First joint meeting of The McDonough County Historical Society and The McDonough County Genealogical Society May 18, 2015
First joint meeting of The McDonough County Historical Society and The McDonough County Genealogical Society
Monday, May 18, 2015, at 7:00 p.m., the McDonough County Historical Society will meet in Conference Room B of the Spoon River Community Outreach Center on East Jackson Street, under the direction of former mayor and current Society president Robert Anstine. Special guests are the members of the McDonough County Genealogical Society. However, members of the general public are welcome.
Former mayor Tom Carper will speak… As most of us are aware, Governor Rauner announced plans this past month to end Amtrak train service to Macomb. Presently, Amtrak provides twice daily round-trip service between Chicago’s Union Station and Macomb. The elimination of that service would be highly detrimental to the future of Macomb overall and in particular to that of WIU. As WIU president Jack Thomas has stated, more than fifty percent of Western’s students come from the greater Chicago area, and most of them rely on Amtrak to travel between Macomb and home. Former Mayor Tom Carper will provide timely updates on Macomb’s train service situation in a talk entitled “Amtrak in Illinois
1971-Present: What About Tomorrow?” Carper served on the Amtrak board of directors from 2008 through 2013 and has recently been appointed by
President Obama to a second fiveyear term. Following his remarks, he will answer questions.
McDonough County Genealogical Society Allen Nemec will speak…
The featured speaker for the evening will be McDonough County Genealogical Society president Allen Nemec. Nemec is an acknowledged authority on local historic homes, the author of Macomb Homes with Names: A Look into Macomb, Illinois’ Historic Homes, Their Past Inhabitants and a View of them Today (2010), and a member of the Macomb Historic Preservation Commission. His talk will be
entitled “Original Town of Macomb Pre-1870 Homes.”
Original Town is a forty-two block area of Macomb, surrounding our historic square and bordered by Adams, Dudley, Piper, and Johnson streets. It was the portion of town laid out by town leader James Campbell, soon after the land was registered with the state, and hence first to have commercial buildings and homes constructed within it. The homes which once lined the streets within Original Town were associated with people by such names as Tinsley, Bailey, Wells, Wilson, Brooking, Van Vleck, Broaddus, Hays, Westfall, and Bayne, who came to Macomb with the expectation of living a good life in this place and who married, worked at various jobs, raised children, and in some cases established businesses, held public office, served in the Civil War, and practiced medicine. In their time, they were as familiar to each other as our friends and neighbors are to us. As decades passed, most of those people became relegated to obscurity so that their only associations with Macomb exist in mentions of them in town or county histories, engravings on tombstones at our local cemeteries, and homes they erected and lived in. Because those homes are one of the few features left to connect us with those people, and therefore with our
common heritage, it is vitally important that we work to preserve them. As Nemec says, of the many pre1870 homes that once stood in the Original Town section of Macomb, fewer than a dozen remain. The last one to be razed was the once-lovely federalist-style home at the northwest corner of the intersection of Dudley and Washington streets. We didn’t have to allow it to lapse into a state of ruin so that in the end there was little alternative but to tear it away. We simply lost track of its association with prominent merchant George Wells and with his widow Louisa, who raised their five children on her own with a limited income, who participated actively in the life of her town, and who in spite of her difficult situation found countless ways to help those who faced challenges equal to, or greater than, her own. During his talk, Nemec will call attention to homes in Original Town Macomb that are well preserved, to others that are in decline and endangered, and to the stories associated with them. --Kathy Nichols, Historical Society
Please join us this coming Monday evening to hear former mayor Tom Carper’s update on the crucial state of our Amtrak train service and Allen Nemec’s equally crucial reminder of the kind of forgetfulness that so easily leads to the loss of precious reminders of our cultural heritage.
Wells House, Macomb, Illinois