I’ve gotten to know Champaign-Urbana better since 2016, and on Saturday was back again, helping facilitate Lilly’s return to UIUC for the 2018-19 academic year. I didn’t have a lot of time to look around, but one thing did catch my eye: the Colonel Wolfe School building.

Looks a little run down, but seems like it has good bones. The name, hard to see at a distance, is carved in stone over the main entrance.

Lilly will be seeing this building with some regularity, so I asked her whether she knew anything about it. She didn’t. Neither did I, so I did the next best thing: made something up.

“I’ll bet it was a private school run by this fellow Wolfe in the late 19th century,” I said. “One of those schools where the students were mistreated. You know, regular beatings for minor infractions. On quiet moonlit nights, maybe you can hear their ghosts moaning inside the old school.”

Lilly brushed off this suggestion, but I will say in my defense that I suspect that’s how places acquire their reputation as haunted: by people saying they are.

The facts of the Wolfe School are more prosaic. There isn’t a gush of information online about it, but I did find out it was a Champaign public elementary school built in 1905. That was a time of school building reform, so it probably had the latest amenities, such as light-admitting windows and toilets on each floor.

As a school, Colonel Wolfe lasted into the 1970s. Some time later, UIUC acquired the building and used — uses? — it for this and that (sources are a little vague). Doesn’t look like the university has put much money into spiffing up the exterior.

As for Colonel Wolfe — John Wolfe (1833-1904) — he was a civic leader, though not an office holder, in late 19th-century Champaign. As a young man, he fought for the Union as a member of the 20th Illinois Volunteer Infantry and then the 135th Illinois Infantry.
An obit is online. Wolfe never even saw the building, much less thrashed his charges there.