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Thank You - Hello, welcome to Illinois stories.

I'm Mark McDonald at the homestead Prairie farm house on the grounds in the Macon county conservation district.

This home has been here and in use and lived in since we think the 1840s, certainly in the 1850s and through the 1970s has a very interesting story to tell because it's changed many times over those years.

And part of the story is an archeological dig that they've been conducting for the last three years.

So during this program, we get to see how they came across the dirt that they're searching through how the house was expanded over the years, what they found in this archeological dig.

And a lot of other interesting things.

Lee slider has been part of this operation since the 1970s and Lee.

You have an interesting history because you are one of the first, you were one of the founders of the conservation district.

And at that time, this home probably wasn't even part of the equation, but after you founded the district and you know, the home was adjoining property, so it became part of the district.

And you actually worked on the house in the seventies.

- Yes I did, I came here at 1978 and that was my job was to restore the house and to build a program interpreter program around it.

- And the interpretive program.

How did that grow into what we see now?

Because now we see it's a, it's a beautiful piece of property it's been add.

The house has been added on to five times.

You've got a heritage garden, you've got archeological digs going on.

I mean, there's been a lot of attention given to this.

- Yes, it is.

It's on the national register, historic buildings.

But when I came to work on the building I learned and I had to, well, I had to really do a lot of research to find out just how, what context that the house fit within Macon county, Illinois, and the nation in that period.

So we could interpret the people who lived here.

Well, we don't know much about their early people, but so we had to kind of up things based on historic so that you could do a kind of a second person living history and the intern.

- Way back when, I mean, this is not the first time that you've had an archeological dig here.

You oversaw one that back then in 1980, I guess didn't.

- 79 And 80.

We did some work.

- Here.

What'd you find?

We found stuff.

We.

- Found stuff, but right here by the front door and it was a big stone under the porch.

And I fought, I found a piece of clay pipe that somebody was sitting in the doorstep at one time, I made the story up that his wife came out and hit him with a frying pan.

I broke the pipe.

- Well, you got to, every, every item has got to have a story, right?

Oh.

- Yeah.

But it's not true.

- But you've were in involved in some other things, for instance, you, you had didn't you try to, you've tried to find a mill, right?

That was.

- It's nearby.

We have a male on the Western part of the property, on the Sangamon river.

The remnants of the dam is there, but we were looking to see whether they could find evidence of the mill house.

Yeah, we did.

Yeah.

- Well, you don't always get lucky.

You don't always get what you, you always get the truth, but you don't always get what you want.

Right.

Oh, that's right.

Yeah.

Okay.

So the house has been added on too many times and we're going to take a tour of the house, went from a one room log cabin into a five room house that you see now over a period of what a hundred and some years.

- Over that.

Yes.

We didn't know what the date wasn't until I started tearing it apart.

Oh, it was a mess.

You could, I don't know if you've seen a picture of him, but we found that there was no opening in any of the logs sides that indicated that it had a hearth.

So that meant that the house had to be built after the advent of past iron cookstoves.

So that's what we tried to emulate.

- Well, from here, go going on from this program.

Now we're going to find out, we're going to look at the dig site.

We're going to go into the cellar where the dirt came from, that can constituted the dig and look through the house and interview some of your colleagues.

So thanks for joining us.

- Thank you very much for asking.

- Brent.

Well, we were just talking to Lee about this, this dig, the archeological dig of it started about three years ago with these piles of dirt out here that are covered with these tarps are the dirt that came out from under the house.

And the reason that's important is because it was undisturbed for many years.

Yes, it was.

And so when you pull it out here and start going it and sift through it, what you find is probably may have existed for 120 years.

Maybe, you know, maybe that old and you have artifactual show us later on, but how does that process work?

How do you, how do you find out what's in this.

- Pile of stuff?

Well, we sift it.

We had our operations department and Shane specifically, he, he came up with this screen and we just put a bucket of dirt in it and we put on gloves and move the dirt around and the loose dirt falls through and what's ever left on top of the screen.

We sort through might be gravel, but we found a lot of different things that all is consistent with a home site.

That's been lived in for many years.

- And you'll show us later on what you found or some of what you found.

Yes.

Okay.

So how does this work?

I know I asked you to go ahead and remove a bucket of dirt for us.

- Just put it in, Just move it around and the loose dirt falls through.

So Now what we, what we see here that really stands out are little pieces of wall plaster.

And we can tell that it's wall plaster because it crumbles pretty easily.

Also we found a, this is a masonry block.

We can tell that it's not a traditional brick, but it's a masonry block that matches from the back end of the house.

- Pieces of the interior of the house that fell in.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

- Oh, the, the house was added on to, and, and reworked down through the years.

And so things like nails and plaster pieces of brick fell under the house, lots of different things, either through just daily usage or from construction remodeling on the house.

- Have you found anything that well, you'll show us later on, if anything that wowed you or that you really thought might've been unusual, we'll get to that, but, okay.

So you've got you and your volunteers come out here when you can and sift through this stuff.

And do you instruct them on what to keep and what not to keep or do they just sort of say, well, that's not a piece of dirt, so let's keep it and we'll figure it out.

- We, we usually keep an eye over their shoulders and, and help them out.

But mostly it's, it's a lot of, it's a lot of work to bring the dirt over, sift it, but you just kind of have to have a good eye.

It's a great, if it's a sunny day, then you've got plenty of light on the dirt here.

As you, as you work it around, as you break it up with your hands and it should move it around.

There are some other pieces of plaster there.

- Boy, that house leaked a lot of plaster or, you know, leached, a lot of plaster, I guess, is what, what would be the right?

- It's kind of like any construction site where maybe people didn't pick up.

Maybe they saw it off and into a board and just dropped it.

Or they pulled out a nail to put in a new nail and just dropped it.

And so that's, that's some of the things that we found.

- Lets walk up to the house.

Sure.

We were talking about, about this seller.

And I don't think the original log cabin had a seller did it at which sitting on solid ground wasn't.

- Originally, but then later the seller was added.

And then over the time that the conservation district has had it, we've rebuilt this brick entrance and then poured a concrete Crete fore into it, just to be able to drain it when the, when the water's up.

But the cellar was used down through the years for food storage, food preservation.

So it was lived in just like another room of the house with people coming and going and objects being put down there used.

And so that's some of what you'll see.

- Th the decision was made many years ago, I guess, to, to shore up the house, to stabilize the foundation and to, and to make sure that it was stable.

Yeah.

At that point, that's when you had to remove the dirt, isn't that right?

- Yes.

To be able to move around under the house, the contractor said that they needed enough room to be able to do that work.

And so the suggestion came from Shane rebel that our operations manager to save the dirt.

And then as we have time sift it, and then once the dirt is sifted in the wheelbarrow, then we take it and we've actually used it to help rebuild some of our trails that lead to the farm.

Oh, good idea.

- Yeah.

Good idea.

Okay.

So we've talked about how this house was expanded over the years.

Look, let's go inside next.

Okay.

Okay.

So this was the original log cabin.

What we're in now?

- Yeah.

The log house started out, started out as a one-room log house, and you can see the logs in the other room, but the house was added on to in stages.

And as the different families needed it, as they grew, as they had the, the money to do it.

- This would not have been an unusual space for our family.

This would have been kind of normal, a one room, kitchen, bedroom.

This was, was, this was everything for the family.

This is it.

- You're talking about antebellum Illinois before the civil war and log houses.

Even though they're kind of rare today, once preserved as museums, this would have been a fairly common.

- Then if you get money enough money to build on which this family did, you would then put on a bedroom.

We're actual mom and dad probably slept in here and maybe a kid or two who knows, oh, I love this Brent.

Cause you said there's the outside.

There's the outside logs.

That's the outside of the cabin.

The one room cabin.

- The door that we just walked through would have been the original back door of the house.

And so you can see what would have been the outside logs and that was left uncovered in the restoration so that visitors can see those logs.

- Yeah.

Very smart.

Very smart to do.

And okay, then this became room number two, probably a bed, maybe everybody's bedroom, who knows.

And we don't even know how many, how many were in the family knew it.

- Well, we do have the 1860 census and we know that there were 11 people living here in 1860.

Whoa, 11.

Yeah.

Now maybe not everybody stayed too long because we think that it was a combination of higher hands and borders.

This would have been this and the next bedroom would have been the third addition to the house.

And during the restoration, they could tell that this part of the house was made with dementia lumber and the type of different species of trees that would have been brought in on the railroad.

So that kind of shows the railroad era.

- Yeah.

And you can also see that the styles are changing.

Now, look at the wallpaper.

- Yeah.

We do that to show some of the change in the house, but like a lot of people how started out as one thing, and then it was remodeled down.

- Through the years.

Do you have any idea when this addition might've.

- Been put on, this was probably, probably late fifties, mid to late fifties because of the type of construction and then also the, the type of wood used.

- And then this was all this next room is also part of that same edition, right?

Yes.

And the last bedroom as well.

- The very last room here, plus the closet.

This would have been the last addition to the house.

- And so then they cut a doorway, of course.

So they could have joined to the, to the other, the second edition.

Yeah.

So it's all one.

Yep.

And there's a back door.

- Of course, right there to a closet.

- To a closet.

That's not a backdoor.

Yeah.

- Okay.

And that we've got maintenance supplies and things like that for the house, but the way the house is laid out, it makes a good circle tour.

You can go through the house, but with the seller, we don't get to show that to the public.

So that's why I'm so glad that you're here.

You can show that to the public that hasn't seen.

- I, I want to see that also gives us a chance to talk about the challenge of stabilizing this house, because you had the whole part point was three years ago to stabilize the house.

So you could keep it from falling in and going wonky on you, you know, and you were able to do that, remove all the dirt.

That was part of the process.

So the next stop is the seller.

Okay.

Alright.

Shane rebel, let you know, this, this project started three years ago.

And when you first thought, w did you think, are we just making work for ourselves or is this something that really needs to be done?

Because this is a, this is a big deal trying to excavate under a log case.

- No, I mean, mark, all projects feel like sometimes at the beginning, like, do we really need to do this?

But yes we do.

And we know that there are situations.

If you want to preserve a house, this old there's a lot of work that goes into it.

There's a lot of modern work that goes into it to, to keep the facade, the look of that historic structure.

And so we have to do these modern things underneath it to make sure it stands up.

It stays healthy.

It stays in one piece and be able to be enjoyed by people for years to come.

- There are two purposes here.

One to make sure that this does so it's stable.

And the other is to remove that dirt and study it, study that dirt because that's part of this whole process isn't as the whole historic.

- The court record.

Yeah.

So the whole purpose of a homestead prey farm is to both represent what was here, you know, in the 1850s and 1860s.

But also we know it was really here in the 1850s, 1860s.

It's not pretend it's not Disney world really was here.

So we know that there's the archeological and the historic record.

And if you look close enough, you can find it.

You know, we sometimes find it where the dirt gets scratched away.

You know, oh, there's something there.

But we knew here we're going to be removing a lot of dirt that was very up close to the house.

And we know all houses, even modern houses.

If you closely enough, we around a modern house, you can find out there's things from this time period that represent somebody lived in this house during this time.

Likewise, if a house sits abandoned for awhile, you can see there'll be a gap in the archeological timeline.

Well, we were able to do a 100% archeological project, but we were able to go through and go through the dirt and try to figure it out in pieces where this came from and where it was and the times and the tools and the way life happened here on this site from this actual site.

- This seller is not open to the public usually, but it's open to us today because, and we're going to share it with the public.

So let you and I go down and you can show us around.

Right.

Great.

All right, thanks.

After you didn't get to put any electricity down here.

Did you know, dark.

- The house does have limited electricity that's to maintain, you know, like there's a refrigerator for staff and they're working here to keep their lunches and their drinks cold.

And, and there's also, there is a security system in place.

You know, anything where it has people involved or people when it's not attended, you know, you want to make sure it's safe and make sure people aren't doing things they shouldn't be doing to it.

So those things, those parts of it are in place.

Now, when you're upstairs with the exception of that refrigerator and the motion detectors we're trying to represent, you know, 1860s, this is what it would look like to live here.

And to walk in here, you come down here, it's a little different, yeah.

This is where we've taken in putting those modern construction techniques, you know, modern cinderblocks modern post and beams, things like that to hold the building up.

- And you can see back here, if you look over, you can see, okay, there, those are, those are concrete blocks, right?

We're a beam, a wooden beam would have been right.

But you can also see the boundary there where you dug, where you dug out.

And that, that, that other dirt is going to stay.

But the reason that you did this is so you can get in there too.

- Right?

Correct.

Correct.

So originally, if you look, it was about eight inches.

Most human beings are thicker than eight inches.

So to crawl underneath there and do work would have been an extremely difficult when the house was built or when the additions were put on the house, they had no intentions of ever being underneath here yet, you know, but we ran into problems, you know, as far as maintaining those electrical lines, maintaining those security lines.

And then there were some foundational problems where some things were needed to work.

And we also had some problems with termites cause there was wood to ground contact.

Yeah.

And so we knew we had to come in here to make those changes and make room for that work to happen.

And that's where, when we realized that we're gonna have to remove a lot of this dirt and we knew that's where that, that wealth of information about the house would be.

- If we look in that direction, let's take a look over there because that's under the first edition.

Right?

Correct.

Let's take a look over here.

And you were talking about termites and wood.

There's a big old chunk of wood right there.

This half, half eaten up by termites right now.

But that if we look past that toward the outside wall there, see all that dirt's been removed and you took care to make sure our, to, to approximate where that dirt came from.

So when you're going through it, you know what part.

- The house you're talking about?

Yeah.

We have a general idea where a group of piles came from maybe not each individual pile.

If it was a true modern archeological excavation, we would have taken it down inch by inch and location, grid it off and sifted it as it came out.

So we knew exactly what was, where it needed to be.

We weren't able to do that because it was a construction project and it is under a timeline and your contractor.

- Doesn't get paid by.

- The day.

Right.

We didn't want to quite pay him by the hour for a three year archeological project.

So we had to, you know, make that adjustment and sift the dirt afterwards is what we've been doing.

And you know, it's, it's turned out really well.

- This is going to last for a good long time.

I mean, this is all, this is all.

- It looks like.

It's a very sturdy.

Yeah.

And where we're standing now is underneath the original log cabin portion of the house.

There's at least three additions to the house.

And so we knew the first edition, which would have been, you know, on the backside of the house or on the end of the house.

And we field by approximation.

That's probably where most of the life activity would have taken place was there.

So that's where we concentrated on.

And that's where we did most of our work.

And it was ma you know, it was where we pulled her out, was mandated by the construction needs, the preservation needs.

So it was all pulled out by hand individuals crawling in there with buckets, man running it up the stairs on a gangplank, on a wheelbarrow.

- Back-breaking oh, well, Brent, we just saw where the dirt came from, which was very interesting by the way.

And it looks like that seller's going to remain intact for a long time.

We'll help.

- So yeah, it's in good shape.

But, but I asked you, if you could show us some samples of the stuff that you and your, and your helpers have found, and you've sort of put it in two categories for us.

So start us off with this first category.

Yeah.

Here on this table, we've got what would be considered construction materials.

We've got brick, we've got wall plaster, white, green, pink paint on it.

We've actually got a piece of a laugh that the plaster and they fit quite well together.

We also have nails screws hooks of course used in the house.

And then we've got pieces of a sawn off board or piece of door trim, something like this or something like that.

- Mm mm fixer uppers through the years they would go up and they were to either replace, they were to replace a part of the house or would just fall off.

But if they, if they were replacing it, they just said, nah, just leave it there.

You know, I'm putting a new piece of wood in here and leave the older.

Yeah.

- Then on this table down here, we've got things like what's generally called ceramics.

So these might be flowerpots dishes, crockery that someone might preserve pickles in.

We've actually got a part of a tea cup, another dish.

And this was actually not found under the house.

This is a really colorful piece of ceramic.

It was actually found back at the back corner when it was rebuilt.

And the new footing was poured.

This was found by a beautiful one of my interns, Joe Ritter, early on also some clay marbles, red clay, clay, a part of a pipe stem smoking pipe.

And then on different days we found these buttons and a straight pin.

- Oh, huh.

Okay.

So she was sewing buttons on and drop the pin at the same time or maybe not.

No, that's not a needle.

So I wonder whether the pen may be unrelated to the button.

- But come off of somebody's clothes and different sizes, different shapes.

But we found all those on different days, not in just one pile of dirt, glass canning, jars, window, glass bottles, all kinds of different things, drinking glasses, more glass.

We found spoons.

This one's pretty rusted.

It's a, a 19th century design.

This one is a post-World war II.

So it shows the very last years the house was lived in we've found pieces of leather, probably from shoes, various pieces of metal.

We've also found mussel shells.

- Now, what do you think those would have been used for just, just ornamental?

- Someone either collected them as a souvenir or you can eat mussels.

Well.

- Sure.

Let's look at the look of this shell on that though.

Isn't that.

- Lovely?

Yeah.

Mother of Pearl, I guess something, something like that.

And then bones, we found bones that like these tiny jaw bones from a rodent.

So it could be wild animals that got under the house down through the years to take shelter.

But then also these that have been cut or sawn, they could be a table scraps.

- More than likely if they've been cut.

Sure.

Yeah.

Huh.

- Again, the house was lived in as far as the inside, outside in the yard.

And then the seller was definitely part of the daily activity of the house and daily life all down through the years.

- You know, between what you collected in the seventies and eighties from outside in the yard and from what you're collecting here, you're going to have a pretty good overall picture.

Are you not of, of the way these families?

- I think so.

We've had several different families down through the years lived here and we've definitely got something from every family's era.

- Well, Brent, thank you.

And thanks for, for your, your crew and your colleagues here for, for showing us around the seller was particularly interesting.

I mean, I think our viewers will get a kick out of that because they can't, they can't go down there by themselves, but the house is regularly open to the public.

- Yes.

We're open weekend afternoons beginning of June to the end of October.

And we're always looking for volunteers to help us with archeology or help us give tours.

Okay.

Thank you.

- Sir.

Thank you.

Okay.

And you know, if you're wondering about this process and how long this is going to take that pile of dirt down there, that's under those tarps.

Well, they get to it when they can, and it may take two or three more years to, to find out.

And for all those samples to join these here in storage with another Illinois story indicator, I'm Mark MacDonald.

Thanks for watching.

- Illinois stories is brought to you by the corporation for public broadcasting, Illinois arts council agency, and by the support of viewers like you, thank you.