The Nicholas Conservatory & Gardens

Posted on April 17, 2016 by admin

As a destination from the northwestern suburbs of Chicago, Rockford has a number of advantages. For one thing, it isn’t that far. It’s easy to drive there, visit one place at least, maybe eat a meal, and then come home. But it’s far enough not to be in the northwestern suburbs. There are still wide-open farm fields between here and there, and some smaller towns. Someday metro Chicago and metro Rockford might well conurb, to make up a verb, but that hasn’t happened yet.

None of that would matter if there weren’t a few interesting places to see in Rockford, but there are. Such as the Klehm Arboretum, a fine warm-weather destination, or the Anderson Gardens. The Rock River is also worth a look, with its various pedestrian-oriented amenities.

I wrote in 2003 about our visit to the riverside, “We drove a short ways north of downtown, looking for a more expansive park at which to finish off the afternoon. We found it on the other (west) bank of the Rock River, at the Sinnissippi Gardens and Park, which had a greenhouse that was already closed…”

These days, the greenhouse is permanently closed. It was replaced by the Nicholas Conservatory, which opened in 2011. I’d read about its development and opening, but didn’t get around to taking a look at it until Saturday, when we drove to Rockford exactly for that reason. Saturday, April 16, 2016 here in northern Illinois was as warm and pleasant as a spring day can be, the complete opposite of only a week earlier, the miserable cold April 9. That was an impetus to go.

We weren’t disappointed by views of the Rock River (more lyrically, the Sinnissippi River) from near the new conservatory. People were out along the riverside trail, but not a throng of them.

Waterfowl were out too.
A stone’s throw from the river — if you’re inclined toward that kind of mischief — is the conservatory.
The facility’s web site is a little thin on facts, but it does say that it’s “the third largest conservatory in Illinois, offering an 11,000-square-foot plant exhibition area complete with water features, seating areas, and sculptures, all in a tropical plant setting.”

I’d guess that the Lincoln Park Conservatory and the Garfield Park Conservatory, both in Chicago, are both larger — I’m fairly certain of that — but whatever its relative size, the Nicholas Conservatory is an elegant construction, and LEED Gold besides. More about its creation here.

The University of Illinois During the 2016 Spring Break

Posted on March 28, 2016 by admin

On the afternoon of March 18, Lilly and I drove down to Champaign-Urbana, and on the next day, we took a look at the University of Illinois flagship campus, which happens to sprawl across both of those small towns. Since our visit, Lilly has decided to attend there in the fall. She’d been leaning toward it anyway. We’d only been there once before, briefly, during our return from the Downstate towns of Arthur and Arcola in the spring of 2007. So it was as if we’d never been there before, especially for her.

Spring break had just started at the university. That meant only a handful of students were around, including some who were clearly leaving. On one street on campus, buses were lined up and ready to take students to specifically marked destinations, mostly in the Chicago area. Spring break also meant, happily, that parking was free and easy.

Even so, we spent a lot of time on foot. Without much of a plan: sometimes new places call for the old random walkabout. Lilly will certainly learn all she needs to know about the place and more in the fullness of time. The campus has a lot of fine buildings, especially fronting the Main Quad, and I was especially taken with Foellinger Auditorium and its green dome at one end of that quad, though I didn’t quite get an image of its full domed glory.

The building dates from 1907 and was designed by Clarence H. Blackall, a Boston architect who did a lot of theaters, and if you read a list of them, very many didn’t survive the great age (that is, regrettable age) of knocking down old stuff, whose apogee came in the 1960s. The Foellinger has clearly endured, though I’ve read that it wasn’t up to stuff acoustically at first, and needed a lot more work. We didn’t pop inside for a look. Next time, maybe.

Not far away was the 185-foot McFarland Carillon, which dates only from 2009.
A Missouri firm called Peckham, Guyton, Albers & Viets, which seems to do a lot of higher ed work, designed the tower, which has 49 bells. We noticed bells ringing at half hours and quarter hours, sometimes, but I’m not sure it was the carillon.

Elsewhere we peeked inside the chapel at St. John’s Catholic Newman Center, which is part of a complex that includes Newman Hall and the Institute of Catholic Thought, and is the largest Newman Center in the country, according to Wiki. Dating from 1926, the chapel has a splendid interior. I explained to Lilly that it was named after Cardinal Newman, not Alfred E., but she didn’t know either of them.

Nearby is the Episcopal Chapel of Saint John the Devine, also a part of a campus ministry. I wanted to take a look in there too, but it was closed for the day.

Heading back to our parking space, we encountered one of the many pieces of public art on campus.There was no plaque nearby that I saw, but information is online. It’s full title is “Tree of Life Fantasy: Synopsis of the Book of Questions Concerning the World Order and/or the Order of Worlds,” by Alice Aycock. As we approached it, I figured it might be a massive sundial, as I’ve seen recently, but no.

This description lacquers on the art-ese pretty well, but it does rhetorically ask, “can we not comprehend the sculpture solely as an interesting, if baffling, assemblage of disparate elements?” Yes, we can. Interesting, but in my amateur opinion not baffling, because it’s mainly an interesting assemblage of disparate elements, though I’d say an interesting “combination of shapes,” since disparate is a ten-dollar word best saved for special occasions.

Black Hawk & John Deere 2003

Posted on April 19, 2015 by admin

In April 2003, we took a short trip to north-central Illinois. We made a stop at the Black Hawk statue, whose formal name is “The Eternal Indian,” by Lorado Taft in Lowden State Park in Ogle County.

As I wrote then, “the statue, made of concrete, is about 50 feet high and stands on a bluff overlooking the Rock River and some of the town of Oregon. The head and neck represent an Indian, looking pensively off into the distance. His arms are folded in front of his chest, and from there on down the statue is less representational, but is clearly a human form.”

We also took a look at the John Deere Historic Site in Grand Detour, featuring a blacksmith demonstration.

“The re-created smithy was… the exact size of John Deere’s original Grand Detour shop, not including a latter addition, and presumably the original didn’t devote about a fifth of its space to a railed-in section where tourists stood. Otherwise, it was an evocative re-creation. A lot of iron & steel tools and implements on shelves, hanging on pegs, scattered around on various tables and benches. A bellows and a coal-burning furnace, which was glowing. A real anvil and some mean-looking, anvil-beating tools at hand.”

The Rock Island National Cemetery & Confederate Cemetery

Posted on April 7, 2015 by admin

These days, visiting the Rock Island National Cemetery means crossing over to Arsenal Island (formerly Rock Island) in the Mississippi River, which is located smack in between all four of the Quad Cities. The island is occupied by a U.S. Army facility, and has been the site of one kind of military installation or another for about two centuries. You pass through a checkpoint where a soldier looks at your driver’s license and asks your business, and then it’s a short drive the cemetery.

It was a quiet place on the morning of March 28, a Saturday. It’s probably quiet most of the time.

The entrance to the Rock Island National Cemetery used to be marked by this piece of ironwork.

These days, the historic gate marks the entrance to the cemetery’s Memorial Walkway, which features about 30 memorials to various branches of the armed forces, or groups related to them, such as Pearl Harbor survivors, Mexican War veterans, female veterans, Gold Star Mothers, and local veterans organizations. I was glad to see that the Seabees have a stone there.

Not that I have a special connection to the Seabees, though I used to work with a fellow who said that his brother, who had died in Vietnam, had been a Seabee. It’s nice to see lesser-known battalions get their due.

The walkway leads to the grave of Thomas J. Rodman and his wife, Martha Ann. The NPS says that “Brigadier General Rodman, the ‘Father of Rock Island Arsenal,’ was an officer during the Civil War and was the arsenal’s commanding officer from 1865 to 1871…

“Rodman invented the construction method used in producing [Rodman guns], which involved casting the cannon barrels around an air- or water-cooled core, ensuring that the barrel cooled and hardened first. This allowed the cannon to withstand higher pressures, making them stronger, safer, and more reliable, while also greatly increasing the lifespan of the cannon.”

Not far from the Rock Island National Cemetery is the Rock Island Confederate Cemetery, “final resting place for nearly 2,000 prisoners of war who died in captivity from disease and the poor living conditions of the camp,” the NPS says.

It’s a much simpler cemetery, with only one memorial besides the gravestones, a six-foot obelisk erected only in 2003. (Some work around it seems to be under way now.) It says:

In memory of the Confederate veterans who died at the Rock Island Confederate Prison Camp. May they never be forgotten. Let no man asperse the memory of our sacred dead. They were men who died for a cause they believed was worth fighting for, and made the ultimate sacrifice.

Erected by the Seven Confederate Knights Chapter #2625 and the Daughters of the Confederacy.

The Rock Island prison camp, incidentally, is where Margaret Mitchell put character Ashley Wilkes after his capture in the service of the CSA. So by a peculiar circumstance, he’s better known for being there than any of the actual prisoners.

Quad Cities-Iowa City ’15

Posted on March 29, 2015 by admin

Or, back to visit Herbert Hoover. Not that President Hoover’s a particular favorite, but we were out that way. It started late Thursday afternoon, when all of us got in the car and headed westward, eventually putting up for the night in Moline, Illinois, one of the Quad Cities, our first of two nights there.

On Friday morning, we made our way to Iowa City — not following the most direct route, exactly, but getting there in the early afternoon for a look-see around the University of Iowa. It’s among the places Lilly is considering for her continued education. Late March being unpredictable, the air wasn’t very warm, but the sun was out and it wasn’t cold enough to discourage a walkabout on campus, or the nearby college-town business district, or a visit to the former state capitol. A re-visit for most of us, though it’s been quite a few years.

On our way back to Moline that afternoon, we stopped in West Branch, Iowa, birthplace and burial site of the 31st President of the United States. This time I insisted that everyone get out of the car and take a look. Lilly took my picture, so now I have a Manus Hand-style photo with a dead president. It’s the only one of that kind that I have.

On Saturday morning, I was up earlier than the rest of my family, taking the opportunity to visit the Rock Island National Cemetery, along with the nearby Confederate Cemetery, burial ground for CSA POWs on Rock Island. On the way back, I toyed with the idea of wandering through the John Deere Pavilion, but left it for another time.

In the late morning, we visited the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, the successor entity to the Davenport Museum of Art that’s been open about 10 years. Interesting collection, not overwhelmingly large, and including something I’d never seen before: a section devoted to Haitian art.

That was it for this 48-hour quickie. Except for a few minutes’ drive through Le Claire, Iowa, where we stopped for gas. Notable as the birthplace of Buffalo Bill Cody, and home to a museum devoted to the showman. We left that for another time as well.

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.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US: Illinois