(prairie fire theme music) (prairie fire theme music) Welcome to Prairie Fire.

I'm your host, Sarah Edwards, we decided to get out of the studio and come to Allerton Park in Monticello to enjoy some of the fall weather and fall, turns out, is about the best season to indulge a secret passion I've had ever since I was a kid.

Well, I guess it won't be so secret after you watch this little adventure.

So when I was a little kid, I loved fossil hunting and camping.

And when I was about 10 years old, after a lot, a lot of fossil hunting and finding tiny, little Crynoid stems and little tiny things, I found the biggest treasure of my life, which is this little Trilobite curled up onto itself.

And I've kept this in my jewelry box for years and years and years, and I've always wanted to do better, find something better than this.

And so today we are here in deep, deep southern Illinois with two geologists, and we are going to go fossil hunting, but we're also going to learn about the geology of Illinois in this period.

And what are we looking at when we look at all these beautiful rocks down here in Southern Illinois?

So we're going to go to go to four different stops and learn about the geology and also find fossils that are going to beat this one.

Now wait just a minute before I go chasing dreams of pulling a T Rex out of the ground, I think we should start with a reality check about fossil hunting in Illinois, and that is, if you're hunting fossils in this state, what you will almost be certain to find will be ancient plants and sea creatures, because hundreds of millions of years ago, Illinois was a shallow tropical sea.

There aren't many fossils at all in Illinois from the Jurassic era when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

On our first stop of the day, we visited some of Illinois' oldest rocks, where we met up with our expert guides, Joe and Jeremy.

My name is Joe Devera, and I work at the Illinois State Geological Survey.

The main thing we do is geologic mapping, which means maps like this.

And through the day, we're going to be going right up through the column from older to younger rocks.

So this is called stratigraphy.

The rocks we're going to see back here behind us is the Bailey limestone.

It's about 400 roughly 400 410 million years old.

Certain strata will not have fossils in it, and then there's other strata that does have fossils in it.

This particular one is so deep that all we see is micro fossils.

So no fossils in the Bailey limestone, because it was so deep underwater.

Our second stop held a lot more promise.

Okay, right now we're at the Trail of Tears State Forest.

As you can see, we have this big hill behind us and a creek filled with rock.

And the reason we stopped here is because we have the right kind of rock.

It was once a limestone, but this particular area, it's been turned to chert, but you still have that fossil sea, or the sea element, because you find marine fossils in this here's where we need a little more geology.

101, your main type of rock, you're going to find fossils in a sedimentary rocks.

So there you break down into shales, sandstones and limestones.

Limestones and shales are going to have most of your fossils in it.

Chert is harder than limestone.

It has a different chemical composition, and it can have sharp edges.

Limestone is more smooth.

Joe found a good example.

That's lime.

You can tell it's nice.

It's that gray colored.

That's how you can tell lime.

Whereas the shirt is lighter, whiter.

This is half shirt, half limestone.

The gray is the lime.

What lighter colored shirt?

See?

What rocks basically are, are environments.

They're ancient environments, and they all tell us a story.

It wasn't long before I found something major or so I thought I just found this.

This is so cool.

Yeah, that's a great find.

And so tell me what it's called and what it is.

This is a brachiopod.

It plants itself to the floor of the sea and then kind of filter feeders through a filter system.

And the reason you can tell it's a brachiopod, not a bivalve, is if you look at my hammer here, a bivalve is symmetrical this way, whereas a brachiopod is symmetrical this way.

But they're both forms of seashells you can find in these ancient sea beds.

Tell me this is a museum quality piece.

They're actually fairly common, but we should find some more.

Then it was off to stop three.

We're right at a road cut on 146 just off the interstate 57 east of Anna, Illinois.

And we started down here, and now we've come all the way up to this brown area here.

And we call it the Golconda limestone and shale.

And that's what you're seeing.

Is limestone interbedded with shale here, and it's just loaded with crinoids, bryozoans, trilobites.

And if you get lucky, you find an Archimedes, which is a coiled bryozoan.

It looks like a screw, so Archimedes, who invented the screw.

And this particular area is interesting because it's the cut off between.

There's a vertical line here between limestone and church, right, yeah, and that shows you that it was ancient hot fluids that came through here, and somewhere it had to stop.

And so the hot fluids had a lot of silica in them.

And so that's why you got the chert.

Whereas over here, where the limestone was wasn't affected.

At this point, we all split up and hunted by ourselves for a while.

These are bryozoans, different kind than Archimedes.

We discovered plenty of small plants in sea life.

Here's a coral.

See, it looks like, almost like a tooth, right here.

I don't know if you can see that.

See, they're so small, I'd take a look at them.

They're little bracts.

Yeah, the really name of the game is persistence.

Not so easy.

Just keep looking and keep looking, and eventually he'll come up with stuff.

If you give up too early, you won't find anything.

We're beautiful.

Look back into the ancient geology of the past.

Okay, so maybe we all needed a little lunch break.

After lunch, it was off to our final stop of the day, except we're at the last stop of the day and it's raining and we're taking shelter in our vans.

The geologists are in that truck, and we're in this van.

Dan's got his camera under cover.

Taylor's crouching trying to get out of the shot.

We got lots of really cool fossils in this area.

And over there is a really nice cliff with a rock face on it, which we'll see after the rain stops, which it will the rain has stopped.

Finally, I put my hat on.

So tell us where we are.

History wise on the stratigraphically wise.

Stratigraphically.

Yeah.

So we started down here.

We ended up the last site was right in here, and now we're in the pink, pink, which is the Kincaid limestone.

We're here at millstone lake.

And what happened was, back in the mid 90s, it rained really hard, like, I think, nine inches within an hour.

And so the spillway couldn't handle it, so it came up over this, the water actually came up over this and went down there and created that mass wasting.

This is what you call mass wasting.

It's just all and there's shale below us, so these big blocks have tumbled down.

You can see the shale down there.

It's just a really dark, almost like a greenish gray.

The massive flooding revealed an old cave when the rock and soil washed away.

When that wash out happened, it just carved through and then collapsed.

And then you get the actual where the cave was when it was actually below the surface at one time.

And as a grand finale, we found the most impressive fossil of the day.

So at that last site you saw Archimedes, and they were very little, real small, like corkscrew, type of fossil.

Now we're getting really large ones.

We're in the Kincaid limestone, and you can see really large Archimedes.

You know, it's a couple feet long, and they're all through here in the end.

I may not have found something better than my Trilobite, but I felt a lot more educated about how to be a good fossil Hunter.

Well, this was a really good.

A fossil hunting 101, first, oh yeah, yeah.

You really find, want to find the really, really good stuff.

You can't just be like roadside, like what we've been doing.

You have to really be back in the bush.

Believe it or not.

A lot of new discoveries come from amateur fossil hunters, right?

You'll find something they don't know what it is.

They bring it into somebody like Joe and new species is named, yeah, challenge accepted until the next hunt.

That's all.

Folks back here in central Illinois, harvest is in full swing.

But at sola gratia farm outside Urbana, Illinois, harvest is a year round affair, and that's because they have a very unique mission, and it's doing a lot of good for a lot of people, solo gradients, by grace alone, the idea is that we all have something to give and share with others, and through God's grace, we are serving our community and others.

So look, ready.

Farm is an urban farm, and we have a lot of partnerships with food access service providers in our community, like the Eastern Illinois Food Bank, Jubilee cafe, daily bread soup kitchen, number of food pantries.

So we're growing good, healthy, fresh food and making it available for those that have limited means.

Since the beginning of sole gray farm, we've had CSA.

It's Community Supported Agriculture, and it works like a subscription service.

So people sign up to become members of the farm, and then each week, they are sharing in the risk and the reward of the farm and getting the bounty.

So it's really a tremendous way to eat seasonally and just see, you know what hits your box.

You know, if you think about what vegetables are, kind of the standard.

There's like 12 to 15 that most people eat regularly.

So we're helping people broaden their palate, try new things, and really connect around good food.

You when I started, the farm was at about six to eight acres in production, and since then, we've expanded.

Our output has certainly increased quite, quite a bit.

It's been, you know, the farm has been around since 2012 so we're in our 14th season right now.

The farm was started really in partnership with st Matthew Lutheran Church and faith and place with four acres of land on the campus of St Matt's.

We worked those four acres pretty hard.

We're following sustainable, regenerative growing practices, but it's still hard on soil to keep planting and planting and planting.

And so we started looking around at what was available, and undertook a very large fundraising campaign to be able to purchase not only 29 acres, but also build a building that could house our staff, a new wash pack facilities who were meeting the best food safety standards, and then also just created a space that allowed for additional partnerships and growth, not only for production, but also education outreach.

You our partnership with Jubilee Cafe is a really special one.

I mean, we're very aware that we're the producers and we're very rarely the distributors, where we're directly serving our neighbors in need, but when we can partner with groups like Jubilee cafe and the United Church of Christ to turn our hard work here in the field and growing food into a nourishing meal and really a community building space and event that just means the world to us.

That's full circle.

When we started Jubilee in 2017 one of the things that we realized that we needed in order to make this work sustainable is we're going to have to have community partners.

So we started this partnership with with solo Grazia, and they some of that food we end up cooking and using in our meals, and some of it we end up putting out on our free table so that our guests can like they have food that they can cook if they have access to kitchens at home, I just had experiences in other soup kitchens where it just it didn't feel good to eat there, and we wanted to, we wanted to create a place where we fed more than hungry bodies, more than hungry bellies, where people also had a sense of community and connection, but they were also treated with the most dignity and respect that they could be.

And we serve food that as much as we possibly can, that we make from scratch, it's food we want to eat, right?

I think it is a sin to serve people food that you would.

Not want to eat yourself, and so we serve people, gorgeous, delicious food.

We've served over 27,000 meals, and we want to keep going, but we can only keep going because sole Grazia exists, right?

If they didn't exist, we would have to source those vegetables someplace else, and certainly sourcing locally grown, organic vegetables, which, you know, reduce our carbon footprint, make it all better for the earth and better for creation.

That would be really hard to do.

I mean, from day one, why I've been at solar graddia is the mission to feed the community.

You know, I remember growing up not eating a whole lot of vegetables, not eating a whole lot of fresh produce.

It was just kind of my preference as a kid to to avoid those and so, you know, I think what keeps me going is when I see, you know, a kid at market that's, like, super excited about that purple kohlrabi, or the purple pepper, or like, come up and say, Man, I really love the okra.

Like to see the next generation really excited about fresh produce options.

Food brings people together.

Food is nourishment.

Food is joy.

And I really want for more people to have that investment in their health and well being.

There's a lot of things working against people eating well right now, and I just feel like, generationally, we've we've lost a lot, and there's an opportunity to get that back.

So it's really about people feeling well and serving each other.

And I think the more I witness that, and the more I'm part of it, the more I just want to keep being a part of it.

So I love it.

It is hard, but I'm proud to be doing this work.

Fall is prime time for college sports, and at the University of Illinois, usually the football stadium is the center of all the action.

But this year, the university is celebrating the 100th anniversary of a building that's just as important.

It's called Huff Hall, and it's named after a man who had a huge impact on sports in Illinois.

So George Huff is considered probably the father of University of Illinois athletics, and he was a member of the very first Illinois football team in 1890 but he as his time Athletics Director, did a lot of planning and really set the stage for facilities and success by hiring good coaches.

George Huff actually started what was called the College of coaches, and it was a curriculum where young men around the state or around the country who wanted to get into coaching came here for a in depth curriculum of learning how things to do to be successful.

And I would attest that much of that led to a lot of the Illinois athletic success in the 30s, 40s, 50s, as all those coaches got their degrees in coaching here and then went and coached in high schools around the state of Illinois, and oftentimes would send their athletes back here.

He was also a businessman.

He also knew that it took dollars to run an athletics department.

They were having to turn away 1000s of people who wanted to buy tickets to football games in that time period.

In the in the 19 teens, basketball was had about 1500 1800 they could stuff into the annex there, and they knew that they could build a much bigger facility to allow for more people to watch the games.

And so that's why he's where he started the the idea of building a much larger football stadium, which turned into Memorial Stadium that opened in 1924 and then also the building of what then was called new gymnasium, which later became Huff gymnasium, and it opened in 1925 this was the hub of basketball in The state of Illinois, every March became the original home of March Madness.

That's where that term came from, from the high school basketball team games that play that were played here, and that carried over to a lot of those young men coming and playing basketball here.

And Illinois was very successful.

They won 75% of the games that they played here over those 38 seasons.

And so there was a lot of success that happened here for him to have that foresight and to get that building done right before the Great Depression, right?

I mean, this is all happening, and the timing couldn't have probably been any better, because if they'd have waited until after the depression, I don't know where we would have been at Stuart Staley hired a professor from Springfield College named Thomas K curiton, who's more familiarly known as t k curiton.

He's an exercise physiologist who built his lab in the building on the third floor.

Curiton is primarily known as the father of the modern fentanyl.

Mood.

He was a proponent of physical activity for health as well as fitness.

There are photos of Puritans lab where he's doing fitness testing on various people, including, among others, Jesse Owens, the Olympic sprinter.

And it's really kind of the foundation of what we see even today and understanding the importance of and the impact of being not just physically fit, but just being physically active, not just for sport and fitness, but it's for health, and not just physical health, but mental health is what Huff beyond academics and athletics was also a venue that was used by the community posting things like sock hops and dance marathons.

Eleanor Roosevelt was here in 1942 so it's, it's a venue that, again, is, I think, primarily thought of by the community as an athletics venue, but it is also an important venue for some really important and groundbreaking current as well as historical research, and largely thanks to the vision and the work of the guy that it's named after, George Hopman, I like the fact that we're able to use a building that's 100 years old.

The view when you're outside and you see the round windows, the smoke stacks on both ends of the building.

I think back often about the when I walk up those stairs.

And the stairs, you can see they're worn a little bit, the 1000s of fans and students who have walked those same stairs over time, whether it was George Huff himself or dyke Gettleman or Jerry Colangelo or Manny Jackson or the Whiz Kids of the 40s, the people who experienced that will tell you that it was there's no place like it over the last 100 years, and I don't see it going away.

I don't think this bill is going to go away for a while.

Let's end this episode with a ghost story, since we're in a fall mood, author and historian Troy Taylor has this spooky tale about the historic Avon theater in Decatur, Illinois.

Enjoy.

The Avon theater in Decatur, Illinois, opened in 1916 and it was completely different than any other theater in town, all of the other theaters, and there were a lot of them in Decatur it was known as being sort of the theater capital the Midwest at the time.

There were so many, but they were all legitimate stage theaters.

The only place in town that showed movies were tiny little Nickelodeons.

Nobody really gave much attention to movies in 1916 vaudeville was where it was at that was going to last forever.

Movies were a passing fad, so when they opened the Avon as this grand Movie House, everybody predicted failure, and they were somewhat right, because it didn't even last an entire year before the owner lost all his money and he closed it down.

But by then, movies had started to catch on, and a new company came in, reopened the theater, did a grand reopening, and started bringing people in.

People began to realize that it was the movies that was going to last and go the distance, just in time for the Spanish flu epidemic, which closed everything down all over again.

Well now the new owners had also lost their business, and finally, the place opened up again, this time with the group of Greek brothers who had immigrated to Decatur and had gone into the theater business.

A man named Gus constantopolis became the owner and manager of the Avon and he would remain there for the next 50 years, devoted to the theater.

Now it wasn't his only source of income.

It wasn't even the only theater that he managed, but the Avon was where he kept his office.

The Avon was the place that he wanted to be.

And so people got to know Gus.

They knew him.

They knew him on site.

He knew everybody.

He put his blood and soul into that theater.

Well, unfortunately, he died in 1965 and the theater went through a series of other owners before it finally closed down in the mid 1980s it struggled along as $1 theater for a while, but that was the end.

It was this great old theater, one of the last theaters in Decatur but it didn't make it as it was expected by a lot of people.

The downtown by that time had kind of dried up, and there wasn't a lot of business down there.

So in 1999 the Avon reopened again as a first run theater, just like it was supposed to be back in 1960 16 began showing movies again, and it became a popular spot, and remained so after all this time.

But it was during that time that theater staff members began to realize they were not in the building alone.

There was definitely someone else.

There.

A lot of strange things happened, usually people who come to work there who don't even know the place is supposed to be haunted, and will say that they don't believe in ghosts become believers within a few weeks, because they can't explain the things that go on, the doors that open and close, the lights that turn on and off, the figures that have been seen in the auditorium.

And more often than not, it's one figure.

It's Gus constantopolis, who's never left this building.

Now, his old office was next door to the letter room, and years later, I happened to be in the theater one afternoon, and again, I was there by myself.

I was sitting at a desk in the office with Gus old office, and was talking to a friend of mine on the phone.

And as I was talking, I heard a noise in the hallway, and assumed it was our projectionist, and I looked up to the doorway, and there standing in the doorway, was not the projectionist, but Gus constantopolis, standing there in the doorway of my office, looking at me, and then he turned and walked away.

Now I, you know, have been writing about ghosts and doing ghost tours and things for a very long time, even by that point, but in that entire career, I've only ever seen two ghosts.

This was one of them.

By the time I got to the doorway to see if I could see him walking away, the hallway was empty.

There was nobody there, but I knew what I'd seen, and I sat back down.

I hurried.

I sat back down.

I grabbed the phone, and I said to my friend, I just saw a ghost.

And she and I told her briefly what had happened.

And she said, Well, what are you going to do?

I said, I already did it.

She said, What is it?

I said, Well, I closed and locked the door in case he comes back.

I don't know what I thought the ghost was going to do, but that was my experience in the Avon now, there have been a lot of other things that have been reported over the years.

It is still an actively haunted spot.

It's also a very actively in business movie theater.

So it's not a place that people wander around too much at night looking for ghosts, but when things happen there, and you know, you can never guarantee anything will but it usually can make you a little unnerved.

For sure.

For more information about the 100th anniversary of Huff hall or any of Our stories, you can visit our website at will.illinois.edu/prairie, fire, you.