Let me take you back to about 1852 and watch some men build a house, the home
I now live in.
It was built by Christopher Klinefelter for his daughter,
Mrs. Katherine Gebhart, who lived there from 1852 until her death, in 1895. It
was a two-roomed, one and a half story house, one and a half miles north of the
present town of Troy Grove.
There were two rooms downstairs, and the
sleeping apartment was in the upstairs, with the unplastered rafters for a
ceiling. The chimneys were built on the joists in the upstairs bv laying a plank
over them and building the bricks upward through the roof. There was a chimney
at each end which kept the upstairs warm. The stove pipes went through the
ceiling. At one time the ceiling and the upstairs floor caught fire near the
chimney, because the place is still charred. The bricks that the chimneys were
made of were made near a little stream on the farm owned by Levi Kreisler. A
sawmill was built on the stream, a town was laid out in lots, and a cemetery
made; but the stream could not supply power enough for the sawmill, and
therefore the town was never built up, and the bodies in the cemetery were taken
to the Troy Grove cemetery.
When this pioneer house was built it had no
insulating between the weather boarding and the plaster and wainscoting. This
leaves much cold air into the rooms in the winter.
In the winter wolves
came from the timber and played on the snow banks any of the twenty-four hours
of the day, for they were very bold in the early days.
Near the Little
Vermillion river, a half a mile north of this house, Mrs. Levi Fahler, who lived
in the house before she was married, remembers that there were some empty Indian
huts built into the hillsides. Although the Indians had moved out many years
before, the people scared the children by telling them that the Indians would
get them if they did not behave.
John Gebhart rebuilt the house while he
lived with his mother, adding two rooms upstairs (there was a ladder before), a
large kitchen, an open porch and a cellar. After the remodelling was done, Mrs.
Gebhart lived in one room with her bed, stove and all her cooking utensils,
while her son John lived in the other four rooms with his wife and daughter. His
wife died of smallpox, so he married again and moved to a nearby farm that now
belongs to his daughter, Miss Alma Gebhart.
Mr. and Mrs. Levi Fahler,
the oldest married couple in La Salle county, and probably in the state, were
married in Troy Grove after coming from this house, where Mrs. Fahler had lived.
They moved to the residence now occupied by Wm. Fahler, a son of this couple,
Martin being the other son.
As John Howard Payne said during the Civil
war, I say now, and it holds true to this home:
"Mid pleasures and
palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home;
A charm from the sky seems to hallow us there,
Which, seek through the world,
is ne'er met with elsewhere.
Home, Home, sweet, sweet Home!
There's no
place like Home! There's no place like Home!
Extracted 08 Nov 2018 by Norma Hass from Stories of Pioneer Days in La Salle County, Illinois, by Grammar Grade Pupils, published in 1932, page 30.
| Lee | DeKalb | Kane |
| Bureau |
 |
Kendall |
| Putnam | Grundy | |
| Marshall | Woodford | Livingston |
