I don’t think we stayed in Springfield very long. I remember going to Lincoln’s New Salem State Historic Site, which is another historical town recreation, similar to Williamsburg. This one made more of an impression, I think, because a television miniseries had been filmed here just prior to our visit. I cannot for the life of me remember what miniseries it had been, but at least I had some frame of reference for the buildings, aside from “these are recreations of buildings that were here when Abraham Lincoln lived here in the mid-1800s.”
We also toured the house that Abraham Lincoln had lived in when he and Mary Todd Lincoln lived in Springfield. It was, as they all are, really, a house.
The Illinois State Capitol (not from our 1980 vacation, but from an earlier business trip that my dad took)
I don’t remember going into either the Illinois State Capitol building or the Old State Capitol Historic Site, but I do remember seeing the outside of both. I think we may have just driven through Springfield on our way to our next destination, Lexington, Kentucky.
It is likely that nearly everyone in the United States has heard of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, more popularly called “the Mormons.” In the 2012 election, Republican candidate Mitt Romney was a Mormon. Well, he still is. The “was” is for the term of his candidacy, rather than his religious affiliation.
Never mind that. The fact is that my mom was always sort of interested in Mormonism. When my mom was a new stay-at-home mom with a young child, she answered the door when two young Mormon missionaries were at the door. She became friends with them, and, though she did not convert, she found a lot to like about Mormonism, particularly their family orientation. She and one of the missionaries stayed in touch with one another for the next ten years or so.
So when the time came to plan our 1980 vacation, my mom wanted to go to Nauvoo, Illinois.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was founded by a man named Joseph Smith, in Palmyra, New York. He claimed to have found a set of golden plates that had the story of the “lost tribes of Israel” having fled to North America and Jesus having visited them there.
Soon after founding his church, Smith and his followers moved to Ohio, then on to settle in Nauvoo, Illinois. While they were living in Nauvoo, Smith and his brother Hyrum were arrested and held in the jail in Carthage, Illinois. While they were incarcerated, they were murdered by an angry mob.
The central part of town, at the time, was the space where the Nauvoo Temple had once stood (the Nauvoo Temple was rebuilt in 2002). We visited a lot of houses, as usual, but the site of the temple really stuck in my head. Human memory is fallible, but I seem to recall that they asked non-Mormons (I was raised United Methodist, though I’m sort of between churches at the moment) not to walk on the ground where the temple had stood, since it was still considered holy. I didn’t find out until later that the Mormons had sold the Temple, and, after the Temple had been damaged in a fire, the purchaser had sold it to someone else. The Mormons purchased the land back in the middle of the 20th century. Maybe they had rededicated it, or whatever it’s called, reconsecrated, maybe? I don’t know. And maybe I’m misremembering and non-Mormons were able to run around freely on that land. Now that there is a new Temple on the site, only Mormons are allowed to go there because of the nature of a Mormon Temple.
The site of the Nauvoo Temple in 1980.
Due to stress between the Mormons and the other residents of the area, soon after the Mormons elected Brigham Young as their new president, they moved on, eventually settling in Salt Lake City, Utah.
I have to admit that there are some things about Mormonism that I find appealing. Particularly, I like the health codes. I probably drink more soft drinks than is strictly healthy for me, and I’m a moderate consumer of caffeine (which is forbidden to Mormons) but I already don’t drink alcohol or smoke. I come from a family of alcoholics and my reaction to alcohol is more “Really?” than “Whee!” And the plan is for me to spend more time in a Mormon situation next year — Alex and I will hopefully be flying into Salt Lake City, then driving to Yellowstone for our 2016 vacation.
I’m due for another Northern Illinois Destination, and since I have another 1979 travel memories that is also a Northern Illinois Destination, I figured why not? I don’t think that travel memories and Northern Illinois/South Texas destinations will ever converge like this again. The next Illinois travel memory, from 1980, will be Central Illinois.
The McCormick family were kind of a big deal in Chicago. Cyrus McCormick, Sr. held a patent on a mechanical reaper which changed the face of agriculture forever. The reaper was also the basis for the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, which was later folded into International Harvester Company and is now Navistar International Corporation.
Another founder of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company was Cyrus’s younger brother, Leander McCormick. Leander was something of a real estate magnate. Leander’s great-grandson, Robert R. McCormick, grew up in the McCormick mansion on Rush Street, a building that was, for most of my life, the Chez Paul restaurant in Chicago. As an adult Robert was a politician and a soldier, first with the Illinois National Guard, then in the United States Army, where he served during World War I and reached the rank of Colonel. People referred to him as “Colonel McCormick” for the rest of his life.
After the war, McCormick founded a farm in Wheaton, Illinois, which he named for the Cantigny region of France. He and both his first and second wives lived there for the rest of their lives, and the farm is now a public park. Entrance into the park is free, but there is a parking fee. At the time I write this, the parking fee is $5 during the early hours in the day, but later in the day, the price drops to $2.
We toured the house and probably also the First Division Museum, which documents the history of the First Infantry Division, which had been McCormick’s division when he was in the Army.
The farmlands are now gardens. As you probably could guess, from my previous comments about being most interested in books and plants, this is what I remember best. The gardens of Cantigny are pretty well-known, apparently, though they have probably changed quite a bit in the 36 years since I was there. One of the most famous is the rose garden. My parents and I saw the most fascinating rose there. The petals were white on one side and red on the other. Years later, I asked my mom where we had seen that rose, and she denied ever having seen such a thing.
And when I was going through the old photograph albums doing the scanning, I found the rose. It’s an SX-70 photo, so it doesn’t nearly do the rose justice, but nevertheless here it is:
Rose with red and white petals from our trip to Cantigny.
The house, museum, and grounds are all handicap accessible. Additionally, the park has a tram service for those who cannot walk between the attractions. I do not know if the trams can handle wheelchairs, however.
In 1979, we also took a several-day trip to Galena, Illinois. We stayed at what is apparently the ski resort in Galena. It was the off-season, so we got to stay there for less than the ski season cost and it was a lovely trip.
The view westwards towards the Mississippi River from the top of the ski lift.
We went into downtown Galena and enjoyed the small-town ambiance. We also walked down to the Mississippi River just to do it and walked along the banks through clouds of dragonflies (or maybe they were damselflies, I’m not much of an entomologist, and this was 36 years ago).
I also got to go horseback riding for the second time in my life. My first time horseback riding, two years earlier with my Girl Scout troop, had been . . . unexciting. Since I was the smallest girl in my Girl Scout troop, I got the “gentlest” horse, which was also the slowest. As the group walked, I fell further and further behind. Eventually the person leading our group saw me way, way back there and literally dragged the horse up to the rest of the group. I feared that the same thing would happen on this vacation, but, to my surprise (and pleasure) they gave me a horse with a bit of pep and I was able to keep up with the group.
My parents and I went on a riverboat. It wasn’t a big paddlewheel boat, but it was a nice outing up and down the river. This was the farthest west I had ever been in my life, so it was pretty momentous.
And, since my mom had a thing for historic houses, we fit at least two in, that I can remember. With the aid of photographs, I was able identify one house as the Dowling House, which was the oldest building in town.
The other was more memorable. It was the big red brick house that is now the Ulysses S. Grant State Historic Site. It’s a red brick house, where Grant lived. Apparently, he only stayed in Galena for eight years (four of which were the Civil War, so that makes it actually four years, I guess) and once he was elected President, he never returned. That’s a ringing endorsement of Galena if I’ve ever head one, so I don’t think I’d want to live there myself. As a place for my family to take their first “just the three of us” vacation, though, it was quite pleasant indeed.
This was originally scheduled to be posted on Independence Day of 2015, only I was just getting the hang of writing posts and scheduling them for later, so I accidentally posted it on June 22. I’ve triple-checked and made sure that my attempt to pre-schedule this post worked. I’m typing this paragraph on July 10, 2015, but if all goes as planned, it should post on July 20, 2015.
I figured I would start the Northern Illinois Destinations posts with one of my family’s Fourth of July traditions, the Taste of Chicago Festival in Grant Park, Chicago. I cannot remember specifically what year we started going to Taste of Chicago. The festival started in 1980, so it certainly couldn’t have been any earlier than that. We started bringing the man who eventually became my husband, and then, years later, my ex-husband, in 1989 or so, so it must have been earlier than that. For the record, the Taste of Chicago is no longer held on the Fourth of July weekend. The last Fourth of July Taste of Chicago apparently was in 2011. In 2015, the Taste of Chicago will be held July 8 through 15.
My parents and I had a traditional pattern for doing the Taste. We would walk the entire thing once to get the lay of the land, then we would buy our tickets and make another pass and buy our food. We traditionally got ribs, chicken wings, Chicago style hot dogs (though I cannot digest onions so I would scrape mine off), turtle soup (from the now-defunct Binyon’s. Frankly, the turtle was sort of optional — most people ate the turtle soup for the sherry), and chocolate-covered strawberries. Whatever else we bought would vary based on what was available that year.
I went back with my now-ex a few times after we moved to Texas and my parents retired to Florida. We didn’t have the specific routine that my folks and I did. Then, after my ex and I split up, my son and I made a return visit in 2010.
The food is not the only reason to go to Taste of Chicago. No, I’m not talking about beer, though if that’s your thing, have at it (I don’t drink, myself. I come from a family of alcoholics and my distaste for the flavor of alcohol is not worth attempting to get over if that is the fate that would lie ahead of me). I’m talking about two other things: the music and the people-watching. There is usually a big headliner act in the band shell at night. One year the act was Chicago and I made my folks hang around the park for a few extra minutes just so that I could catch part of the concert. There are also smaller stages that have musicians throughout the day.
If you ever plan to attend Taste of Chicago, remember that it may be, as the saying goes, “cooler by the lake,” but it’s not necessarily that much cooler. Plan for it to be about the same temperature downtown as it is wherever your hotel/host/home is and dress accordingly. Some years the temperature was a balmy 80 degrees Fahrenheit or so. Other years, it has been in the high 90s.
