I spent golden days of childhood at Grandma and Grandpa LaFollette’s house in Knoxville, Illinois.
A bit of that old house has been saved as a historic site, but the place I knew in childhood is long gone. I don’t even have a photo of it. Only in memory is it preserved entire.
Let me try tell you why it was special.
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It stood on a large lot fronting the town square in Knoxville, a town of about two thousand souls. Across the square, on the north side, stood the Old Courthouse, a two-story, white-pillared structure built in 1839. Beside the courthouse, a small brick building housed the village library. Between courthouse and library stood—and still stands—a brick wall, on which the names of local World War II servicemen stand in relief on twin bronze plaques. My father, who survived the war, and his brothers Stanley and Franklin, who did not, are listed there.
The lot my grandparents owned on the south side of the square, next to the Klink Mortuary, was dominated by a huge elm, said to be the largest in Knox County. That tree had a diameter of five or six feet, its trunk surrounded by a circular brick wall and its limbs overspreading the entire lot. The house stood on the left front corner of the lot, near the great tree.
It was a one-story house, with no basement—at least, not under the main part of the house. Its clapboard siding was painted light brown. It was an old house—of indeterminate age really, but old enough that everything sagged a little bit.
A low porch ran across the front of the house. Wooden railings. A wooden porch swing suspended on chains from the porch ceiling.
The front door opened into the living room, a large, square space. It was still a large room, even in winter, when a tall kerosene space heater on a metal pad occupied the center of the floor, its blue and yellow flames spreading warmth and cheer. There was room enough for a Christmas tree plus the whole family—twenty or thirty people with all the aunts and uncles and cousins—ripping the wraps off presents, experimenting with Slinkies and toy tractors and those little plastic woodpeckers made in Japan, the ones that climb the wall on rotating suction cups.
A long bedroom ran down the west wide of the living room. That was shared by the youngest of my aunts—Jean, Sue, and Linda—who still lived at home. The bedroom had two doors that opened to the living room, one at each end.
Behind the living room—on its south side—was a smaller dining room. You had to step down to enter it from the living room, a clue that the house had been built bit by bit, extra rooms added according to the dictates of convenience and necessity.
Attached to the east side of the dining room, one step up again, were two additional bedrooms. The far one was Grandma and Grandpa’s bedroom; the other was a spare, a guest room. You had to go through the one room to get to the other. These two rooms could be made very dark, even on a sunny day, because Grandma never took down the blackout shades after the war was over.
Behind the dining room, to its south, and on the lower level with it, was the kitchen, a small room with refrigerator, range, sink, and pantry on the south wall and just enough room left over for a kitchen table and chairs.
The end of the kitchen had a door that led outside, to a sort of patio under a roof held up by a gnarled corner-post. Beyond the patio was the back yard, where stood an old iron hand pump— although in my earliest memories, the kitchen already had running water.
You may have noticed I mentioned no bathroom. The house originally had no indoor plumbing. An outhouse must have stood on the back of the lot, but I don’t remember it. One of my earliest memories is of watching a bulldozer dig out the earth right behind the kitchen. That hole was then roofed over and given walls and a floor. Water lines were installed.
It was a fairly large, high-ceilinged space, with laundry tubs, a toilet, a shower, and an all-important gas-fired space heater. That became the house’s bathroom. In any weather, winter or summer, day or night, if you needed the bathroom you left the kitchen, walked to the rear of the roofed-over patio, then scampered under the sky to the bathroom door, which opened on a short flight of wooden stairs down into the bathroom.
Under those stairs were shelves, where Grandma stored Ball jars of home-canned pickles, tomatoes, jellies and jams.
The house’s only heat, besides that small heater in the bathroom, came from the kitchen stove, plus the large kerosene space heater in the living room, which was installed in the fall and taken out again in spring. You might surmise that peripheral areas—the bedrooms, for instance—would be cool or downright cold. Your surmise would be right. But that’s what blankets and quilts are for.
Another feature of the bedrooms, besides warm covers, was the continued presence of chamber pots under the beds, even after the outhouse was replaced by a “modern” plumbed bathroom. The residents of the house were accustomed to using “thunder mugs” in the middle of the night. And besides, trekking outdoors to the cellar bathroom at midnight in cold weather, barefoot or shod in slippers, was beyond the call of duty.
The lot was large enough, and the house small enough, that there was plenty of room for picnic suppers on warm summer evenings. We would dine at tables spread under the towering canopy of the big green elm, then chase lightning bugs in the dark and imprison them in peanut butter jars with air-holes punched in the lid.
On Saturday nights the town band performed in the old-fashioned bandstand in the park, just across the street from Grandma’s house. The program was always the same—Sousa marches—and it was always thrilling.
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After Grandpa died, Grandma had to sell the property. Thy buyer wanted a clean lot, unencumbered by the rambling, ramshackle old house that had outlived its time. Grandma found a man who was willing to tear down the house in exchange for the materials he could salvage.
It was a good deal, but when the man ripped the clapboard siding off the kitchen, he found square-hewn oak timbers, with mud chinking between them. All destuction halted while the members of the local historical society assessed the situation. It turned out that my grandparents’ house had been built upon the first log cabin erected by a white man in Knox County—John Sanburn’s trading post from the 1830s.
It was jacked up, placed on rollers, and moved to the north side of the square, in the empty space beside the Old Courthouse. There it was restored to something like its original condition, and ever since then (1957) it has been a historical exhibit for curious tourists.
I used to eat Thanksgiving dinner at the children’s table in that cabin, back when it was my grandma’s kitchen.
If you venture through Knoxville, Illinois, on a day when the Sanborn cabin is open for viewing, you can see something of what life on the prairie in the 1830s and 1840s must have been like. But there is no corresponding way for you to visualize what life was like in the middle of the twentieth century in my grandparents’ old house.
I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
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