The Farm That Became a Church

Recently I’ve been doing some research on the Erickson side of my family tree, working with my cousin Gene.  We’ve found some good stories, including a real “black sheep” of a great-great-grandfather who I’ll write about soon.  But today, the story of my great-grandfather Karl Erickson’s farm, and how it became a church.

Karl (a/k/a Charlie) Erickson came to America from Mecklenburg, Germany with his parents, Johann and Caroline, and his brother Johann Jr., when he was nine years old—that would have been 1868.  The family settled in Will County, Illinois, where his mother soon died and his father Johann Sr. made a living as a farmer (although not a very good one), and later as a laborer.   

Karl and his brother left home (or were turned out of the house, some stories say) to make their way through the world in their mid-teens, and both brothers managed to do so.  By the 1880 census, Karl (by then known as Charlie) was a farm laborer on the farm of John Leppert, where a young lady named Lena Schmidt worked as housekeeper.  Carl and Lena married later that year and settled down to farm on rented land in Wheatland Township, Will County, Illinois.  Eventually they had ten children, nine of whom survived. 

Some years later (1903 to be exact) they bought their own farm, 160 acres in Will County which lay on both sides of Boughton Road in what is now Bolingbrook, Illinois.  They lived and farmed there until they retired around 1920 and “bought a house in town” (that town being Naperville).

But it’s the story of what happened to their Boughton Road farm sixty years later that is my main theme today. 

In the 1980s, a young congregation called Independent Baptist Church was looking for a property.  They purchased 18 acres of the old Erickson farm on the north side of Boughton Road—and instead of tearing down the 120-year-old barn, they remodeled it into a wonderful “barn church” in 1985, putting nearly 10,000 man-hours of volunteer labor into the remodeling.  The pastor of the church, David Shoaf, provided me with these old photos of the barn church—with the silo still standing proud.

about 1985

But the barn church didn’t last long...  On March 17, 1989 an arsonist burned the building to the ground.  Suspicion fell on a land developer who wanted the property to expand one of his projects, but nothing was ever proven.

Down but not out, the church rallied and built a new colonial-style church building on the site of the old barn.  Today they continue to meet and thrive at their church building on the old Erickson farm, 380 West Boughton Road in Bolingbrook.

One further note:

The old farmhouse, built in two sections (the older and plainer section visible on the right side, the newer and fancier section on the left) still stands on the church property.  The first photo below shows my great-grandparents, Karl and Lena Erickson, with four of their children, around 1910.  The second photo show the house in more modern times, nearly 100 years later—still standing.

Photos courtesy of Pastor David Shoaf and Independent Baptist Church of Bolingbrook, Illinois (www.ibcbolingbrook.org).  Old farmhouse photo courtesy of Gene Erickson.

Liz, Arthur, and Amy

My mom once sat down and told me about her mother and father’s siblings, and most of it wasn’t pretty!  I wrote down what she said about each one, and lately, I’ve been trying to sort out fact from fancy. 

My grandfather, Robert Johann Erickson, had five sisters, and one was named Mary Elizabeth (pictured)—but she was always called “Liz.”  Two of Liz’ sisters died of tuberculosis—I’ve written about them previously.  Here is what my mother said about her Aunt Liz:

“Liz had seven children and died in childbirth with the seventh. Their ages ranged from 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2, down to the baby. My grandmother (Liz’ mother) raised the baby. The father hired a neighbor girl, 18 years old, to be housekeeper, and a year later she married him. They had four children, making 11 in all. He was kind of lazy...”

I’ll never know about the “lazy” part, but I wanted to find out more about this great-aunt and uncle that I never met.  Besides that, when someone dies young, there’s often a story there.

Mary Elizabeth Erickson was born in 1884, the second of nine surviving children of Charlie and Lena Schmidt Erickson.  Liz, as she was called, married Arthur Stafford in March 1901, when she was just sixteen years old.  They had their first child, Mabel, a few months later—and more children came along in 1903, 1905, 1906, 1908, 1910, and 1913.

The 1910 census shows Arthur and Mary living on a farm in Will County, Illinois, next door to Arthur’s parents.  They had five children by then, and a sixth on the way.  But Liz’ luck ran out with child number seven…  Records on findagrave.com show that baby Earl was born on the 29^th of January,1913 and Liz died a week later, on the 6^th of February.  She was buried at Alexander Cemetery in Romeoville.

But what was Arthur to do?  The census records back up my mother’s assertion that the baby was raised by his grandparents.  The 1920 census shows young Earl Stafford living with Charlie and Lena Erickson.  He was still there for 1930 census, when he was seventeen.

It is very possible that Arthur brought in a young unmarried neighbor girl to help with the children and the housework—that would have been very common.  And when I checked the 1910 census, Arthur and his family live in the same census district in DuPage Township as 12-year-old Amy Shepherd and her parents.  By 1913, Amy would have been old enough to be “hired out”—and we know that she was Arthur’s wife probably by 1916, when their first child was born.

The 1920 census shows Arthur (age 39) living with new wife Amy (age 23).   They already have three young children (the oldest is three), and five of Arthur’s children live with them.  Arthur’s oldest child, Mabel, is only five years younger than her stepmother, and Mabel’s occupation is listed as “servant—at home.”  I can only imagine how dreary poor Mabel’s life was.  (Later census records show that within the year, young Mabel had ‘escaped’ her home via marriage—but by the 1930 census, she had five children of her own!)

The 1930 census shows Arthur (50) and Amy (32) living with two of his children and four of theirs.  So Arthur did indeed have eleven children.

Arthur outlived his young wife by eleven years.  They were buried together at Woodlawn Memorial Park in Joliet.

So, my mom was right about the seven children, the death in childbirth, the baby being raised by grandparents, the young second wife, and the four additional children…  But I’ll never know about the “lazy” part.

West View Farm

Some of the happiest times of my childhood were spent in Minooka, Illinois. 

My maternal grandparents were Robert J. Erickson (1888-1968) and Clara Anderson Erickson (1892-1967).  They were married in 1913, and before long, they purchased the farm of Robert’s father, Charles Erickson.  But the Great Depression took its toll on Midwestern farmers like them, and the mortgage didn’t get paid, and by the time my mom was in high school they had lost that farm and then lived on two or three rented farms.  Grandpa was down, but not out.  The same year Mom married Dad—1950—Grandma and Grandpa Erickson bought West View Farm, and paid cash for it. 

West View Farm was 120 acres of Illinois clay loam.  Many of the buildings were already unneeded in the 1950s, having been built for an earlier time.  My grandpa kept a beef steer in the stable, and raised chickens in another barn.  Then there was a corn crib used as a repair and maintenance building, a small shed or two, and a huge barn which wasn’t used for much of anything, along with three empty silos and an old orchard…  and then there was the house.

The view of that farmhouse from Holt Road is something I will carry in my memory forever.  It was a magnificent place, especially when seen from the road across the vast expanse of front yard which my grandfather kept in magnificent condition all the years he lived there. 

We visited the farm most Sundays, and in the summers I would spend a happy week there, following my beloved grandfather and Uncle Bob around the farm.  It was a wonderful place for a child—the windmill, the cistern, the water pump, the corn crib with its souvenirs of my Uncle Bob’s plowing championships, the chicken house, the orchard, the garden, the sundial—and that wonderful house.  Grandma and Grandpa lived on the main floor, and the second floor had been an apartment for Uncle Bob and Aunt Shirley, until the women quarreled and my aunt and uncle built a house down the road.  So now it was unoccupied, with room after room to explore, full of furniture, toys, old clothes, and every kind of thing.

In the mid 1960s, Grandma Erickson’s high blood pressure finally took its toll.  The heart went out of Grandpa after that, and within a year or two, he was gone, too.  After a protracted legal battle, Uncle Bob bought out his three sisters and carried on with the farm—but the hard feelings lingered, and I didn’t see the farm again for nearly twenty years.  After that, I made occasional visits there, but as my uncle let the place “go to seed” as he got older (and as he went to seed as well), it was harder and harder to make myself drive out there and witness the farm’s slow demise.

Eight or ten years ago my uncle died.  Some time after that my sister and I drove out to Minooka to walk around the old place.  Looking up from the road, across the once magnificent lawn, and seeing the house boarded up brought tears to our eyes.  We walked around the buildings, marveling at how quickly the now-vacant farm was being reclaimed by nature.  We knew it would never be restored to its former glory; if the real estate slump ended and someone bought it, its proximity to Interstate 88 would make it prime property for development.

Last summer my sister and I returned once again.  We thought we were prepared for anything we might see, but we were mistaken.  Where the farmhouse once stood, there were only charred ruins.  I stopped at the farmhouse across the road and was told that it had burned down the previous year—perhaps due to lightning, or squatters who were careless with a cooking fire inside.  I grieve the loss of that farm like I would grieve a dearly loved friend.  But my childhood is bound up in the memories of that place, and always will be.

Tuberculosis

I don’t think much about tuberculosis (known as “consumption” in the old days)...  But my Great Grandpa Charles Erickson and his wife Lena had far too much familiarity with it, since it killed three of their adult children—Mina, Edward, and Tecla—as well as several of their grandchildren.

Charles and Lena Erickson’s oldest daughter Mina married  George Edward Lehmann around 1900; I’m not sure when this photo of George and Mina was taken.  Mina, it is said in the family, contracted the disease as a young mother, but refused to go to Edward Tuberculosis Sanitarium in nearby Naperville, Illinois (now Edward Hospital), not wanting to leave her children.  Tuberculosis ended her life in 1924 at age 42.  Three of her children caught it, probably from her, and two of them (Howard and Hazel) died from it a few years after their mother did.  My mother once told me that the third child, a son, survived after aggressive treatment of some kind. 

It is said in the family that Charles and Lena’s son Edward also died of tuberculosis, in 1916.  Charles and Lena’s daughter Tecla contracted it as well, dying in 1937, and giving it to her married daughter Vera, who died at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Minnesota in 1945.  A survey of available records seems to bear all of this out.

I wanted to know more about this disease that took such a toll on my grandfather’s siblings. Was it really so contagious, and was it truly still killing people in the 1940s?

I started at the American Lung Association website at www.lung.org.  I learned there that tuberculosis, or TB, is spread through the air.  When a person with TB coughs, laughs, sneezes, sings, or even talks, the disease can spread. 

It also said this:  “It is not easy to become infected with tuberculosis.  Usually a person has to be close to someone with TB disease for a long period of time.  TB is usually spread between family members, close friends, and people who work or live together.  TB is spread most easily in closed spaces over a long period of time.”  That explains why those with TB were sent to live in sanatoriums until they recovered!  Indeed, it would have been easy for a mother to give the disease to her children.

I learned on the website News-Medical.net that the disease has been with us since ancient times.  The concept of separating TB patients from the general population in sanatoriums began in the late 1800s.  Sometimes rest and improved nutrition brought about a cure.  Although a vaccine was developed in the 1920s, it apparently wasn’t widely used, and there was little else that could be done until the advent of the antibiotic streptomycin in 1944.   

As for the family tradition that one of Mina’s sons was treated aggressively for the disease—News-Medical.net said this:  “Before antibiotics were found effective against tuberculosis, surgical treatment of tuberculosis was common and often lifesaving.”

Typhoid, whooping cough, tuberculosis—all are diseases I’ve seen repeatedly in my family tree.  So many died before their time, in days gone by!  

What Ever Happened to Agnes Goldberger?

My mother grew up in a household of five children—herself, her three siblings, and a distant relative named Agnes Josephine Goldberger—an orphan from Chicago. 

Agnes came to live with them at age six, after both her parents died, and she lived with them for about ten years.  What a change—from being the pampered daughter of a wealthy Jewish doctor in the big city, to being a farm girl, orphan, and foster child in rural DuPage County!  What was life like for her there?  Was she accepted at home, at school, in the community?  Was she an object of gossip?  Pity?  Or prejudice?  At any rate, at around age sixteen she left the Ericksons and returned to her Jewish relatives in Chicago, never to be seen again… and that’s all I ever knew about her, except that there were hard feelings in the Erickson family after she left.  

I wanted to know more—so recently I did a little research on Agnes.  It turns out that her father, Henry E. Goldberger, was a physician whose parents emigrated from Bohemia to Chicago.  Henry’s first wife, Mary Ingram, died in 1922.  Henry married Agnes Evatt in 1923, when he was 53 and she was 28. 

Baby Agnes was born to Agnes and Henry in Chicago on December 11, 1925.  By 1929, little Agnes’ mother was dead, and by 1933, so was her father, Dr. Goldberger…  Agnes was an orphan at age six.  Somehow she ended up on the DuPage County, Illinois farm of my grandparents, Robert and Clara Erickson.  It seems that Agnes wasn’t actually related to the Ericksons at all—but rather, her father Henry’s first wife, Mary, was a cousin of Clara’s—quite a stretch.  So how did they end up taking her in?  I don’t know.

I have a number of Erickson family photos with Agnes included.  I wonder if she was treated like one of their own, or if she always felt different, unwelcome, an outsider?  My grandpa Robert was a kind and loving man—but my grandma Clara, perhaps not so much. 

Mom always said that Agnes’ family suddenly wanted her back when she turned sixteen and she inherited her father’s money, and so Agnes left them without so much as a thank you—but my grandma Clara was no amateur when it came to holding a grudge, and I think my mother was just parroting what she heard at home.  I’ve always wondered if there was more to the story.  What happened to Agnes Goldberger after she left the Erickson farm around 1942?  Maybe someone out there knows the answer.

Postscript:  Some time after publishing this article here in July 2013, a granddaughter of Agnes found it in a google search. Her mother, one of Agnes' daughters, read it to Agnes. Agnes had changed her name after she left, and she had never shared anything about her childhood for the rest of her life. Sadly, she was still unwilling to talk about it, except to give her daughter permission to tell me that she was the person in my post, and that she was still alive.  

In 2015 an alert reader found a facebook post from a grandson of Agnes which was a memorial to Agnes' recent death. The photo showed her on her wedding day, and the resemblance to my photos was unmistakable. 

In September 2019 I was contacted by another of Agnes' daughters.  After Agnes left my grandparents' farm at sixteen, she went to live with distant relatives, changed her first name, and took on their last name. Eventually she married and had four children.  She never talked about her childhood with her children, and raised them with the belief that she was a natural-born member of the family she went to live with at sixteen.  Her reasons will always remain a mystery.

Agnes died in March 2015 at age 89 in New York.

Robert C. Erickson - Champion Plowman

My Uncle Bob was a champion plowman, back when that kind of thing was a big deal here in the Midwest.  I don’t want his story to be forgotten.  How many young men of his generation ended up meeting four presidents, and competing in Europe (twice!) solely because of a remarkable ability to plow a straight furrow?

Robert Charles Erickson (1924-2005) was my mother’s younger brother.  He grew up in a farm family in northern Illinois, and learned young how to drive a tractor and work a plow.  By the time he was a teen, he was competing in—and winning—level land plowing matches at the local level and beyond. 

He first competed nationally in 1947 at age 23, where he lost by only .05 point.  But made a number of appearances at the nationals, and in 1954 at Olney, Illinois, he achieved his dream of being national champion.  So in 1955 he competed in the world championships in Uppsala, Sweden, coming in 8^th out of 36.  1960 saw him winning the nationals again, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, qualifying him to compete the next summer in Grignon, France, where he placed 12^th out of 48. 

The photograph below shows him in 1956 with President Eisenhower.  I also have pictures of him with Truman and Nixon.  He told me once that he ate lunch with President Kennedy around the time he competed in France, but there was no photographer there.

Uncle Bob retired from national-level competition after France, due to a rule that forbade the same person from representing the U.S.A. more than twice, so my mother told me...  She said the rule later changed, but he chose not to return to competition.  He went back to Minooka, Illinois and farmed there the rest of his life with his father, my Grandpa Erickson, who had taught him everything he knew about plowing.

Sadly, Uncle Bob died a lonely man.  He and his wife Shirley had no children, and his wife died many years before he did.  Quarrels about money and inheritances had broken his ties with most of his family by the time he died.  But he always loved his farm and his tractors and his stories.

I drove out to Minooka, Illinois one day a few summers ago and looked up his tombstone.  I was pleased to see that it was well cared for by his best friend Tom, and that it was a fitting tribute to a Champion Plowman.

One Girl’s Childhood During the Great Depression

Memories of life on an Illinois farm, as dictated by my mother, Adra Erickson Wallin (1922-2010)...

“I was born at home (all four of us were), at the farm at Barbers Corner on August 18, 1922, at six in the morning.  A nurse and a doctor came—Dr. Ludwig—but I was born before he got there!  My mother got a “hired girl” to help her take care of us for a few weeks.

We lived on three farms when I was growing up.  My father grew corn, soybeans, oats, wheat, alfalfa, and hay for the animals.  We had six horses, two cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and sheep...  The Depression was hard on our family.  When I was twelve, in 1934, we lost our farm and had to move.  Everybody was poor then.  We had a phone when I was little, but not later—no electricity, no running water—and we were seven miles from town.  We had lamps and we would carry them to our rooms to study by.

In the summer, we would have droughts—we’d get small crops those years.  We’d also get chinch bugs and grasshoppers on the corn (our biggest crop).  We’d sit in front of the fan to stay cool, or go down to the river, which was cold.

We had an outhouse at every home I lived in.  We called it “the privy.”  They were terrible—just a board across with two holes.  There was also a board with a smaller hole for kids!  It was hot and had bees in the summer.  They were far from the house, too, because of the smell.  We used a Sears Catalog for toilet paper, because we liked the thin sheets.

Chores I had as a child included bringing in the “split wood” for the kitchen stove.  Geraldine brought in the “chunks” for the big stove in the dining room (our only heat), and little sister Audrey brought in the cobs (to start the fires).  Also, I’d gather eggs every day after school. 

I remember my first day of school—I walked downhill, across a creek, and uphill, half a mile...  There were a lot of kids—first through eighth grades all in one room.  There were smaller seats for the younger kids.  I would help my sister Audrey—we sat in a double seat.  We didn’t have all the subjects every day—not with eight grades.  At recess we played baseball, tag, hide and seek, hopscotch, and swinging—we had a rope swing in a tree.   

I walked to Barbers Corner school, but at Higgins four of us rode in a pony cart.  Bob would drive the cart, put it in a shed, hook it back up at night, and drive us 1½ miles…  When I was in high school, my brother drove us in the car.  He needed to get home to help on the farm, so he couldn’t do sports.

My favorite times with my mother were sitting on the front porch at night on the swing.  Her best advice to me: Don’t get married too young!  My favorite times with my father were going for buggy rides with our horse, Bess.  In the winter he would take us in the bobsled—a big wooden box on runners.  I remember sometimes being worried about being an orphan and being sent to an orphanage. 

My mother was scared to death of thunderstorms, so I was, too!  She’d get us out of bed and get us dressed and take us down to the basement.  When my mother was younger and teaching school, there was a storm and lightning struck the barn and set it on fire.  She and the family she was boarding with had to go out in their nightgowns and save the animals, and she never forgot that—that’s why she got us up and dressed whenever there was a storm.

When I was nine I went to the 1931 World’s Fair in Chicago, and when I was ten I went again.  I was visiting a friend of the family.  He would turn all five of us kids loose for the whole day there—and I was the oldest one!” 

Thanks for the stories, Mom.  My, how times have changed!

Wordless Wednesday: Robert J. Erickson, Peeling Potatoes

My grandfather, Robert J. Erickson, around 1930 - Will County, Illinois