When flutists Richard and Emily Graef bought their weekend home in Galena, the last thing on their minds was music.
In fact, music was what they wanted to get away from, even though she has a busy concert career and he is assistant principal flute for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
They were seeking what Emily calls ”a contrary lifestyle.”
They also didn`t plan to do any restoration work.
”Our intention was to buy a completely finished house and relax,” Emily said. ”We had no intention of getting a fixer-upper. We had never contemplated this in our lives.”
They had barely contemplated Galena. The two ended up in Ulysses S. Grant`s old hometown late one afternoon on a random drive several years ago, and Emily realized it was the same town she had visited-and not liked-on a school field trip 25 years before.
Back then, however, many Main Street buildings were empty, and her classmates thought ”the town was just dismal. They brought us out here in a bus,” she said, ”and we couldn`t believe we`d ridden all that way (from Chicago) to come to this ghetto.”
She was a little surprised to find herself back again as an adult, but the couple needed a place to stay that night, and Galena now has a lot to choose from.
Ensconced at a Queen Anne bed-and-breakfast called the Hellman House, the Graefs went out for their first walk in town and met a group of teenage boys hanging out on one of Galena`s steep public stairs.
As an interracial couple, the Graefs braced for trouble, but Emily recalls that all the boys said was, ”Hi! How are you? Have a nice walk.”
The Graefs were delighted. They came back often after that, always staying at the Hellman House, and began to look for a place of their own.
Like many who are drawn to Galena, what the Graefs ended up with was exactly what they didn`t think they wanted:
A wreck.
To be sure, it was a red-brick Federal-style wreck that incorporated one of Galena`s oldest buildings, an 1828 limestone cottage that is now the kitchen wing, but it was a wreck nonetheless.
”Why would I want this house? It`s horrible,” Emily asked herself when their Realtor steered them into it. ”Every room, I got more and more repulsed,” she said. ”There was so much mildew that the walls were black.” Every room had falling plaster, the dark walls made the house dreary even on a bright day, and the brick section of the house, which dates from 1845, needed complete tuckpointing.
Then she walked into the living room, whose rippled antique windows gaze out over a valley that resembles rural England.
At that moment, ”I realized it had a lot of potential,” she said, ”and that was it.”
The decision ”took her three minutes,” said Richard. ”It took me several weeks.”
They bought the house in May 1987, but they didn`t let Emily`s parents visit for nearly two years.
”There wasn`t a room you could sleep in and not fear plaster would fall on you,” Emily recalled. ”All of our friends thought we had completely lost our minds.”
Mercifully, the previous owner had had the plumbing replaced and a decent furnace installed. The Graefs hired professional masons for tuckpointing and had the house rewired. But they did the rest of the work themselves, from reputtying all the original six-over-six windows, to refinishing the pine plank floors, to repairing the original sand-plaster walls (no wallboard in this house, thank you).
It wasn`t easy.
Emily remembers painting walls faster and faster one winter Sunday, interrupted by frantic phone calls from Richard, who was at home in Evanston. He was trying to pry her loose so she could drive home in advance of a coming blizzard:
”You`ve got to leave NOW!” he kept saying. ”Just a little bit more,”
she kept answering. She got the walls done and made it home.
Redoing the floors, Richard wore out his right arm pushing a floor sander over the beat-up planks. For the next six months, he said, it hurt every time he raised the flute to his lips.
He often drove home after a Galena work weekend ”flexing my fingers and thinking, `What am I going to do?` But all comes back,” he said with a smile. ”The body regenerates.”
Even so, why would professional musicians, careful of their hands and their talent, put themselves through this?
”It`s just so good for me to get away from the precise, concentrated work I do on stage,” Richard said, ”to come here and work with my hands and go home with my hands sore and my arms sore but with my brain cleared.”
Besides, he said, ”we love it here. When we don`t come for two or three weeks, I feel fidgety. We`re coming here more and more to relax-and to practice.”
Yes, practice-as in music.
Their professional passion crept into the picture almost immediately.
That`s why the east parlor is now the music room, complete with an 1820s piano and a 1790s English flute.
That`s also why the Graefs were tempted to explore Turner Hall, a 19th Century limestone edifice on Galena`s Bench Street that is still used for public entertainment. ”It is spectacular in terms of its acoustics and size,” Richard said.
For the Graefs, it was also irresistible.
Not long after they bought the house, and mostly for fun, they invited some friends from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) to come out to Galena and put on a concert.
The result was not only heartening-Galenians are a grateful and enthusiastic audience-but the concert planted the seeds for what is now the Galena Chamber Ensemble, a mostly CSO group that performs four public concerts a year. The ensemble has carved out enough of a reputation that last fall, in what the community considered a coup, Friends of the Chicago Symphony organized a tour around one of its concerts.
”We play music that we want to play, and we ask our colleagues what they want to play, and we have fun and let everybody sort of shine,” Richard explained.
Said Emily, ”The audience responds so beautifully, it makes you want to play more and more and more-it makes you give some of the best performances of your life.”
While building the ensemble-they still store its music stands in their Galena hallway-Richard kept up his regular performance and tour schedule with the CSO, and Emily continued to give concerts nationwide.
And they worked on the house whenever they had a chance, breathing plaster dust and assembling antiques and mementos to make the place live again.
Some are intensely personal, like the sampler Richard`s mother began at age 8 and finished for their house at age 72. Or the photograph of Emily`s great-grandmother, who was born in slavery.
Other treasures are elegant, an aged oil painting of a flute performance at the Court of Frederick the Great, for example. Or whimsical, like the ponderous antique pump organ in the upstairs bathroom. (It works, too.)
But one find fits no known category.
The Clipper (the name is painted on its faded red sides) is a Rube Goldberg machine that stands in the corner of the dining room, topped with bottles.
It`s an ancient grain separator, picked up for $5 at a farm auction.
”That,” a Galena native told them acidly, ”looks like something a yuppie would put in his dining room as a bar.”
”Good idea!” said Richard.
The dining room holds another treasure, usually not visible: the record of their Galena visitors.
In other houses, people ask you to shut the door when you leave. The Graefs ask you to sign it. The inside of the dining-room closet door is paved with drawings and signatures, a permanent guestbook written on wood.
As every home-restorer discovers, the Graefs soon found that everything they did took more time than they expected. And usually got more complicated. The flowered wallpaper Emily chose for the tranquil upstairs guest room had to wait three years to be applied. Downstairs, the front door turned out to be the original, all right, but it was too chopped up to be used and had to be copied.
In the graceful, two-story front hall, the first wallpaper they applied looked wrong; so the Graefs took a deep breath, stripped it off and started over. The right paper turned out to be a Colonial Williamsburg pattern in rose on cream.
Outside, they discovered the original brick walk buried under a few inches of sod, all around the house, so they painstakingly unearthed that too, along with planting clumps of jonquils.
”In the first six months we had the house, we got the most done; the rest took 3 1/2 years,” Emily said.
But all the agony is over now.
The house is finished, so meticulously done that it`s one of the five tour homes (along with their beloved Hellman House) on the Galena Historical Society`s annual Tour of Homes, next Saturday and Sunday.
And Emily no longer has to be afraid of having her parents visit. Her father, in fact, is prone to come downstairs in the morning and announce, ”I feel like I`m in a dream!”
And he`s not far wrong. From the misty green of the gentle hills outside the front windows, to the lace curtains and pre-Civil War antiques, the house spins a 19th Century spell.
That may be partly due to the resident ghost, one Osee Welch, an Irish wagon-maker who was prosperous enough by 1845 to build the red-brick section onto the front of the old stone cottage, tripling the home`s original floor space.
It is Welch, the Graefs suspect, who knocks all their pictures and old prints and antique maps askew every night.
At least, the Graefs point out, the ghost is benign and friendly, like so many things in their Galena life.
