Step inside. My private tour of a Sears Modern Home in Carlinville, Illinois in Sept. 2013 & May 2014.

I was fortunate to meet Mr. Robert Cook, a homeowner of a Whitehall Sears Modern home in Carlinville, Illinois, when I was on a tour of the Macoupin County Courthouse in 2013. After a couple of phone calls, he invited me over for a private tour of his home. In May of 2014, my wife went with me for the second photoshoot. I brought Mr. Cook some fresh bakery pastries on both visits.

Mr. Robert Cook and his Whitehall Sears Modern home on a corner property in Carlinville, Illinois.

Original catalog photo and floor-plan.

Mr. Cook, a man in his mid-70s, purchased the home around 1993. He has painstakingly refurbished the home himself, except for the plumbing. The porch was already enclosed when he bought it. There is also an added family room in the back of the house measuring 20”x17” and is about 4 inches lower than the rest of the first floor so the roof of the add-on would not block a second-floor window. The home began life with a coal burner for heat and hot water but was converted to gas a long time ago.

Front of house.

Rear of house addition.

Added unattached 2 car garage in the style of the Sears Home.

As you can see from the photos I took, Mr. Cook has stripped all the wood trim and doors, saving the original home's hardware. Even most of the button wall switches for the lights are original. The stained glass was added somewhere around the late 40s or early 50s, but Mr. Cook can only guess to the date. The windows are hand-cut leaded glass. The two-car garage was added later. The back door was moved to accommodate the add-on family room. Upstairs are three original bedrooms, but the previous owner had built closets in each one. And, of course, the bathroom, with original tile still on the floor, had also been updated.

Also updated in the house is the removal of old ducting. New ducts and an air conditioner were added. Mr. Cook searched for time period furniture so he could decorate his home as it would have been when it was a new house. With that in mind, he has yet to find a suitable dining room table and chairs.

The Standard Addition - 8 models for Standard Oil of Indiana built in Carlinville, Illinois for a coal mine community.

Carlinville, Illinois has the largest single collection of Sears kit homes in the United States. Beginning in 1917, Carlinville saw its population grow by one-third when Standard Oil of Indiana opened two new coal mines. An influx of young European immigrants coming to work the mines caused the town’s population to swell from 4,000 to 6,000, creating a severe housing shortage.

Standard Oil officials found a solution to this crisis in an unlikely place; Sears and Roebuck. For the first time, people could order home kits in a variety of models through the Sears mail-order catalog. Eight different models were selected for Standard Addition, ranging in price from $3,000 to $4,000, with the company placing an order for $1 million for homes, the largest in Sears history. By the end of 1918, 156 of the mail-order homes had been placed within a nine-block neighborhood on the northeast side of town.

In 1926, Standard Oil executives determined they could buy coal cheaper than mining it themselves, and they made the decision to close the mines. The closure devastated the town and required years before it fully recovered. The workers moved away, mostly to other mines, and abandoned the housing to the ravages of time and the occasional party-goers from nearby Blackburn University. Standard Addition remained largely vacant until the mid-1930s when the houses were offered for sale to the public. Families could purchase one of the run-down five-room homes for $250 and a six-room model for $500. Even in the midst of the Great Depression, comparable homes were selling for $4,000, so it was an incredible bargain for lucky buyers.

Today 152 of the original 156 homes still stand. Four no longer exist on their original sites; three were destroyed by fire and one was moved to the country. As the largest single repository of Sears Homes in the United States, Standard Addition has been the subject of several documentaries and has attracted the attention of architects and nostalgia buffs from around the globe.

Copyright © 2014 Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

The checkered past of Cave-In-Rock on the Ohio River in Hardin County, Illinois.

Hardin County in Illinois was formed in 1839, but the natural centerpiece of the whole county was first seen by European eyes a hundred years before. In 1739, the French explorer & surveyor M. Chaussegros de Léry charted the course of the Ohio River, found, mapped and named it "Caverne Dans Le Roc" or, in English, the Cave-In-Rock.

The cave had, of course, been in existence for thousands of years. It was worn into the bluffs by Ohio River flooding, probably extensively during the melting following the Wisconsin Ice Age, which ended about 10,000 years ago. The effects of the 1811-1812 New Madrid earthquake (7 and 7.5 on today's Richter scale) may have further contributed to the formation of the cave.

Many caves are the topics of stories told about the happenings in and around the premise. Possibly no cave, though, has more stories and legends told about it than this cave! Cave-In-Rock outlaws, pirates and counterfeiters reined for fifty years beginning in 1790. As is true with most legends, facts are few; sometimes, even local folklore is hard to document in any credible way. However, legend holds that notorious counterfeiters Philip Alston and John Duff used the cave as a meeting place in the 1790s. 

Through a relationship with Duff, Samuel Mason moved his base of operations to Cave-In-Rock in 1797. Mason had been a Revolutionary War militia captain and later served as an associate judge in Pennsylvania before moving his family to Kentucky. After arriving in Kentucky, Samuel Mason became the leader of a gang of river pirates and highwaymen outlaws who wreaked havoc around Cave-In-Rock, Stack Island (a point on the Mississippi River about 200 miles north of New Orleans) and along the Natchez Trace. Mason's gang's practice was to rob travelers going down the rivers. They also pirated boats carrying merchandise and supplies down the rivers. It was common practice for men to move supplies down the rivers, abandon the flatboats at the end of their journey, then return home along the Natchez Trace. If the Mason gang missed robbing them on one of the great rivers, they'd have yet another opportunity to rob them on land along the Natchez Trace.

Samuel Mason used Cave-In-Rock as a central point of his base of criminal operations, which stretched all the way to New Orleans. His tavern in the cave created an easy lure for travelers to stop as they passed, but the combination of the gambling den, brothel and refuge for criminals made it the perfect trap.

Micajah "Big" Harpe, born Joshua Harper (c.1748-1799), and Wiley "Little" Harpe, born William Harpe (c.1750-1804)

Some believe that the first recorded mass murderer in American history might have spent time at Cave-In-Rock. Micajah and Wiley Harpe, known as "Big" and "Little" Harpe, were active during the last decade of the 18th Century. 

Known as the Harpe brothers, the two started out life as first cousins.

The Harpe brothers spread killing and despair wherever they went. While they operated primarily in Kentucky and Tennessee, there are some accounts of their horrible activities on the Illinois side of the Ohio River. 

"Big" Harpe was the first of these three bandits to lose his head to captors, but eventually, Samuel Mason and "Little" Harpe were captured, killed and beheaded. Their heads and skulls were left strategically in plain view to deter future outlaws. Their departure only made way for the next generation of thieves and counterfeiters!

In the early 1800s, the Sturdivant Gang and the Ford's Ferry Gang appeared in the region. The Sturdivant Gang originated in Colonial Connecticut. By 1810, third-generation counterfeiter Roswell S. Sturdivant led his gang, primarily based in St. Clair County, Illinois, but also occupied a fortress nearby Pope County. The Ford's Ferry Gang had a more local foundation. James Ford (1770-1833) was a business and community leader in Kentucky and Southern Illinois on both sides of the Ohio River. The other side of his dual personality was that of a gang leader and his bandit's high-jacked flatboats for decades!

Isaiah Potts and his wife Polly, who owned a tavern, Pott's Inn, near Ford's Ferry, are two of the most colorful characters in our story. Ferry goers would depart the boat and take the short trek to the tavern as they ventured inland. It was a common occurrence for the travelers to be attacked, robbed and killed along the route to the tavern. 

This photograph of Pott's Inn was taken in the 1920s by Cave-In-Rock.

Although one descendant of Isaiah and Polly believes their behavior has been highly exaggerated over the years, one story seems to live on. Did they murder their son when he returned after being gone for years? While there is no credible evidence, legend holds that young Billy Potts left home after being caught by locals in the act of murder. Young Potts changed his ways and prospered. He returned home after many years, but his parents didn't recognize their well-dressed son, lured him to the infamous spring for a drink, and robbed and murdered him. As they had often done, they buried him in a shallow nearby grave. The next day, friends of Billy Potts came looking for him and described having seen him the day he got off the ferry. Isaiah and Polly realized what they had done. They dug up his grave and found a young man bearing a birthmark just like their son had. If it is true, it is a sad ending.

Happily, outlaw folklore isn't the only history associated with Cave-In-Rock! Although not too highly revered today as a highly educated researcher or author, in 1833, Josiah Priest wrote about cave paintings he observed at Cave-In-Rock. Priest described the paintings as plants, animals, humans, the sun, the moon, and stars. He described the humans as wearing clothing similar to the early Greeks or Romans. He wrote, "On the Ohio, twenty miles below the mouth of the Wabash, is a cavern, in which are found many hieroglyphics, and representations of such delineations as would induce the belief that their authors were, indeed, comparatively refined and civilized."

In 1848, another writer visited the cave. William Pidgeon was a well-known antiquarian and archaeologist. He became famous for his 1858 work, Traditions of Dee-Coo-Dah and Antiquarian Research, although at a later time, his work was critically deemed to be partly almost science fiction. He described the curious pictographs at Cave-In-Rock as humans that looked like ancient Egyptians. Pidgeon wrote about his belief, because of artifacts he had found, that an entire network of a mound-builder race was occupying sites in Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota. At the time, many in the science community made fun of him. In the past 150 years, history and prehistory have unfolded, and we now know that the Ohio River Scenic Byway region was such a place!

The pictographs described by Pidgeon and Priest have long been destroyed, but more recent graffiti tells the stories of other visitors to the cave. In 1913, the Ohio River flooded, and B.C. and Cole paddled his boat into the cave, stood up and carved his name into the cave ceiling.

In 1929, Illinois bought 64.5 acres of land, including the cave. Additional parcels were purchased later, and all combined form the current 200-acre Cave-In-Rock State Park. The beautiful park stretches from the Ohio River's shoreline to the top of a 60-foot-tall bluff. It is maintained by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, and the lodge and cabins are managed by Marty Kaylor, a Cave-In-Rock lifetime resident. Kaylor recently reported that IDNR reported that in 2012, 514,000 visited Cave-In-Rock State Park, and Kaylor said the number significantly increased over the 2010 number of 227,000 people.

ADDITIONAL READING:

Mass Murderers in the Illinois Frontier: The Harpes Brothers.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D. 

Wonderland (Amusement) Park, Danville, Illinois / Tilton, Illinois

Wonderland Park was built circa 1903 by William B. McKinley, chief executive of the Illinois Traction System. In 1905 the park was operated by the Danville Amusement Co. 

The park was believed to be situated on the west side of South Gilbert Street, just north of the intersection with Tilton Road. The park has also been described as being along Tilton Road near the United Autoworkers Hall and the Golden Oil Company. The third suggested location was between Wayside Drive and Parker Avenue on Tilton Road.

Wonderland Amusement Park was only open on Sundays. The round trip fare was 10 cents. Admission was free if you presented your round trip ticket for the interurban train. There were baseball games during the week but none of the rides or other attractions were open.

Note the misspelling of "Shoot the Chutes" on this postcard.

Rides included a roller coaster, a merry-go-round and other carnival-type rides. Between 1905 and 1907, the park was enlarged to about 15 acres. An old theater was enlarged and remodeled to accommodate about 1,000 persons. A restaurant, a funhouse, a small zoo, a bandstand, billiards and pool hall, bowling alley, refreshment stand, and other attractions were added.

Wonderland Park had a base ball park at the rear of the grounds. There was a Minor League Base Ball team (class D), named the "Danville Old Soldiers" listed as playing in Wonderland Park in 1906.

The name Wonderland Park was changed to Wayside Park in 1907.

An article in the Danville Daily Democrat of June 16, 1907, describes it this way: 

"With pretty flowers, green grass, newly painted buildings, a handsome merry-go-round, which has cost $3,000 to place, practically new roller-coaster, a penny arcade not excelled outside of Chicago, a handsome new Nickelodeon, a theater filled with the stellar lights of comic opera, four additional small shows, cages of fine animals from the provinces of Brazil, eating-stands and dozens of new features which have been added to the old ones which stood in Wonderland Park last year, the new Wayside far overshadows anything ever shown in this or any other city in the state, even twice the size of Danville."

According to an article in the Danville Press-Democrat, Wayside Park was dismantled in April of 1909

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

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Thank you Leann Stine of the Danville Public Library, for adding information about Wonderland Park.