Even before it had its own brand of blue jeans, its own theme song, its own TV show, even before John Steinbeck labeled it “The Mother Road,” U.S. Highway 66 was considered a little bit more romantic than the average American highway.
According to the “WPA Guide to Illinois,” published in 1939 by the federal Works Progress Administration, Route 66 was “the most heavily traveled major highway in the State. . . . Along its course are the State capital and half a dozen State institutions. Industrial cities and county seats in which Lincoln practiced law alternate with farm villages and mining towns that will long be remembered in the labor history of the State and the Nation.”
The myth of Route 66 was born in the 1930s, when it was one of the few pathways across America. Steinbeck’s Joad family used it in “The Grapes of Wrath,” Ernie Pyle drove it as he traveled the country, searching for small towns to profile in his “Hoosier Vagabond” columns. It was a means of travel, not just transport. You saw things along the way.
Unlike Interstate Highway 55, it wasn’t just a concrete chute built to sweep motorists across the prairie between Chicago and St. Louis. Route 66 was the main street of dozens of rural villages, from Braidwood, the site of the 1883 Diamond mine disaster, which killed 74 men, to Mt. Olive, where labor crusader Mary Harris “Mother” Jones is buried in the Union Miners Cemetery, alongside the men she organized against the big coal companies.
A few weeks ago, I threw my “WPA Guide to Illinois” onto the front seat of my 1990 Mazda and set off to find how much of Depression America is left along Route 66. The guidebook’s writers had laid out a tour that I decided to follow through the southwest suburbs.
In Summit, I was told to look for “the gargantuan Corn Products Company Plant,” which was, in 1939, “the largest corn refinery in the world.” E.T. Bedford, the George Washington Carver of corn, built the plant in 1908 to turn corn into starches, syrups and sugars. If the plant was “gargantuan” then, it’s hard to think of a word that describes this industrial dreadnought today, its 92 buildings linked by gray pipes of a hundred different sizes and vented by smokestacks unfurling ragged pennants of steam.
“We do much more than this,” said Lori Samuelson, communications manager of Corn Products International, as she scanned a passage in the guide boasting that the plant ground 80,000 bushels a day. “We have many more buildings. . . . In ’38, it was probably one or two buildings.”
The corn milled here also finds its way into far more products than the “candy, chewing tobacco, beer, mucilage, fireworks, ink, and stationery” for which the WPA writer gave it credit.
“We go into over 10,000 products, from batteries to baby food,” Samuelson said. Peanut butter, baby powder, soft drinks and low-fat foods, a product category no one had thought of 60 years ago, also rely on corn. Cornstarch can put back some of the thickening and taste food loses when fat comes out.
Although the Corn Products plant is far bigger than it once was, it’s no longer the world champion of corn processing. In fact, it’s not even the state champ. The Archer Daniels Midland plant in Decatur has overtaken it, partly because Decatur still is what Summit used to be: an island in a green sea of cornfields. Many of the farms that fed Corn Products have “gone concrete,” Samuelson admits. So while it’s no longer the biggest, “we are the oldest corn processing plant,” she said, a title no one can take away.
Summit, the book also notes, was “situated at the imperceptible crest of the watershed between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi drainage systems. Rain falling on the east side of the town drains into the Atlantic Ocean; that falling on the west into the Gulf of Mexico.”
This is still true. It takes a lot longer than 60 years to change a geological fact like that.
In Indian Head Park, I stopped at the Lyonsville Congregational Church, which “served as a recruiting station during the Civil War.” The old wooden building, built in 1858 by Congregationalists who migrated here from Elmira, N.Y., now has an appendage: a modern brick sanctuary. The original church’s white paint is peeling, and the timbers that bear it have had to be shored up themselves. But it remains standing, because so much history has taken place here.
Congregationalism came to America on the Mayflower. By the time of the Civil War, the denomination was adamantly anti-slavery. A story has it that Deacon Rufus Brown, one of Lyonsville’s early church officers, used his house as a stop on the Underground Railroad. And the church was so proud of its community’s turnout for the war that “there’s a plaque in the old sanctuary with a list of people from this area who fought in the Civil War,” said the current pastor, Rev. Robert von Trebra. Some of those felled by Confederate bullets are buried in the church graveyard out back.
It was another 20 miles to the next site, Stateville Prison in Crest Hill, “Illinois’ new modern prison for men,” where “care of the 4,100 prisoners, all first offenders more than 26 years old, is as modern as the building.”
That sentence was written during a time when liberal reformers were trying to replace the stone dungeons that had traditionally housed American prisoners.
Most towns on this tour got a cursory paragraph, along with a description of a notable site. Not Joliet, a classic Midwestern river town of old brick stores and warehouses and bulky Victorian houses, which rated a chapter of its own in the guidebook, a chapter that declared: “This is the Joliet of which Sandburg wrote:
On the one hand the steel works
On the other hand the penitentiary.
Santa Fe and Alton trains
Between smokestacks on the west
And gray walls on the east.
“But this is not all of Joliet; the man on the street scarcely gives a thought to the penitentiary, so little does it intrude upon the life of the town. Across the north side of town stretches the Joliet park system, which, although planned too late to include areas of the city proper, is one of the finest among small cities of the State. If the average resident were asked what is the most outstanding thing about his town, he would probably say the high school band, followed by the park system, and mention the penitentiary as an afterthought.”
And don’t forget wallpaper. Joliet once was the wallpaper capital of America, manufacturing enough every day to stretch to New York City and back. The best known of the plants was the Joliet Wallpaper Mill, at 223 Logan Ave. I found the brick buildings on a dead-end street in a residential neighborhood. Above the front door, carved in limestone, was the company name and the date 1914. The mill stopped making wallpaper in the mid-1960s, said Jean Grossklaus, who grew up in Joliet and has worked in the mill’s offices for more than 30 years.
Now owned by the IVEX Packaging Corp., it simply makes paper, unadorned with any patterns. Before Joliet surrendered its signature product, though, Grossklaus made sure to get a souvenir. When the mill stopped producing wallpaper, “they just let a whole bunch of us in (the plant) and said, `Take whatever you want.’ ” Grossklaus took a brass wallpaper roll, which is now a lamp stand in her home.
Joliet Township High School may rank with Chicago’s Lane Tech as the area’s most awe-inspiring, thunderously large educational institution. It was designed by Daniel Burnham, who certainly obeyed his motto “Make no little plans” when he came to Joliet. The building is crowned with battlements that make it look as imposing as Windsor Castle.
Over the front door is a bronze bust of Louis Jolliet, faded to green by the elements. The guide calls it a “Tudor-Gothic building, built in 1899,” and mentions that “on the main floor is a series of six murals by William Panhallow Henderson, painter, architect and muralist. The murals depict the activities of Marquette and Jolliet among the Indians. Presented by the graduating class of 1906, they are considered among the finest of Henderson’s mural work.”
The paintings have been moved around to make room for more art, but I did find one in a stairwell. Dusty and browned, it appeared to show the two explorers in a gloomy room in France, studying a globe. Through a window, they could see the sea that separated them from the New World.
Far more important at Joliet High School, though, was the band, which, the guide said, was “nationally famous; so frequently did it win the national band competition that it was eventually barred and now attends the contests on an honorary basis only.”
Outside the band room is a display case filled with mementoes from Joliet’s musical glory days, including a photograph of the man responsible: A.R. McAllister, the band’s director from 1913 to 1944. He wears a military-style outfit with yellow braid on his shoulder. In the next cabinet are the maestro’s hat, gloves and baton, and then the championship plaques, lined up like the Bulls’ NBA championship trophies in the Berto Center: Joliet won the National High School Championship Band Contest in 1926, 1927 and 1928, then took a few years off before beginning a new dynasty in 1933 and 1934.
The current band director, Ted Lega, is only the third in the school’s history. But he is a direct musical descendent of his predecessors.
“I played under the second,” Lega said. “My dad played under McAllister.”
McAllister actually started his career as a wood shop teacher, Lega said. Then the local superintendent of schools saw a college band and decided the high school needed one too. McAllister, an amateur musician, was named maestro.
His first band practiced in the Manual Arts Room, sitting on nail kegs and playing used instruments. But in keeping with his military appearance, McAllister had formidable organizational skills. He brought in musicians from Chicago to drill his band and encouraged his students to take private lessons.
The national band contests Joliet once dominated were abolished in the ’30s because they put too much pressure on young musicians. But the band still holds its own at statewide festivals. And it is so much a part of the school’s identity that Lega has never had to argue for its importance, a la Richard Dreyfuss in “Mr. Holland’s Opus.”
“It’s been important to the city and the community that we have a band here,” Lega said. “It’s . . . valuable in what it offers the students of this community. It’s important to a lot of people, and the word’s passed down.”
Joliet’s other jewel was the park district, especially Pilcher Park, 640 woodland acres lying alongside Hickory Creek, on the east side of the city. Even before it became a park, the land was cultivated as an arboretum by its original owner, John Higginbotham, who planted southern magnolia, sweet gum, cypress, tulip-tree, white fringe, pecan, black birch, hickory and black cherry.
“Plans for development envisage introduction of trees from all over the world,” the guide promised.
This never happened, said Heather Godsey, an assistant manager. Instead of trying to be an international arboretum, Pilcher Park is cultivating native plants that, in the wild, are often choked out by hardier Old World flora. One section of the park has been burned several times to clear it for wildflowers, “so it’ll just be a big patch of wildflowers, all the colors,” Godsey said.
Beyond Joliet, the tour crossed Interstate Highway 80, which didn’t exist when the guide was written but which is now the perfect dividing line between urban Illinois and the huge rural body of the state, whose people have traditionally labored to feed Chicago’s appetites. I rolled through Elwood and Wilmington, two prosaic villages for which the guide recommended no sites, and then I arrived in Braidwood, which has a history as violent and boisterous any Wild West town. Coal was the black gold that made Braidwood a boom town in the 19th Century.
“In 1865 settler William Henneberry, in sinking a well, struck a rich 3-foot vein of coal 70 feet down,” says the guide. “The new field attracted many mining syndicates, some from as far as Boston. By 1873 the community had grown to 3,000, and was incorporated as a city; in 1880 the population numbered 9,000, and as many as six long coal trains pulled out of Braidwood daily. Miners lined up for three blocks at the pay window on pay day; 117 saloons, a large racetrack and a music hall flourished. In the following decade, more pits were closed than opened; as new fields were discovered in the vicinity, residents jacked up their houses and wheeled them to the new bonanzas. Mining was resumed in 1928 with modern strip methods, but intense mechanization precluded a revival of the roaring days of old Braidwood.”
Today, Braidwood has shrunk to about 4,500 people, half its peak size. A sign outside the city limits proclaims that this is the hometown of labor leader John Mitchell and Anton Cermak, the Chicago mayor killed by a bullet meant for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The strip mining ended in the 1960s, said Wayne Saltzman, who has lived in Braidwood all his life.
“This whole area was strip-mined,” he said. “They started down south, and they followed the vein here and got as far as Morris, and the vein got too deep and was too expensive to mine anymore.”
Now all Braidwood has to remember the coal companies by are piles of earth and manmade lakes, a landscape created by bulldozers.
A few miles northwest of Braidwood, in the hamlet of Diamond, there is another monument to coal mining. It’s a memorial, set on the old head of the mine where on Feb. 16, 1883, 74 miners drowned in a flood. Only 28 bodies were recovered, so the marker is literally a gravestone. A black bulb was put up by the United Mine Workers in 1898. It sits atop a stone pedestal, which was erected by the Braidwood Home-Coming Association in 1926 and has the names of the dead, plus this inscription: “Sacred to the Memory of our Deceased Brothers Who Lost Their Lives By the Flooding of the Diamond Mine.”
If you drive south from Braidwood, through Godley and Braceville, you can see the hills created by strip mining. They’re reddish and, except for their bald crowns, are now nearly hidden by evergreens. In a way, they’re quite pretty, giving the flat farmland landmarks that nature denied it.
Although the tour in the WPA Guide goes all the way to Edwardsville, I ended my tour in Gardner. When I stopped in the lone gas station downtown, a boy in overalls and a red cap emerged from the office.
“Five dollars,” I said, sticking a $10 out the window.
He shoved a nozzle into the tank and pumped in four gallons of gas while he made change from a roll in his pocket. That, I thought, is yet another sight you might have seen on Route 66, 60 years ago.
