widely spaced oaks grow dogbane, pale-leaved sunflower and smooth yellow violet wildflowers. In the marshy areas, explorers can view great Angelica, marsh marigold, shooting star, nodding ladies’ tresses and spotted joe-pye weed as well as egrets, great blue herons and wood ducks.”

We saw a lot of plants and a few animals, probably including some of those listed above. But the district forgot to mention what a swell habitat the park is for mosquitoes and especially gnats. It’s been a good year for gnats.

Tri-State Leftovers

Posted on July 2, 2014 by admin

Cool for July 2, but I know the heat will return. Such are Northern summers. Tomorrow isn’t a holiday, but it ought to be. Back to posting on Sunday.

The bridge that crosses the Mississippi from Savanna, Illinois, to Sabula, Iowa, is exactly wide enough for two vehicles, and no wider. It’s a steel truss bridge, and more than 80 years old. These facts alone make it a thrill to drive across, but a conscientious – make that sane – driver isn’t going to take in the view of the Father of Waters while crossing; he has to leave that to his passengers.

The main steel structure on the Iowa side eventually gives way to a much longer and slightly wider causeway that passes through high waters and lush green islands. At that point it’s Iowa 64, and also US 52. The last time I drove over such watery lushness was in Louisiana bayou country.

North from Sabula to Dubuque is also US 52, and a branch of the Great River Road. At this point, Illinois 84 (and a bit of US 20) is the branch of the Great River Road on the opposite bank, in Illinois. We spent a fair amount of time on both roads the weekend before last, and I can say one thing: bikers are fond of the Great River Road. We saw a lot of them on the roads and parked in various towns along the way. They weren’t usually young men, but mostly wizened fellows, probably out for the weekend.

The Great River Road is actually a chain of state and local roads passing through 10 states from Louisiana to Minnesota, or vice versa if you travel the other way. It’s a National Scenic Byway totaling over 2,000 miles, according to the Federal Highway Administration. Signs along the way look like this (and in fact we drove past this exact place).

We stopped for a moment in Bellevue, Iowa, on US 52 to take a peek at Lock & Dam No. 12. There’s a small roadside park that offers a nice vantage of the structure. As I got out of the car to look at the dam, I noticed a young family – husband, wife, child of three or four – also standing in the park, seemingly admiring the structure with more intensity than people usually devote to infrastructure. Odd. (My own family members were in the car.) Maybe they were a couple of young engineers. For the record, the dam creates Pool 12, with a total capacity of 92,000 acre ft. The US Army Corps of Engineers completed it in 1939 and still operates it, and the structure’s been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2004.

The campgrounds at Mississippi Palisades State Park are well-designed and expansive. They don’t cost that much, either: $10 per night for a tent site. But the wet spring and early summer, and probably the close proximity to the Mississippi and many smaller pools of water, also meant we were in close proximity to a lot of bugs. This bothered Lilly and Ann in particular – you should have heard the commotion when they discovered a spider hitchhiking a ride in the back of the car. In the vicinity of the campground itself, mosquitoes mostly weren’t the problem, or maybe our DEET kept those away. Gnats were the biggest nuisance.

By night, they’d all calmed down and the fireflies were out. Gnats = nuisance. Fireflies = joy to behold. They don’t get in your face and they put on a show.

Things You See in Mount Carroll

Posted on June 30, 2014 by admin

Somewhere or other at some time, I read that Mount Carroll, Illinois, had enough things to see to recommend a short visit (how’s that for source amnesia?). Wherever I got it, I can pass along that recommendation. It’s a small place, with only about 1,800 people, but it has a sizable concentration of historic structures. We took a look at a few of them on the afternoon of June 20.

That includes a fine courthouse, the Greek Revival part of which dates back to before the Civil War. Elsewhere on the courthouse grounds are a few monuments – but not quite as many as some courthouses I’ve seen – including a tall one dedicated to Union veterans. Turns out that Lorado Taft sculpted the cavalryman at the top of the monument, which is formally called the Carroll County Civil War Soldiers And Sailors Monument.

Writing in the short-lived blog Larado Taft: The Prairie State Sculptor, Carl Volkmann says, “Lorado Taft was a member of a team of artists who was commissioned to create the Carroll County Civil War Soldiers And Sailors Monument. George H. Mitchell designed the monument, and Josiah Schamel constructed the foundation. John C. Hall designed the annex that was added later when county officials determined that there were many names missing from the original honor roll list.

“The monument consists of a fifty-foot vertical shaft with a Lorado Taft-sculpted soldier holding a flag at the top. Lewis H. Sprecher of Lanark posed for the statue and made several trips to Taft’s Chicago studio to model for it. Two additional statues are attached to the base of the monument, one an infantryman and the other a cavalryman.”

Not far from the town square is a genuine, honest-to-God Carnegie Library that is, in fact, still a library. We went in for a look around. It seemed like a nice facility for a town the size of Mount Carroll. We were the only ones in the library except the librarian – it was about 30 minutes ahead of closing time on a Friday afternoon – and I spoke briefly to her, telling her that I wanted to show my daughters what a Carnegie Library was. I also wanted to come in because they aren’t exactly common sites.

Later, I checked, and my feeling wasn’t quite right. At least according to this Wiki list, some 60-odd Carnegies are still functioning libraries in Illinois alone, out of more than 100 originally built. Seems like most of them are in small towns away from metro Chicago, so unless you frequent that kind of small town, you won’t see them much.

Just before we left town, we came across something that’s presumably not always near the courthouse in Mount Carroll: this unusual car.

Unusual for American roads, that is. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Morris Minor in this country. It’s so unusual that besides it being a Morris, I didn’t know anything else about it.

Naturally, I had to look it up. Through the marvel of Google images, I was able to pin it down to a Morris Minor 1000 Traveller. In its pages on Morris Minor history, Charles Ware’s Morris Minor Centre Ltd. in Brislington, Bristol, says “there is only one other car on British roads today which is as familiar as the Morris Minor, and that’s the Mini. That both were designed by the same man is no coincidence, and indeed Sir Alec Issigonis is one of the very few car designers whose name is recognised by the man or woman in the street and not just by enthusiasts or fellow engineers. [This might be true in the UK, but I have no way to judge that.]

“The products of Sir Alec’s genius have had a profound and highly beneficial influence on the British motor industry, so it is hardly surprising that it is his first car, the Morris Minor of 1948, which has become the subject of this proposal for a long-life car.”

More about Sir Alec here. I’m not sure I’d want to own a Morris Minor myself, but it’s a distinctive design. Good to see one loose on the roads of North America. I’m glad there are enthusiasts in this country. Any fool with money can buy a snazzy new sports car or a Lexis or the like, but it takes some imagination to invest in a Morris Minor.

Driftless Views

Posted on June 23, 2014 by admin

The area we visited last weekend included places in three states, but that’s just political geography, invented by men and as transient as a firefly light in the grand scheme of the Earth. A more geographically apt way to think of our destination is the Driftless Area. That too is transient – everything is, over millions of years – but not quite as much.

The concept is well enough known that a part of Wisconsin markets itself as Driftless Wisconsin, no doubt to compete with the better-known wooded areas up north and the cities in the southeast part of the state. The organizations web site tells us that “the Driftless Area includes 24,103 square miles, covering all or part of 57 counties in southwest Wisconsin, southeast Minnesota, northeast Iowa, and a small part of northwest Illinois.

“The region’s distinctive terrain is due to its having been bypassed by the last continental glacier. The term ‘driftless’ indicates a lack of glacial drift, the deposits of silt, gravel, and rock that retreating glaciers leave behind.

“The Driftless Area is characterized by its steep, rugged landscape, and by the largest concentration of cold water streams in the world. The absence of glaciers gave the rivers time to cut deeply into the ancient bedrock and create the distinctive landforms. Karst topography is found throughout the area, characterized by shallow limestone bedrock, caves, sinkholes, springs, and cold streams.”

That is, this part of the Midwest actually has some pleasing topography, unlike most everywhere else. A 1989 visit to Galena, which is in that “small part of northwest Illinois,” introduced me to the pleasures of the land, even though visiting Galena is mostly about the pleasures of a late 19th-century streetscape put to modern uses.

Sometimes I miss hills. The modest hills of San Antonio, the more robust ones of the nearby Hill Country, the rolling hills of Middle Tennessee. So it’s good to visit the hills and take a look off in the distance.

A few miles east of Galena, in rural Jo Daviess County, Ill., along US 20, there’s an overlook worth stopping at.

Further south at Mississippi Palisades State Park, there are views from the palisades. They’re not quite as lofty as the more famous Hudson River features, it seems, but offer fine views of the Mississippi all the same. The hilly topography shapes human settlement as well. A large bluff rises west of the Mississippi in the city of Dubuque. The older parts of the city spread out below the bluff, down to the banks of the river. Naturally, the visit only whets my appetite to take a look at more of the Driftless Area, especially up around Prairie du Chien in Wisconsin and Effigy Mound Nat’l Monument in Iowa. It’s a mild affliction I suffer.

Tri-State Summer Solstice Weekend ’14

Posted on June 22, 2014 by admin

Late on Friday morning we drove west for a few hours – and enjoyed a remarkably long in-car conversation among ourselves, no radio or other electronics playing – and by mid-afternoon arrived at Mississippi Palisades State Park, which overlooks the Mississippi River just north of Savanna, Ill. The plan included bits of three states in three days. My plan, really, since my family humors me in such matters, and lets me think up the details of little trips like these.

Friday was Illinois. We camped at Mississippi Palisades, which is an Illinois State park and incredibly lush this year, and we spent time in Savanna, a little river town on the Great River Road, mostly to find a late lunch. Toward the end of the day, we made our way to Mount Carroll, Ill., which is the county seat of Carroll County and home to a good many handsome historic structures.

On Saturday, we ventured into Iowa – it really isn’t far – and first saw Crystal Lake Cave, just south of Dubuque. In Dubuque, lunch was our next priority, followed by a visit to the Fenelon Place Elevator. Which is a funicular. When you have a chance to ride a funicular, do it. The last time we were in Dubuque, I remember the Fenelon Place Elevator being closed for the season (uncharacteristically, I don’t remember when that was — the late ’90s?). Anyway, this time I was determined to ride it.

Afterward, we headed west a short distance to the town of Dyersville, Iowa, home to the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier, but better known for The Field of Dreams movie set, which still draws visitors. We saw both.

Today was mostly about getting home at a reasonable hour, but I had to add a slice of Wisconsin by navigating a number of small roads until we came to Dickeyville. It would be just another rural Wisconsin burg but for one thing: the Dickeyville Grotto, which actually includes a main grotto, smaller grottos, shrines, a church and a cemetery (and a gift shop, for that matter). Like funiculars, grottos demand our attention, especially such as striking bit of folk architecture as the Dickeyville Grotto.

Peonies Aplenty

Posted on June 12, 2014 by admin

Deep within Spring Valley, here in populous northeastern Illinois, there’s a log cabin built by one John Redeker, son of Friedrich and Wilhelmine Redeker, which sounds like the sort of German family that once farmed the 19th-century Schaumburg. It feels a little remote, but it’s only an illusion. These days, the cabin hosts events and exhibits.

It’s on the grounds of a peony farm that John briefly ran, but his death in 1930 at 30, and the following Depression and other factors, made it a short-lived enterprise. Still, peonies solider on at the site. Note the bushes in front of the cabin.

Not far away, in a clearing near the cabin, is a field of peonies.

A good place to spend a few solitary minutes.

More at the Klehm

Posted on May 28, 2014 by admin

One reason I like arboreta and conservatories is the signs. My memory for plant names is sieve-like, so it’s good to be able to look down and find out the name. The age of digital cameras has made it even easier to take notes based on the signs.

For instance, I know this is a W.B. Clarke Anise Magnolia (Magnolia salicifolia). It grows at the Klehm Arboretum & Botanic Garden in Rockford, a fact I documented on Saturday.

It isn’t a Southern magnolia (Magnolia grandifora). Good thing, since Rockford isn’t remotely in the South. I’d never seen magnolias quite like this, but then I’ve read there are many kinds.

Apparently W.B. Clark was an early 20th-century hybridist working in San Jose, California, traces of whom are accessible to casual Googlers. He seems to have developed some plant varieties that are still with us, such as the Anise Magnolia, whose ancestors are from Japan.

The arboretum sported a few other attractions, such as a pleasant water feature —

–and a maze of bushes. Not a very large one, and easily navigable to a child of 11 and middle-aged householders. The most interesting part wasn’t the maze itself, but the analemmatic sundial within the maze, such as we once ran across at Fermilab.

I stood on the May stone and my shadow told the time more-or-less accurately, accounting for Daylight Savings Time.

Conifer Man, Conifer Man, Does Whatever a Conifer Can

Posted on May 27, 2014 by admin

On Saturday we took a quick hop over to Rockford, Ill., and soon found ourselves face-to-face with Conifer Man.

To me this looks like a guy in a tree suit – that’s how I’d guess it looks, anyway – but it’s really one of the odd-shaped conifers to be seen at the Klehm Arboretum & Botanic Garden in Rockford, which features about 500 species and cultivars of woody plants on 155 acres. Not that I would know even a fraction of those, but still I know an odd conifer when I see one.

This, for instance, is a weeping white spruce. Ann compared it to Charlie Brown’s tree.

Next, according to the sign, is a procumbent blue spruce or, as I like to think of it, a Christmas tree implosion.

Procumbent. Now there’s a word you don’t see much, a solid Latinate that seems to be used mostly to describe plants with stems that trail along the ground without rooting. Another meaning is simply lying face down, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it used that way, with “recumbent” the main choice for lying down in some way. The terms accumbent and decumbent are cousin-words usually used in botany – “resting against another part” and “lying or growing along the ground, but erect near the plant’s apex,” respectively.

As long as I’m on a lingual tangent, the Latin cumbere, to lie down, goes all the way back to the Indo-European base keu-(2), which my American Heritage New College Dictionary appendix tells me is a “base of loosely related derivatives with assumed basic meaning ‘to bend.’ ” Plants certainly bend to be accumbent or decumbent or procumbent, but animals and people do as well, to some degree, so that fits.

Starting in the early 1900s, the site of the Klehm was a commercial nursery, and so it remained until 1985. The original owners planted a good many of the now-large trees, which are sometimes noticeable for being in rows. These days the land belongs to the Winnebago County Forest Preserve District, who have been busy in recent decades making the place less like a nursery and more like a woody museum.

Walk along the main path and you can’t miss the conifers, some of which are very large, unlike the oddities pictured above. Not that you can’t see the likes of pines, firs, junipers, spruces and so on elsewhere, especially as you go north, but even so the Klehm collection is impressive.

Naturally, we had such a casual visit that we missed some of the more remarkable trees – which I read about later – such as the grove of Bur oaks that were there before the nursery, and which might be as old as a pre-settlement 300 years. There are also some fully grown American chestnut trees on the grounds, which I understand are pretty rare, since an invasive blight destroyed most of that species in the 20th century.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US: Illinois