From a hillside, the view is of green fields and a stretch of sprawling and picturesque old oak trees. Beyond is a patchwork of more fields and woods, and though Jerome Johnson says the fields are all slated to be covered with new houses someday soon, at the moment it is hard to imagine suburbia marching onto this pastoral scene.
”We will be surrounded entirely by houses,” Johnson says. ”This will be an island.” He reaches into the lush grass around his feet. ”Look at the sedges,” he says. ”They`re coming back.”
Just out of sight above the hill, behind an old wooden barn, is an elegant but weathered red-brick house. Built in 1846 by Timothy Garfield, it stands largely unchanged-”the most substantial and best building there was on the road from Randolph Street Bridge to the Mississippi River,” as Garfield`s son Green wrote in an 1889 biography of his father.
Ranged around the house, which recently got a carefully researched restoration paint job, are some barns, an outhouse, an herb garden and a wooden chicken coop that houses exotic-looking hens and roosters. The red-brick building has served as an inn and as a farmhouse, and now it is undergoing a further transformation into a museum. The other buildings and the chickens, along with the fields and the sedges, are all integral parts of that museum.
A recent addition to the complex is another 1840s house, the home of the Burr family, who were neighbors of the Garfields, that was moved onto the property and will be undergoing rehabilitation during the coming year.
”This is an extremely intact site, historically and physically,”
Johnson says. ”It`s rare to find a historic farm situation that`s a real farm. At least, with 250 acres, you begin to see what the scope of a farm was- it`s not just a collection of buildings.
”And then to be supplemented with a complete collection of documents-that`s just unheard of. We`ve got all the historic resources; all we`ve got to do is get the money together.”
Johnson is the executive director of the Garfield Farm Museum, which started as such in 1977. The museum, located five miles west of Geneva, now hosts thousands of visitors who come each year for the annual Fall Festival, special events and year-round tours of the only remaining mid-19th Century farmstead in the Chicago area. The visitors get to see not only a historic farm but also a museum still in the making. For Johnson has big plans. He dreams that the museum will become one of the must-see attractions in the Chicago area-a demonstration of the agricultural productivity that made Chicago a great city, and a means of allowing a specialized urban society to see the source of its food.
That dream is being realized rather slowly, but then it has been a long time coming. Timothy and Harriet Frost Garfield were Vermonters who moved their eight children west in quest of a more prosperous future. Farming the rocky soils of New England, his children would always remain poor, Garfield thought. On the rich soil of Illinois, their success would be limited only by the scope of their ambition.
In 1841 Garfield paid $650 for 440 acres of prairie and oak stands in the fork of a dirt road leading west from St. Charles. The family moved into a little log house on the property.
It`s hard to imagine how hard the new settlers had to work. They added onto the log house, making it big enough for themselves and overnight guests. They raised a barn built with wood from the oaks that grew all around. They broke the prairie to make new fields. They planted and harvested corn and wheat and oats. And in the evening, after a day of manual labor, they put up guests.
Garfield had seen prosperous innkeepers in New England and thought his family could do as well in Illinois. Much of the ever-increasing traffic west of Chicago came by the farm. Farmers traveled east with wagonloads of goods to sell in Chicago, merchants went the other way with their wares and always there were new settlers moving west.
For 37 1/2 cents, travelers got dinner-which might be salt pork, potatoes and cornmeal or something more elaborate if it was available-a roof over their heads and a place to tie up their horses. Accommodations were cramped; if there was a crowd, complete strangers might find themselves sleeping together on a bed or on the floor. The night air was thought harmful, so windows were kept closed. A room full of people who quite likely had not bathed in a while must have been pungent. One night 64 people slept in the eight-room log house. But it was also merry at times. It was an egalitarian society, and if strangers had to sleep together, they also socialized together. Men in the barroom sampled hard cider and whiskey, smoked and ate popcorn. Women and teetotalers socialized more quietly in the parlor. If the guests felt energetic, there might be fiddle music and a contradance.
The lodging business was a boon to the Garfields; the five, six or eight dollars they earned in a night was good money in those days. By 1846 the family was doing well enough to build the three-story house of homemade brick. The hours spent serving guests food and drink and putting up their horses, though, could be disheartening, especially after a day of hard work in the fields.
”No odds what the business was or how tired you might be, you were liable at any time, just as you were thinking of going to bed, to be called out to look after two or three teams which might drive up with three, four or a half-dozen people and sometimes thrice that number and all hungry, and so, tired as you might be, you with mother and sisters would have to be up till midnight feeding and taking care of the crowd,” Green Garfield wrote. ”It might be in the midst of harvest, and when you would think there would be no travel and you might be tired enough to die, that was exactly the time a crowd would be onto you.”
By 1849 the family was doing well enough to build a new horse barn. But they barely needed it; that year the railroad reached St. Charles, and it took most of the traffic that had been moving by wagon and stagecoach. The late nights in the barroom dwindled, and the inn became solely a house for both the Garfields and the tenants who later leased the farm.
The innkeeping business was ancient history by the time Hannah Mighell Garfield, one of Timothy and Harriet`s daughters-in-law, decided in the late 19th Century that the farm was worth saving as a museum. Her daughter, Elva Ruth Garfield, did the groundwork by preserving photographs, letters, diaries and other documents-and by resisting offers to buy the place. In 1977 she founded two non-profit agencies to run the museum and donated 163 acres to them. She died soon thereafter, and the museum has since been run by the agencies and a group of dedicated volunteers.
The first order of business was to buy some land that had inadvertently been left out of Elva Ruth Garfield`s bequest and to restore the deteriorating buildings. Most of the money for those projects-and for the museum`s funding in general since then-came from private sources. The farm`s 250 acres will become increasingly important as open space as the surrounding area is built up.
Johnson grew up near the farm and began doing research there in 1981. ”I volunteered to inventory documents in a storeroom and got hooked,” he says.
For a while he lived in the inn as a caretaker; now he lives nearby. As director, his biggest challenge is to present the farm`s rich lode of information to visitors in an engaging way, and the best way to do that, he says, is to create hands-on experiences.
”This is not going to be one of those stop-and-read-the-sign-type museums,” he says. ”Instead of just being bombarded with information, visitors can get a feel for what it was like to live in that era. You can`t tell them how bone-tired you`d be after a day of following oxen and still go to a contradance in the evening.”
There are plenty of hands-on experiences for visitors to try at the annual Fall Festival, the museum`s biggest annual event: cornhusking, winnowing oats, spinning and weaving, breadbaking and, if the animals can be acquired on time this fall, plowing and load-pulling with a team of working oxen.
During regular tours, conducted Wednesday and Sunday afternoons, visitors don`t see those activities, but, led by a guide, they can see the lively chickens and the garden with its ”heirloom” vegetables that are similar to what the Garfields raised in their day.
Johnson hopes the museum`s day-to-day activities will someday resemble those that take place during the Fall Festival. He estimates that it will take $3 million to set up the museum he`d like to see-which would include a visitors` center in a converted barn, complete with agricultural museum, a full complement of historic livestock breeds, 20 acres of historic farming activities, including rebuilt period fences and hedgerows, and a restored 10 to 15 acres of prairie and savanna.
So when he`s not out trying to raise money, Johnson watches for the sedges and other prairie plants, which are returning, partly with the aid of the prairie burns that volunteers conduct each spring (the fires kill alien plants, but the native species survive). ”To understand the farm, you have to understand the prairie,” Johnson says. ”People came here because of the prairies, because the soil was good.”
If the museum can teach people that, Johnson says, then it will have accomplished its goal. He wants visitors to gain an appreciation of something that was obvious to the Garfields but which most of us have forgotten: that we all depend on the land for our food. ”We have young people come here who live in these (nearby) developments, and they have no more idea of what that field of corn means to them than someone from the middle of Chicago,” Johnson says. ”We have the opportunity here to expose people to something that`s entirely new to them, though it would have been completely commonplace to their grandparents. It doesn`t matter if we talk to them about history or not as long as we show them that you need land-large quantities of land-and the climate to grow your crops.” And that is one thing that has not changed at all since Timothy and Harriet Garfield first set eyes on this place.”
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Hours: Fall Festival, Oct. 4, 5, 6; 10-5 daily. Regular tours, Wednesdays and Sundays, 1-4 p.m. through September; other times by appointment.
Donations: Fall Festival, adults $4; children $1.50. Regular tours, adults $2; children $1. Special events vary (garden show $3, contradance $6, prairie seminar $10, candlelight open house free, etc.).
The museum is on Garfield Road just north of Illinois Highway 38, five miles west of Geneva (708-584-8485). Call ahead for dates and reservations.
