On the wall in a finished room of one of the basements of the Norris Funeral Home in St. Charles is a board mounted with nearly 100 corncob pipes, each inscribed with the name of someone from the community.
Some of the handwritten inscriptions are faded and barely recognizable, and some belonged to residents of the town who are no longer alive, but Lee Norris leaves the collection up anyway.
It’s a part of history, and the Norris family of St. Charles has a reverence for things of the past. (This family has no relation to another St. Charles Norris family, heirs to a steel, oil and barbed wire fortune.)
The Norrises’ fondness for history shows in the way they have preserved their family home and business and in the way they have saved and displayed items that have turned into several informal, yet fine, collections.
“The collections are really impressive,” said Jeanne Schultz Angel, director of the St. Charles Heritage Center. “I think it’s wonderful that people of the community have collections of artifacts that they can show pride in and exhibit to friends and family. It shows we need to remember how things were.”
The respect for things historical begins with the Norris family home and funeral home on the corner of Walnut and 3rd Streets.
The first owner of the land was Ira Minard, one of the founders of St. Charles (at that time called Charleston), and the site was also once owned by Amos Locke, a prosperous local merchant.
“He was kind of an important guy around town,” Angel said.
Benjamin and Anna Walker built a one-room dwelling on the property in 1843. The bark-covered logs used for floor joists from that building are still visible in the original basement of that structure.
Sometime before 1855, a two-story brick Greek Revival-style structure with a front porch and picket fence enclosing the front yard was built. A shoe store owner named William Simon, with a family of 12 children, moved in.
In 1940, Russel Norris (Lee’s father) wanted to move his funeral business off busy Main Street and bought the home from the Simons. The elder Norris added a two-story front porch with tall columns, an office section in front and large back and side additions. All told, there have been seven major additions to the structure. However, the bones of the first homes are still visible.
Do all the additions detract from the integrity of the structure?
Not at all, Angel said. “The building reflects the changes of its times. It’s a treasured local landmark,” she said.
There are interesting stories from such a rich history, as can be expected.
First of all, for many years the original basement lay undiscovered, hidden behind a fireplace. The Norris family found it during one of their remodeling projects.
The basement has odd little cubbyholes cut into the sides of it, reinforcing speculation that the home was once a stop on the Underground Railroad.
“There’s no substantiation for it,” Norris said, “although the family who lived here were members of the Free Methodist Church across the street. The church and its members were known abolitionists.”
Inside, the funeral home was decorated by Lee’s mother, Grace Norris, with remnants of historic buildings.
“She would read in the newspapers that historic buildings were being torn down,” Lee said, explaining that his mother saw the beauty in many of these materials and wanted to preserve them.
Hence, the interior boasts English oak paneling from a Chicago mansion, book shelves from Todd Lincoln’s home in Chicago, some doors and frames that were in Illinois Gov. Frank O. Lowden’s home in Oregon, Ill., and curved glass windows from a revolving door in a Chicago building, Norris said.
A stairway in the reception area leads down to the finished basement, a second reception area where groups can gather during a funeral and where the Norris family’s collections are displayed.
There are four major displays: a Native American collection, Boy Scout collection, office machine collection and pipe collection.
“My father began writing a book about Shabbona (a locally famous Pottawatomie chief of the 19th Century) but never published it. It sort of went along with his interest in Boy Scouts,” Norris said.
The Native American collection features clothing, jewelry and animal mounts. Next to it are keepsakes, badges and programs from scouting events the Norris family took part in. Russel Norris was a scout leader, as were his sons, Lee and Fred. Lee is now chairman of a committee to organize a national reunion of Eagle Scouts, said Dennis Cook, president/scout executive for Three Fires Council in St. Charles.
But perhaps the most impressive of Russel Norris’ collections are his pipes, more than 800 of them, although only 300 are on display in glass cabinets along one wall, Lee said.
Fred Norris, who was mayor of St. Charles from 1977 to 1997, tells the story behind that collection.
“It began rather innocently,” Fred said. “He was a pipe smoker, and people would bring him pipes from all over the world when they traveled. During the war, they brought back Japanese and German pipes. At one time, he had more than 1,000.”
His largest pipe was more than 12 feet long, Fred said.
“I would hold the match at one end while he puffed at the other,” he said.
There are pipes from the Orient, scrimshaw-decorated Native American Eskimo pipes and European ceremonial as well as precious Meerschaum pipes.
The corncob collection started when people from the community would congregate and smoke a pipe with Russel.
“It was like the old barber shop, where everyone had their own shaving mug,” Fred said.
Surrounding these displays is Lee’s collection of office machines and electronic equipment, which began when he salvaged the public address system that was being removed from St. Charles High School in 1959.
“The class of 1932 gave it to the school,” said Norris, who thought it ought to be saved. Since then, he has added old mimeograph machines, hand-cranked adding machines, typewriters, Dictaphones, one of the first hand-held calculators and one of the first Radio Shack computers that used a portable cassette player to store information.
“He is a real forward-thinking person,” Angel said, adding that she admired him for recognizing now what would be interesting to people in the future. “People will applaud him in 100 years.”
Why does he do it?
He says he enjoys listening to people and hearing their stories. He enjoys watching as they see something in his collection that prompts them to start spinning tales.
“It’s neat to get people to start talking about things they’ve forgotten about, things that meant something to them,” he said.
“His collections show what’s important about the past,” Angel said, “and how we need to remember how things were.”
WOULD YOU BELIEVE TWO NORRIS FUNERAL HOMES?
The Norris family has been in the funeral business in the Fox Valley since 1903, said Lee Norris, 55, owner of Norris Funeral Home in St. Charles.
When Norris’ grandfather, Fred T. Norris, opened a funeral parlor in Elgin, he was a forward thinker, because funerals before that time had taken place primarily in private homes or furniture stores. He was also one of the first to offer motorized ambulance service.
Fred’s son Russel started his business in St. Charles in 1937. There was also another Norris family at that time, which owned a funeral home on the other side of town. But that family’s son married the wealthy Dellora Angell (niece of and heir to John “Bet-A-Million” Gates, who made millions in steel and oil), and he closed his establishment.
Meanwhile, Fred died and his partner Clarence Reber continued the business as Norris-Reber Mortuary until the late 1960s, when the funeral home burned down.
Russel’s son Fred (who said his nickname as a child was “digger” and that he learned to drive behind the wheel of funeral hearses) worked in the business for a while, then left when the pressures of his political career as mayor interfered with the running of the business.
“The funeral business always came first. You had to drop whatever you had planned when someone called for a funeral,” said Fred Norris, explaining it bothered him to miss important community responsibilities when business took precedence.
So he took a corporate position, and his brother, Lee, took over running the funeral home.
It is a different lifestyle, Lee said.
“When the phone rings, we’ve got to go,” he said. “In the old days, somebody had to be here 24 hours a day. Before pagers, I had to let people know where I was at all times.”
His family has learned to live with the demands of the business, he said.
“They’ve been raised to know we make plans, but they can be changed,” he said.
So far, none of Lee and wife Jane’s children (Elizabeth Thorson, 32, of Montgomery; Krista Lee Andersen, 29, of St. Charles, and Russel Norris, 26, of St. Charles) or his sisters (Joy Pearson of Texas and Cheryl Davis of St. Charles) has expressed any interest in continuing the funeral business.
“Maybe it’ll skip a generation,” he said.
