JAMES HARLEY, AURORA'S FORGOTTEN HERO: 1901--1910

JAMES HARLEY: AURORA'S FORGOTTEN HERO

Prindle sold his home to James Harley in November, 1901, for $1550 Harley’s biography, though apparently lost to professional Aurora historians, reads like the classic American success story--the super-achiever who built our nation into what we’d like to believe it is today.

Harley was the oldest of eleven children, born during the 1860’s on a farm near Elwood, Illinois. He attended a country school and began a college education, yet quit when his father died and he was needed to run the family farm. He married Emma Linebarger and bought a fruit ranch near Grand Junction, Colorado, yet soon discovered it would be more profitable to sell fruit than to grow it. He moved back to the area in 1896 with his wife and daughter, Mildred, born in 1889, to open a produce company with two other men, Taylor and Morey, on Broadway. Before long, he bought out the shares of the other two owners and become sole proprietor.

Harley completely remodeled it in June 1905. The contractor, J. F. Bennett, built and remodeled other area homes during the same time period, including the Stolp home on Fourth Street and the Bornheim home at the corner of Lincoln and Bluff. Although we have found no documents, we believe Harley added the upstairs bathroom, back bedroom, storage area, and second staircase. The 1897 Sanborn fire map shows the back section having only one story and the 1907 Sanborn increases it to 1 ½, which supports our theory, as does the significant increase in property value when he sold it nine years later.

Harley moved to Fox Street in November 1910, but his story doesn’t end there. He went on to become a two-term Aurora mayor during the World War 1 years, install an extensive sewer system in the Oak Park area, become postmaster during the 1920’s and 1930’s, and attained leadership in more civic organizations than one can count. His death in 1948 merited a front-page headline with inch-high letters in the Aurora Beacon News.

Why isn’t there a street named after him?

JAMES FRANKLIN, NOBLE INTENTIONS: 1993--2005

JAMES FRANKLIN: NOBLE INTENTIONS

James Franklin, a young reporter for the Joliet Beacon-News, bought 615 South Lincoln Avenue from the estate of Dorothy Greenwood in April, 1993.

According to Franklin's mother, Rita Franklin, James had every intention of fixing up the house, but never did. He applied for a permit to rehabilitate the home soon after purchasing the home in 1993, but city records show that he never picked up the permit. He is listed in city directories as living here between 1994 and 2005, but we also know that a parade of renters went through--Anibal Banos, Moyses Flores, Sylvia Lomas, and Peggy Niles, to name a few. Rita, who lived with him for only a short time, believes that these were friends; she described her son as a generous man, who liked to provide his down-and-out buddies with a place to live until they got on their feet. We know of them only because we receive their mail. Only Sylvia is ever mentioned in a city directory.

According to Rita, the wall separating the back bedroom from the storage area was torn down when they moved in, which leads us to believe that Louis Greenwood did tear it down. She said the house needed a lot of work, which her son wanted to do but never could--perhaps because of a busy, and erratic, newspaper schedule. It appears that Franklin removed the old knob-and-tube wiring, but never replaced it with a modern wiring system, which is why we had no upstairs lighting for the first six months that we lived here. Rita remembers the house as being very cold, and said that James would close off the unheated back bedroom all winter because even a space heater couldn't keep it warm. She was impressed with the apparent history of the home, and said that the city had even talked about designating it as an historic home. She had heard that this area had once been inhabited by a lot of rich people at the turn of the century, but that gangsters had also lived in the area. During the 1990's, the east side had deteriorated to the point that she was afraid to drive here at night.

Franklin sold the home to Yorktown Enterprises, an investment firm who "promised to take care of it," in 2005 for $119,000. We bought it in September, 2006.

LINCOLN BLOSSOMS WITH THE GREENWOODS:1964--1991

LINCOLN BLOSSOMS WITH THE GREENWOODS

Louis and Dorothy Greenwood moved from their home on LaSalle, next to the old corset factory and across the street from Doney, into 615 South Lincoln around 1964. They bought the home from Doney for only $13,000. They were members of Our Lady of Good Counsel church, and had five lively Boomer children--twins Mary and Margaret, Betty, Robert, and Pam. The children loved running races down the long upstairs hallway with their dog, Bruno, who was allowed to run around the house as much as he pleased. They had furniture in the basement, and the children watched T.V. down there during the hot summers before central air conditioning was common. Louis Greenwood worked at FermiLab, and Dorothy, the first working mother to inhabit the home, worked at Carson's.

Louis Greenwood was a man with varied interests. He loved to work outdoors, and he took pride in his ability to landscape and garden the backyard. His daughter, Mary Luba, says that they always had "the most beautiful backyard," and son Robert told me that he filled it with irises, snapdragons, and rosebushes. Flowers adorned the north side of the yard, the edge of the sidewalk and the space under the kitchen window. He planted yew trees in the back and two large evergreen trees in the front which, unfortunately, have been chopped down; but, amazingly enough, the perennials he planted along the north side still come up every spring. The fence did not yet exist. Louis also enjoyed playing his organ, which was positioned between the two windows in the dining room, and making wine and grape jelly in the basement closet where previous generations had stored coal. We have found many artifacts from the Greenwood years: antique matchbooks, Louis's canning jars, a Melmac saucer, a ping pong table, an old football and gardening supplies.

Louis made several modifications to the house. He planted grass in the driveway, which ran along the north side of the yard, so he could have more space for his gardening pursuits. He also enclosed the sunporch and installed a new kitchen door, which had been taken from an old farmhouse. Mary claims that he removed the wall separating the upstairs back bedroom from the adjacent storage area, so Robert would have a bigger bedroom, but Robert says he never did this. The home, during this era, had siding that looked like tiny pebbles, a design not commonly seen anymore. Like the Boltie's, the Greenwoods were able to park cars in the garage, and Robert and his dad often worked on cars together in it during the 1970's.

During the 1980's, Greenwood children gradually married and moved out. Louis's health deteriorated and, as he grew increasingly ill, he moved his bed downstairs, as Carl Boltie had done. He suffered a stroke one evening during a trip to the store, and came home unable to speak. He died that August night in the den. Dorothy stayed there alone until her death in September, 1991. Robert, the executor of the estate, rented out the home until James Franklin, a young worker for the Joliet Beacon-News, bought it for $58,000 in April, 1993.

PHOTOS OF THE KIDS

THE "DONE-AGE"; OR, LINCOLN GETS A FACELIFT: 1962--1964

In 1962, Boltie sold the house to Emery Doney, who lived only one block away on LaSalle Street. Doney was a tradesman, and we have a neighbor who still remembers him and the frequency with which he changed jobs. Doney worked as a painter for the CB&Q Railroad and as a maintenance man for the East Aurora schools, among other jobs.

Doney never intended to live at the house on South Lincoln. He found the home to be in poor repair, and he intended to fix it up and sell it. And fix it up, he did! Doney’s work represents the link between the old and the modern, the home that previous generations knew and the one we live in today. Without the help of contractors--and, incidentally, without securing a permit--Doney chopped out a portion of the kitchen and created a new basement stairwell. He moved the kitchen sink, previously in the pantry, to its present position under the window, and converted the pantry into a downstairs bathroom, installing a shower where the sink had been. He closed off the second staircase, which had led from the kitchen to the hall outside the upstairs back bedroom. In its place, he created two den closets where the downstairs entrance had been, and turned the upstairs entrance into bedroom and linen closets. Doney also created a hall closet outside the master bedroom.

After contacting another resident, we learned that the mismatched hardwood in the closet of our son, David, was actually the entrance to the closed-off staircase. Other clues were high baseboards, worn with scuff-marks, in closets where they didn’t belong, and “fake walls” put together with nails and thin wood in the backs of closets. If you look at the ceiling when descending the basement stairs, you will see an unnatural slant which is where the second staircase went up. My husband climbed a very tall ladder to see if any stairs were still intact, but he found that Doney had covered them with a sheet of Masonite. If they are still within the walls of the residence on South Lincoln, they will never be seen again. However, if you look carefully at the wall beside the basement stairs, you will see drywall seams which outline the door that used to lead from the den to the kitchen. Our son, Joe, has learned to look throughout the house for unnatural drywall seams, all evidence of Doney’s reconstructive surgery.

Doney is still alive today, at age 91, and we met him at his nursing home. He remembers little of the work he did, though he does remember that the house “hadn’t been taken care of” when he bought it. He also remembers the names of the five small children in the family sold it to, the Greenwood’s. He was firm in his recollection that he had closed off the second staircase before they moved in, which led me to wonder what was wrong with it. According to Will Schwickert, the staircase was very steep and curvy, which makes me think he closed it off to prevent accidental injury of the Greenwood children.

Doney rented the home to a man named Rauscher while he was doing the repair work. Rauscher ran a small machine shop in the garage during this time, which may explain why it has so many electric outlets. The Greenwood family moved in around 1964.

THE TRAGIC BOLTIE'S: 1952--1962

THE TRAGIC BOLTIE'S

Only two months later, the investor sold the house to Carl Boltie. Boltie moved in with his wife, Marie; brother, Bill; 19-year-old daughter, Hazel; and 12-year-old son, Ernie, in July, 1952. They had lived on a rural stretch of Montgomery Road for many years because his oldest daughter, Helen, had childhood health problems which were supposed to be cured by country living, but now that Helen was grown and married, they felt free to move into town. A year later, Hazel married Will Schwickert and moved back to the rural Aurora. Schwickert, an 84-year-old retired livestock and grain farmer, is one of family's few survivors, and he provided much of the information on the Boltie family during an interview at my home.

The Boltie era strikes me as a rather dark chapter in the history of the Lincoln manor, because the research I have done on the family reveals a consistent line of tragedy (the Kennedy syndrome?) An infant son, Carl Boltie Jr., died of pneumonia, and Helen was a sickly child. She overcame her early troubles, but contracted polio while pregnant with her second child and developed a permanent physical disability. Carl injured his back during the late 1940's and, even though he kept his job at Lyon Metal Corporation, he was no longer able to share a bedroom with his wife because of the muscular tics and sleeping problems which ensued. He had to wear a custom-built shoe, and he depended on brother Bill for rides to work. Almost all of his brothers died of heart disease, and Carl, himself, died of a heart attack suffered at work in 1963, a year after he and Marie moved out. Ernie developed heart disease by age 50 and died in Texas in October, 2008. Most tragic, though, was the untimely death of Hazel in 1980, when her car rode onto a hidden guardrail and flipped upside down in Big Rock Creek, on her way to work at Kaneville Seed Company. She stayed upside down in the creek for nearly four hours before police recovered her body. She was only 47.

In spite of their dark undertones, though, the Boltie family had some good times in the home. Schwickert still remembers that the family kept parrots in the basement, sometimes setting them free to fly around. Carl taught his parrot to swear, so he always draped a towel over the cage when the grandchildren came to visit so they would not be subjected to unsavory influences. Ernie collected several macaws, also, and would sometimes trade birds with his friends when he came home from college.

Helen, the immediate family's only survivor, has had two strokes and can no longer talk, but her husband, Tom Hoffman, claims that Carl made little improvement to the property. He said that Carl replaced the siding and furnace, and did nothing else. Schwickert remembered little about the upper floor, and when we looked at the bedrooms, he remarked that when he took a girl out, he didn't spend much time upstairs--a man of principle! Neither Schwickert or Hoffman remembers the barn, and both claim to have parked cars in the garage, so it appears that the barn was demolished between the time of Harold Christian's death and the Boltie's moving in. Perhaps the investors, who owned it for the two month interim, tore it down. Marie filed for a building permit to replace the garage in 1961, but apparently she never followed through on it because she sold the house for only $16,000 the following year. She never offered it to Tom and Helen, an oversight which Tom remembers with apparent bitterness. “Helen and I could have bought the d--- thing and rented it out!” he said.

It is interesting to note that Marie Boltie later met Charlotte Christian while playing Bingo, and discovered that they had both lived in the same house. Another interesting sidenote is that Carl changed his name from "Bolte" to "Boltie" early in adulthood, which is why I found almost no information about the family through genealogical sites.

Bill Bolte died of a heart attack in 1961, and Carl and Marie moved out a year later.

THE CHRISTIAN ERA: 1935--1951

When the Great Depression, Aurora residents suffered many foreclosures, and the Baker family was not exempt. When his horses died of distemper in 1934, Frank Baker could no longer work as a teamster, and he foreclosed on the house. Kane County Investment Company took possession, and in March, 1935, Andrew Christian purchased it for himself and the family of his son, Harold.

The Christian family found much repair work awaiting them. The hardwood flooring downstairs was worn; the oak staircase was rough and knotted; and the wide floorboards upstairs had outlived their usefulness. Harold's wife, Edna smoothed and refinished the staircase, in spite of chronic ill health. Their teen-age daughter, Charlotte, worked tirelessly resurfacing the hardwood floors and putting linoleum over the worn-out floorboards in the upstairs bedrooms. A grown son, Gale, worked for Masonite in Chicago, and he contributed masonite flooring for the den and ceiling tiles for the dining room. Even Vera, the five-year-old, stripped wallpaper.

Vera Christian Hunger, 79 years old, is the only surviving family member, and she revisited the home this April for a “then and now” tour. She showed us how the downstairs bathroom had been a pantry, the kitchen sink where the shower is today, and how the basement stairs had come down from the bathroom wall where the sink is today. Her memory is extraordinarily sharp, and she remembers the exact positions of furniture. Grandfather Andrew's armchair sat on the south wall of the den, and a library table stood in the hall. Her family also owned a record player on which they could create their own records to send Gale when he was away during World War 2.

Harold Christian, a carpenter, took a cabinet that an apprentice had measured incorrectly and forced it to fit into the space above their sink. In those days, cabinets often lacked doors, and closets were a rarity; the house had only two real closets, one in the master bedroom and the other under the oak staircase, and neither closet had doors. Harold also removed a kitchen cabinet so he could install the family's first refrigerator, a Servel which used gas. Aside from these projects, though, Harold did little carpentry work on the house. According to Vera, he was too busy creating things for other people to do work on his own property. He designed the "San-Tree," a wooden Christmas tree stand that was marketed and sold.

The house was heated with a coal furnace, and Harold installed a stoker when he was working at the Shipyards during World War 2 and would be away from home for several days at a time. The kitchen stove operated using both coal and gas, and a stovepipe ran across the kitchen ceiling and up between the two windows in the back bedroom. Coal was kept in a small room in the back basement. The side yard, where perennials grow today, was the driveway, and the barn stood where the driveway is today.

Like the Baker’s, the Christians had a colorful family history. Andrew, the grandfather, was born in 1866, and immigrated to the United States from Norway when he was six years old. His education stopped after third grade, when he was bound out as a farm hand, but he found successful work in adult life as a machinist. Harold began his career as a fireman for the railroad, but later became a mill-worker and operated his own business out of the barn and, later, the shed which he built on the property in 1946. Oldest son Gale fought in World War 2 and was stationed at Pearl Harbor. Kenneth became a professional clarinet and saxophone player in addition to establishing a career as a foreman at the railroad’s roundhouse. Charlotte married late in life and worked for sixty years as a legal secretary; although she never had children, she was extremely sociable in the community, riding the commuter train and playing bingo at area churches. Vera, the baby of the family, was born nine years after her next oldest sibling, Robert.

Perhaps the most colorful chapter in the family history was that of Harold’s mill-working business. Although others in the neighborhood operated businesses out of their homes, including Bauman’s Bottling mentioned in the previous post, a hostile neighbor reported Harold to the city for a zoning violation. The city of Aurora sued Harold in 1950, the year that Edna died. According to Vera, this neighbor was, himself, constructing and selling furnaces in his own basement. Harold justified his operating the business on the grounds that it been grandfathered to him, as Baker had used the barn for business purposes before he bought it. The case was still in progress when he suddenly died of congestive heart failure in June, 1951.

Harold died virtually penniless; his total cash, on hand and in the bank, totaled less than $100 upon his death. His Servel refrigerator, 1940 four-door Nash Sedan and 1946 Ford Pick-up were sold, and the property went into probate. He left many debts, and the house was listed in poor repair. Gale, executor of the estate, sold the property from his front porch, and an investor bought it for $2000 in 1952.

BAKERS AND APPLEQUISTS: 1920--1934

Frank and Margaret Baker, and their large extended family, form a colorful chapter in the history of the home. The Bakers immigrated to America from England in 1910 with their only child, Catherine, who was about eight years old at the time. Mrs. Baker originally came from Wales, and Catherine was born there. Mr. Baker was a teamster, meaning that he kept several teams of horses which he used to dig basements. Three teams of horses lived in the two-story barn behind our home, and the fourth stabled elsewhere. The horses grazed in Oats’s Pasture between the railroad bridge and the cemetery during the summer, and hauled coal during the winter. According to Mr. Applequist, whom I interviewed, coal sold for $1.50 a ton during the 1930’s, and it was weighed at a small scale-house which still stands today at the corner of Lincoln and Evans. The original brick coal bins at the corner of Logan and Ashland were torn down only a few weeks ago.

The Bakers had a lively, crowded household. Catherine had a “shotgun” wedding shortly before her seventeenth birthday and married Cecil Hopkins, only 19; however, the marriage lasted only a year. Their child, Marion, was born around 1920, and was later adopted by Catherine’s second husband, Carl Applequist. Catherine and Carl had two sons, Eugene and Robert, and lived with her parents for many years. (My son, Joe, was thrilled to learn that Eugene was born in his bedroom--a 13-pound baby born at home in 1927!) Mr. Baker took in an abused teen-age girl, Olive Dano, who later married William Newland and continued living with the Baker’s. In addition, the Baker family made an agreement with the newly-constructed Bardwell Elementary School to take in children from the “sight-savers” class. These children, with severe visual impairments, came from neighboring communities, including Sugar Grove and Big Rock, to attend school at Bardwell. One girl, Catherine Schneider, stayed with the Baker family for many years.

The Applequists later moved to Sexton Street, and Carl Applequist died of a bad heart in 1942. During their time on Lincoln Avenue, the Applequist children loved going to the back alley where they could get free soda pop from Baumann's Bottling Company, which operated out of a shed at the back of 211 Bluff Street. The soda later became the Nehi which is still sold today, and the shed is still standing (though just barely!)

THE RENTER AGE; OR REAL ESTATE FOR A BUCK: 1910--1929

The years following Harley’s residence are more of a mystery. He sold the home to Harry and Clara Jones in 1910 for $4500 but, according to city directories, the Joneses never lived there. They lived in Geneva during the entire period of their ownership. and, instead, we see a parade of names that change every year or so: Amos Adams in 1911, Mr. Avery another year, etc. Apparently, Mrs. Jones was a landlady, and the home entered the “rooming house” stage of its life.

Clara Jones deeded the home to Jennie Buchanan in 1919 for only $1, and here, again, we encounter an enigma: Mrs. Buchanan and her husband, James, depot master of the CB&Q railroad, never lived there. It is highly probable that Jones and Buchanan were related, but genealogical research (still in progress) would be needed to confirm this. City records, instead, show Frank and Margaret Baker living in the home from 1920 to 1934. Mr. Baker’s surviving grandson, 81-year-old Eugene Applequist, claims to know nothing of the Buchanan’s and said that his grandfather always owned it; yet, deed records at the courthouse show that Mrs. Buchanan sold the home to the Bakers in 1929. Buchanan drew up a formal, legal document with the Bakers in June,1927, agreeing to sell them the property for $4,163.89 if they would pay her $50 a month until the principal was reduced to $3500, at which time the remaining balance would be due in full. Two years later, though, Buchanan sold the property to the Baker family for only $1. We may never know why.