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- Hello.

Welcome to Illinois Stories.

I'm Mark McDonald in Ipava.

Each year in September, Ipava holds a homecoming called Camp Ellis Days, and this town of about 650 swells to maybe between two and 3,000 people who come in for a parade and other activities.

Well many people have never heard of Camp Ellis, but it had a huge impact here.

This is what it's all about.

- Well Marion, every year, Ipava has like a homecoming called Camp Ellis Days, and people not from around here probably can't understand what a big thing Camp Ellis was in the lives of people around Ipava, Table Grove and this whole area.

But around 1940, it pretty much overwhelmed everything, didn't it?

- That's really true.

It grew into a project that I don't think anybody realized would happen.

One of the ways to point that out was that where we're standing right now, if you want to find 100,000 people, you have to go about 100 miles away from here to encompass 100,000 people.

When Camp Ellis was here in 1943-44, all you had to do was go 10 miles and you could encompass 100,000 people, and at opening day or dedication day of the camp, you could almost double that figure.

- [Mark] You know, right next to you is a map of Camp Ellis, and it gives you some of the scale.

Not only were there 70 or 80,000 people here at its height.

This was like 18,000 acres.

It was an immense area of land, wasn't it?

- [Marion] It's about six and a half miles from the very west point to the very east point and about a five and a half miles north to south.

This map that we're looking at, each one of the squares is a square mile, 640 acres in each square mile, so you're right.

There were between 18-19,000 acres in the whole campus.

- [Mark] Now the government decided they needed a camp.

Why?

- That's somewhat debatable in the things that I've read.

It's a little hard to determine, but I believe that the main reason they put this camp here was they wanted to make a training camp for engineers and for medical people, and they put a big hospital here.

I think that was the main reason that this camp was placed where it is.

- Well they needed a big hospital if they were gonna have 80,000 people living here, didn't they?

- Yes, but the 80,000 people, that pretty much was the bulk of the people who were here while they trained the different phases of people that they trained for the camp, the major ones being engineers and hospital people.

For people who live around here, a good comparison is that this hospital was about right here, only a little over a mile away from Ipava.

Ipava's here.

Hospital covered 160 acres right in that area.

One of the comparisons that's often made is that this hospital at Camp Ellis in 1944 and 1945 was bigger than St. Francis Medical Center is now in Peoria.

It was one of the largest hospitals in the country at the time, and one of the most advanced.

- You have an incredible display here on exhibit here on Camp Ellis.

Let's walk back if we can, because I want to see some more of it while we're here.

If we look off to our left here, this is a new acquisition for you.

They did an incredible thing after they built Camp Ellis.

They decided they needed a runway, but they didn't want to pour pavement or weren't able to, so they put down a mile long hard strip out of this iron.

- 150 feet wide and a mile long, and the object was they wanted to make a transfer of medical people, a group of surgery people, that they could transfer from here to anywhere and do it very quickly, and to do this, they laid this runway down in 24 hours.

- 24 Hours?

- Yeah.

- A mile long, and they tied it all together.

- 150 feet wide and a mile long.

It's all made out of steel.

There's a picture up here on the wall showing them doing that.

- [Mark] It's right here, you can see it.

- Had several people in here that were involved with this.

One man that was in training as an engineer, and he said that this is the worst day of his life.

- And he had some tough times, hadn't he?

- Yeah.

- He later, after being trained for an engineer, he trained as a medic and was in the Pacific as a medic, so he saw some pretty bad things there.

But on this particular day, if you look in the background of the picture, you see snow and mud.

The mud looks like it's six to 12 inches deep.

They're all wearing heavy wool overcoats.

Once they started, they didn't stop, and they got it done in 24 hours.

The medical people brought in three C-47s and loaded them up with the surgery unit and flew them out and accomplished what they wanted to accomplish.

Within a short period of time, they got a medical unit transferred I think it was to Lawrenceville that they took them, but the idea was to be able to get them moved out quickly so that when they got to Europe, they could move a surgical unit right up behind the lines.

- So this was like the first MASH unite, I guess, something like that.

- Pretty much.

That's the way it looks to me.

When you look at MASH on TV now, you can realize that that's what they started here at this hospital.

- [Mark] These are the hospital.

This is the footprint of the hospital.

Those buildings are gone now, but this looks like this was some of them, some of the hospital buildings.

- All of the buildings in this camp were not substantial structures.

They were all frame built, and the hospital, instead of being one large building, was a lot of little buildings, but they were all interconnected so that you could go from any unit at the hospital from one unit to another without being outdoors, but still they were separate buildings.

- We're gonna talk more about the POW aspect of this camp, 'cause that's the one that gets everybody's attention.

But that was really a small portion of what they did here.

They ran the hospital, they did the medical training.

They also did engineering training, which we can see over here.

I don't know how many bridges they might have built, but they were good at it, weren't they?

- They practiced and practiced and re-practiced.

I've told people that come in here and want to talk about Camp Ellis, some people don't realize that Camp Ellis straddled Spoon River, and that was one of the reasons for it being built where it was because there are a lot of small rivers in Europe and they knew they were going to have to, the bridges were gonna be destroyed and they were gonna have to cross rivers and do it rapidly.

This is where they did the practicing to do that.

And the engineers that were trained here were trained to cross the river in a hurry, and they'd take a unit of soldiers out there and build the bridge, cross the river, get on the other side, go up about a half a mile and build another bridge and come back, tear the other one down.

I would kind of guess that the Spoon River during Camp Ellis was probably bridged several hundred times.

- 'Til they got good at it and boy, they knew how to do it, because when they got to Europe, they were successful.

- As soon as they got one unit trained at it, that unit went to Europe and they trained another unit.

- Marion, you've been sort of hosting Department of Defense people in this area because they've been looking for practice landmines, grenades and stuff that would've been used at Camp Ellis in training but may not have exploded and could possibly explode, and it's kind of scary, isn't it?

- They have been out there looking for any live ordinance they can find.

The ordinance that was used at Camp Ellis is generally pretty small.

There weren't any large bombs, weren't many large land mines.

They were all pretty small.

The pictures that are here are pictures of things that were used out there.

The picture of this land mine right here, we've got another example right over on the other wall, right there, of a picture that they found just a couple of months ago.

And when they found this picture, this picture right here is the same landmine that you saw over there, and this is an actual hole and it's down by Burnadotte, the little town that was in Camp Ellis, and they found that a couple of months ago.

It's been more like three months ago now.

They did explode it in place, and they probably will find some more.

When they were here a few years ago, they found several of these in the same area.

They're trying to clear all of those out and trying to educate the public so that the public knows that those kinds of things are there and will recognize them and not get in trouble.

So far, nobody's been in trouble.

Nobody's found something that has exploded that's hurt anybody.

- Yeah.

Dean Chenoweth, you were like seven or eight years old and the government needs 18,000 acres in west central Illinois to open a camp, and you happen to live on a farm in there, and they pretty much tell people you gotta go.

Is that pretty much the way it happened?

- Yeah, it really is.

It was kind of a startling experience with the whole neighborhood.

We weren't expecting anything like that at all.

- Your mother had seen surveyors working around the place.

Everybody knew something was going on, right?

- We were getting rural electrification out in the country and we'd had surveyors.

We assumed they were working with rural electrification, but I don't know to this day whether they were or whether they were doing the preliminary surveys on the camp, but just within a few months, I think we'd had the electricity up for a week and they almost immediately tore it down.

- They tore it down, why?

- Because they needed the poles and the wiring over in the camp area where the vast amount of the troops were.

- They needed to electrify Camp Ellis, so you lost out on that when you had electricity for one week.

You must have thought you were in heaven for that week.

- We thought it was pretty great.

- Oh, I'll bet.

That's so sad.

This is the Camp Ellis map.

Point out where your home was there.

- Okay, our home, I was living on my grandmother's home at the time and it was on this Oak Hill Road, and it was in this area where we were living at the time.

Where I was born was up in this area, and we'd still farm the ground, and part of it was pasture and so forth.

- All those hundreds of families like yours were displaced and had to find property somewhere else where you could farm, so your family picked up and moved west of McComb.

- Right.

Some of the other farms had already been taken ahead of time and we thought they were done taking, so the folks had kind of quit looking.

My uncle in their farm was in an area that they were already gonna take, so he had bought a farm up south of Bushnell, but we hadn't really looked real serious 'cause we didn't think it was gonna come this far.

- And at that point, what the government says is okay, this is what we're gonna give you for your acres.

And it's not a take it or leave it.

This is it, you're leaving.

Do you remember how much per acre?

- It was $75 to $100 an acre, and at that time you couldn't buy ground even at that, but that was low on it.

And that was with whatever improvements were on it.

If there was a house and barns on it, well that went with it.

- And you either moved your house and your barn or they tore it down.

They'd just bulldoze everything down.

- You just had to be out there by certain date.

Whatever you had out by a certain date, why that's what you got.

- Did your parents ever hold a grudge against the government for this?

- It was tough for them to give it up, you know, 'cause they'd lived in this area all their life, but not with the war on.

They talked mostly about the neighbors who had young men, 17, 18 years old and what they had to give up.

It was so much more viable than the land, so that's the way they rationalized it.

- Thank you, Dean.

- Us boys weren't old enough that we were gonna go in it right away.

- Thanks.

- But there was so many people that were looking for ground, and of course a lot of them never farmed again.

They couldn't find anything or couldn't get it financed, so it was pretty tough.

It was tough.

- John, you've done some research and writing about Ipava and Camp Ellis.

We talk about these families, these farm families that were displaced.

Some of them were even displaced more than once, and you know a story about that.

- Yes, the Marshall family, they had 1,000 some acres, and they'd taken part of their farm and they told this family to move over across the road into their father's home, that they wouldn't take it.

And they did.

And then later they said well, you gotta move out of here right away because we need an airport, an air strip.

And by then, most of the farms were rented or taken, so it put them in a bad situation.

- [Mark] So they got displaced once and then again.

- [John] Right.

- Were they ever able to buy any of that land back, or have been able to follow their story?

- They did not buy any of it back.

- They did not.

- The brother bought a piece back, but they were upset because when they took their land, they said he could buy it back at the same price.

Well, administration changed and they wouldn't allow that.

- Is that right?

So the price inflated after the war.

- Yes, quite a bit.

- So if you expected, let's say they offered you $100 an acre for your land and you got off and you expected to be able to purchase it back, it might be what, double that?

- Might be double that, and then they turned it down.

Then at the auction he bought more than that.

- Bill Kraemer, so many people are surprised to know that there was a prisoner of war camp in west central Illinois, and you were a guard.

- Yes.

- It was your job to make sure those prisoners from Germany and Austria stayed in line.

- Yes.

- Was it tough?

- No, they were very, very highly educated and very well disciplined, and they were very glad to be in the United States of America.

- Really?

They would tell you that?

- Oh sure, yeah.

The war for them was over, and they loved America for several reasons, but the best reason that I can recall was the food.

They were so hungry for meat and butter products.

They would make sandwiches out of raw chopped meat, and they would butter a piece of bread and make a sandwich out of lard, whole lard, and they loved that.

They did all our cooking, and each morning we would take them out to the project.

They would ask us what they would like to fix us for breakfast.

They did all the cooking.

They ate the same rations that we did and they received the same treatment as we did.

- Now you say for them, the war was over.

They knew they weren't going back.

- Oh no, they didn't.

They knew this, yes.

- And they knew that they were gonna live a pretty good life here, but they also knew that the war was gonna end and they weren't gonna stay in a POW camp forever.

- Well, they were entitled to come back five years after the war was over if they wanted to and become United States citizens.

- Did any of them do that?

- Well, not to my knowledge.

I was only here about a year and I had to leave because I got in trouble with one and I was penalized for a little while and I got in trouble with the post commander also and I was transferred to Chicago.

But I don't know when they left, but when I was here, there was only 1,500 of them, and they were Rommel's men from the North African campaign.

- Is that right?

So they were serving in the desert.

No wonder they wanted to come here.

- Oh, sure, yeah.

Field Marshall Montgomery outsmarted Rommel in the desert.

He was the Desert Fox.

But they were very well educated and they were young.

I think that they were about probably 25 to 31 years old.

When you approached them, they stood up.

- [Mark] Disciplined.

- Oh, very much so.

They always had equivalent to our buck sergeants under officer, they called them.

He would give them orders what we requested them to do.

- Well, thanks for the visit.

- Thank you very much.

- It's very interesting, and I love your shirt.

- I have two, one of them in the other room.

- [Mark] This is you and your wife.

- This my own design.

- [Mark] This is you and your wife.

- Yeah.

- [Mark] Beautiful couple.

- Thank you very much, Mark.

It's a pleasure to do the program.

- Well Mary Gore, you were a bookkeeper, is that right, at Camp Ellis, and you frequently came in contact with the prisoners of war.

Under what circumstances would you come into contact?

- Every day they would come and bring in their coupons.

They were paid.

The Austrians were, not the Germans.

The Austrians were paid with coupons, and then they came in and I had to count how many it had been spent.

- So the Austrians were treated differently than the Germans were.

- Yes, they were.

When they first came, they had to split them up because they couldn't get along.

- Oh, is that right?

You mean they would fight among themselves?

- Oh yes, very definitely.

So they told me, I don't know.

That's what they told me.

And so that the Austrians and the Germans, one was on one side of the camp, and one's gone on the other side.

- Now why did the Austrians get paid and the Germans didn't get paid?

- Well, I don't know whether they did, I didn't have anything to do with it.

- Oh okay, so you only cashed the coupons.

- Yes, because of them, but I don't think they did.

The Austrians were all over camp.

- You mean they had freedom?

- They had freedom.

Yeah, they were everywhere.

But the Germans, no.

- They kept them contained, and if they were on a work detail or something, they made sure they were guarded, et cetera.

But they didn't guard the Austrians, they just let them run free?

- If they were at a social function or something, there was always guards there, but they didn't.

- [Mark] What were they like?

Were they nice guys?

- Yes, they were.

I was gonna say that at one time we had a Chrysler, my uncle did, and I drove the Chrysler out there and they wanted it.

The prisoners were so fascinated with that car, so I took them for a ride, some of them.

- [Mark] You didn't get in trouble, did you?

- The guard went with me.

- Okay, so you didn't get any trouble.

- But it was so funny, and then we'd come back and the rest of them would go take a ride.

I said I hope nobody catches us driving around camp.

They were interested in the car, not me.

- Did they speak English, the Austrians?

- No, well now some of them would a bit, but most of them I couldn't understand, but we'd get along.

We could make connections there.

- How long were you a bookkeeper at the camp?

- Well, until it went out of business.

- So three or four years, I guess.

- Yeah.

- Was that a good job?

- Yes, it was.

It was very good job.

It was a good job.

It was interesting.

People were nice to get along with and everything.

- Well, thank you.

Bill Branson, you were a youngster when Camp Ellis was operating.

It was a good age, it was a good route for you to be a paper boy, wasn't it?

You were the right age and it was there, and it needed work, didn't it?

- Sixth, seventh and eighth grades is when I was out there selling papers.

- And you just don't think of a military camp needing a paper boy, but the guy you worked for, he brought in papers from all over the midwest I guess.

- Oh yes, and even some New York papers.

They had a system of getting them in here.

We worked sometimes seven days a week because they had Sunday papers also.

- You and how many other kids would have been working out there?

- Well, it's really hard to remember, but I'd say 10 or 12 a lot of times.

- Because it was a small city, wasn't it?

- And of course that was the summertime.

I don't know really how he handled it all winter, but we had to go back to school.

- Sure, sure.

- We couldn't be out there.

- So give me an example of what a day was like.

Here's the map of Camp Ellis.

What was a day like for a paper boy?

- Well, I lived a mile south of town, so I'd get up about 4:30 and walk to town and we would meet at the, there was a building where the papers were assembled and where the boys would get the amount they thought they would need for their route.

We'd all get in this big van and head for Camp Ellis.

We had permission to take the paper boys in, and then this big van would just dump us off at our particular locations and we were on our own.

We put papers in the mess halls and we also carried them right to the barracks and sold them individually.

We sold a lot of papers.

- [Mark] Do you remember what a paper cost back then?

- Well, it was like 15 cents at the most, I think.

- And you were trusted with the money.

You were supposed to bring back cash for each paper that you had.

- We had to do our own.

We could turn in the ones we didn't sell.

We didn't really have to sell it.

We just didn't make any money off of those.

- You know, we talked about the impact that this camp had on the families that were displaced, which is a negative thing, but there were some positive things too, because it took a small army to build this thing and all those construction workers had to stay places, didn't they?

- Yeah, they did.

They stayed as close as they could.

They didn't want to commute too far, and so a lot of homes that were outside the camp were used for construction workers, and then later for the officers that didn't want to live on the base.

A lot of them had families, and mostly we had lieutenants and captains.

- [Mark] Did they stay with you and your family?

- They stayed in our home upstairs.

We had two apartments upstairs.

We had a big house and converted the upstairs to two apartments.

We had a stairway that let them go in and out fairly privately, and so it worked out pretty well.

We had a lot of nice people.

It was really surprising how well everything went for all the disruptions there were.

- It was life, it was war, right?

- People supported the effort, yes.

They sure did.

- [Mark] Well Norman Jones, in the Easley Pioneer Museum, there is an exhibit of photographs that you helped put together because your uncle, Private Bradford, took all these while he was stationed at Camp Ellis, and then you framed them for the exhibit.

And your uncle's still alive.

- [Norman] Correct.

- [Mark] Yeah.

Did he ever tell stories about Camp Ellis?

- Oh, lots of stories.

We wrote a lot of them down and kept them.

He told us one, I remember one story.

He would go back to Michigan when he'd have a weekend pass working in the warehouse, trucks brought stuff in.

He'd catch a ride in a truck to Galesburg, get on the train, go to Michigan for the weekend, come back, and he kept clothes and shoes hidden in the warehouse so he could slip them on to get on the truck to go to the train.

He went to go one weekend and a prisoner had stolen his clothes and his shoes, so he went to the prisoners and told them, and they got together among themselves and they brought his clothes and his shoes to him and he said well, who took them?

And they said, that doesn't matter.

We took care of it.

- That's kind of cryptic, isn't it?

This is very interesting stuff.

Come on a little closer for me if you would here.

Of course it was partially a prisoner of war camp, and this panel here is all prisoners of war.

And in fact here, they even had a band, didn't they?

Fascinating place.

- [Norman] And they all wrote to him after they got home to Germany.

They were just all so glad to be here.

- They were glad to be here in the States out of the war, and they got treated pretty well.

I think you mentioned that he worked in a warehouse.

- Yeah, these were all pictures he took in the warehouse, and there was also a lot of civilians who worked in the warehouse, and these prisoners here worked in the warehouse.

- And this shows, this is just everyday stuff, but it's so great to have all of this documented because not only do most people not even know about Camp Ellis, but if there weren't photographs taken, all they'd have is just words.

- They're a little more personal, too.

- It sure is.

And this is incredible.

Did he take this one?

- No.

It was put out to the soldiers.

- [Mark] Oh, okay.

- I just thought it was interesting that that guy ran all the way around.

- You got a guy in this picture, you got a guy down here, he's in this picture here, and then the camera was moving very slowly and you find him again over here.

It's hilarious.

- He remembered that story well.

- This farm home on highway 136 is the only frame structure left of what was Camp Ellis.

All those structures that housed 70 to 80,000 people were either auctioned and sold or torn down.

With another Illinois Story near Ipava, I'm Mark McDonald.

Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Illinois Stories is brought to you by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Illinois Arts Council Agency and by the supportive viewers like you.

Thank you.

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