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.

Somebody’s Lying

Posted on March 4, 2014 by admin

At 5:12 on Tuesday (my answering machine tells me), we got our first robocall of the election season. Since it’s an off-year election, the volume probably won’t be as high as in ’12, nor as entertainingly daft.

Still, I’m recording it here. The candidate is in the Republican primary. Regardless of who wins that primary in the Eighth Congressional District of Illinois, incumbent Rep. Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat, is odds-on favorite to win the general election.

Anyway, the call went as follows: “This is Hugo Z. Hackenbush, and I’d like a few seconds of your time to set the record straight. Over the last few weeks, my opponent for Congress has smeared my good name, and has lied about my residency in Illinois.

“The truth is, I was born and raised in the Eighth District, and the only time I left was to serve my country in the United States Marine Corps, which included five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It’s clear that my opponent’s attack on me and the military aren’t just wrong, they’re unpatriotic. Please send a message for freedom, and vote for me, Hugo Z. Hackenbush on March 18. Thanks for your time.”

Atlanta ’10

Posted on October 13, 2013 by admin

About three years ago on the way to Springfield, we stopped in Atlanta, Illinois, which isn’t far from I-55 but which used to be right on U.S. 66. These days that means there’s enough nostalgia traffic – and probably local regulars – to support the revived Palms Grill Café. We ate there three years ago, only a short time after it re-opened. Some years before that an artist named Steve Estes painted a mural dedicated to the original joint across the street.

A helpful sign under the mural says: “In its early days, weekly dances and bingo nights accompanied the blue-plate specials served at the Palms Grill Café. The “Grill” was also Atlanta’s Greyhound bus-stop. You just turned the light on above the door if you wanted the bus to pick you up. Located directly across Rt. 66 from this mural, the Palms Grill Café served Atlanta’s citizens, as well as a steady stream of Rt. 66 travelers, from 1936 until the late 1960s.

In his design of the “Palms Grill Café” mural, Steve Estes of Possum Trot, Kentucky, captured the intent of the “Grill’s” first owner, Robert Adams, an Atlanta native, who named it after a restaurant he frequented during trips to California. The mural was completed in June 2003 during the “LetterRip on Rt. 66” gathering of approximately 100 Letterheads in Atlanta.

The Letterheads are a group of generous and free-spirited sign painters from across the United States and Canada who are interested in preserving the art of painting outdoor signs and murals.

Just down the street from the mural is a small park with a handful of memorials. This stone caught my eye.

The modern sign says:

Knights of Pythias “Memorial Tree” Stone

This stone was dedicated by the Atlanta, Illinois Knights of Pythias organization as a memorial to veterans of World War I. The stone was placed under a Memorial Tree on November 11, 1921. At some unknown date, the stone was removed from its original location. It then rested behind the Atlanta Library for many years. Research continues to identify the exact location of the memorial tree. Atlanta’s Acme Lodge #332 of the Knights of Pythias was organized in 1892. No longer active in Atlanta, the Knights of Pythias, is an international fraternity founded in 1864, whose motto is Friendship, Charity and Benevolence.

Can’t remember which tree was planted by the Knights of Pythias, eh? Just goes to show you that no matter how fervently one generation wants later ones to remember something, they probably won’t. Or if they do, it’s a matter of chance as much as anything else. Then again, you can also make a reasonable argument along the lines of, Who cares which tree a long-gone fraternal order planted in an obscure town in the heart of North America in the early 20th century? Really important things will be remembered. (Except that they usually aren’t. Except by historically minded eccentrics.)

The Atlanta Library is an octagon dating from 1908. That’s a fine shape for a building. There need to be more of them. The exact reasons for choosing that shape for this library are probably lost, but I’d think it made for better lighting in an era when electric lighting, though available, wouldn’t have been as bright as later.

According to the library web site: “Near the turn of the 20th century, the Atlanta Women’s Club established a committee with the purpose of erecting a Library building. Land located next to the tracks of the Chicago and Mississippi railroad, was donated to the City of Atlanta by Seward Fields, a descendant of William Leonard. Leonard was one of the contractors responsible for helping build the Chicago and Mississippi railroad… A beautiful bookcase dedicated to Seward Fields is still in use at the Library.

Mrs. Martha Harness Tuttle… helped fund the erection of the Atlanta Library building. In 1908, she donated $4,000 – over half the funds needed for the new structure. The Library Board adopted plans for erecting an octagonal-shaped structure as prepared by architect Paul Moratz, of Bloomington, Illinois… The new building was dedicated on Saturday, March 28, 1908.

The Opera House and the Box It Came In

Posted on August 22, 2013 by admin

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: acknowledge the famous, or at least the noteworthy, but don’t ignore the obscure. Never know what you’ll find in obscurity. Besides, odds are you yourself are obscure. It’s the human condition, or rather the condition of most humans.

That’s an over-long intro for the Sandwich Opera House, which we chanced on after seeing the Farnsworth. Sandwich, Illinois, is a town on U.S. 34 in southeastern DeKalb County. The Opera House dates from the golden age of opera house construction in small-town America, the late 19th century. It’s apparently also the City Hall. It was closed, but you could admire it from across the street.

It’s still in use for entertainment. For a little contrast, I took a picture of this brutalist box of a building across the street.

Maybe it isn’t beyond saving. What it needs is a lick of paint – some DayGlo green, say. It could be the Green Cube of Sandwich.

More on the Farnsworth

Posted on August 21, 2013 by admin

Our tour of the Farnsworth House on Saturday took us inside its floor-to-ceiling glass walls, where photography isn’t permitted on weekends. We heard about the mechanical aspects of the house — all those pesky practical items like electricity and water — the guest bathroom, Dr. Farnsworth’s bathroom, the kitchen zone with its long stainless steel prep area, the history of the curtains, the placement of the few lights, and the back-and-forth between client and architect about whether there ought to be at least one closet. Architect said no, client said yes, so ultimately a freestanding wardrobe was fashioned by one of Mies’ employees for the house.

Previously I hadn’t bothered to find out much about how the house came to be. Not to worry, a video at the visitor center and the guide filled us in on some details, such as initially warm (maybe very warm) relations between the unmarried Dr. Farnsworth and the free-with-his-affections Mies, which eventually grew acrimonious. Especially when Mies presented her with a bill she considered inflated. Less might be more, but not when it came to his fee.

Outside again we went to the “back” of the house, that is, the side facing away from the river.

This is a fuller view.

The row of kitchen-counter-like shapes under the brown interior structure are in fact kitchen counters, with the “bedroom” off to the left. The black cylinder-like thing under the main level — the other columns are white — is where water goes in and out, and electricity comes in.

Got a good look under the house, too.

Another bit of the house’s history involves the land to the west. Lord Palumbo built a boathouse there, and just beyond it is a road: Fox River Dr., which crosses the river within sight of the house. In the late 1940s, the road and bridge were small. In the late ’60s, Kendall County took two acres by eminent domain to widen the road and build a bigger bridge. Dr. Farnsworth fought it, but lost. With the increase in population over the decades since then in this part of the state, the road’s now pretty busy, at least on a Saturday afternoon. Quiet isn’t something you get on the Farnsworth grounds these days.

From the back of the house, the property slopes upward to a small hill, which would have been the rational place to build a dwelling, considering its location above the flood plain. But as suggested about some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s works, perhaps it’s best to think of this Miesian creation as a work of sculpture rather than a house. And a right interesting sculpture it is.

The Farnsworth House

Posted on August 20, 2013 by admin

I can’t say that I know architecture, but I know what’s interesting. The Farnsworth House is definitely that. Built over 60 years ago in rural – and now exurban – Illinois, it’s a glass-and-steel, but most notably glass, house designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, famed Chicago architect (which he became later in life, another unwitting gift to America from the Nazis), and one of the panjandrums of Modernism. It’s also hard for amateur photographers like myself to get a good image of the place.

This is the “front,” facing the Fox River, illustrating the fact that the house is all about the horizontal: a “deck” (my term) accessible by stairs, a main level accessible by more stairs, and then the flat roof, presumably accessible by ladder. The deck is wide open to the elements, though shaded by trees in our time, and the main level is either outside or inside, as delineated by glass walls. Except that, as I understand it, one of the purposes of the glass walls was to help obviate the distinction between exterior and interior. Unless you close the curtains, which I understand the residents did with some regularity, and which the National Trust does when it isn’t giving tours.

For a while we stood in front as our guide filled us in on the building’s origin and other details of the site, such as its propensity to flood. Mies knew that, of course, and raised the structure to avoid the worst of the Fox River’s periodic rampages. Turns out that because of development upstream, rainwater and snowmelt drain faster into the river than they used to, so the river rises higher than it did in the early 20th century. Oops. Such torrents flooded the house in 1956 and 1996. Not sure that’s what Mies had in mind when he talked of integrating the built environment with the natural one.

Apparently the ’96 flood was especially vicious, popping one of the floor-to-ceiling windows and washing away some of the artwork belonging to Lord Palumbo, the property’s second owner.

We went up the stairs to take in the view from the deck…

…and then to main level. Both levels are floored with Italian travertine, a wonderful stone hand-picked by Mies. According to the guide, so far the National Trust hasn’t been able to locate any exactly like them, so there aren’t any replacements. It’s wonder we were allowed to walk on them at all.

Up on the main level’s “porch,” (my term again) our guide gave us the rules for going inside: no photos, no shoes, and no sitting around on the furniture. We were free to take pictures of the interior through the window-walls which, of course, offer an expansive view of the inside.

Something you appreciate after standing around for a few minutes on the main level, at least I did, is the lack of handrails. That is, in fact, a code issue that would prevent the house from being built in our time exactly as it was in the late ’40s (among a few other things). The drop is only a bit more than five feet, of course, but even so it could be an injurious crash to the ground, or worse, into the narrow space between the deck and the main level. I don’t know if the matter of rails ever came up between the original owner, Dr. Edith Farnsworth, and Meis, but I feel certain any such thing would have been ruled out for aesthetic reasons.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US: Illinois