Paxton

Sir Joseph Paxton

 I was born in Paxton, Illinois, but I never really knew much about why it was called Paxton or hardly any of its history other than Dad saying that it was a Swedish settlement and that people invested a lot of money in some deal I was never clear on, only that it involved changing the name of the city to Paxton, but whatever the deal was, it fell through and they just never bothered to change the name back.

Paxton was originally called Prairie City in the 1840s.  A settlement that grew up along the Illinois Central RR which has always had a lot of influence in the town, and was renamed by the ICRR as Prospect City in the 1850s and then renamed Paxton in 1859 After Sir Joseph Paxton. (That's him in the picture).  Sir Joseph designed the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London.  I wish I had known this when I was in England since it wasn't all that far from several places I visited.  It looks magnificent from the pictures I've seen of it.  Sir Joseph, like other major British historical figures, invested heavily in the US Rail Roads, and the folks living there in Paxton had hoped that the place would become a major English settlement, although it never panned out.   

The Crystal Palace

As  kid, I loved the town with all of its white ginger bread houses and paving brick streets.  I was there again recently for may Aunt Margie's burial--funerals, it seems, keep bringing me back to this place, and every time I go out to Glen Cemetery, I have to easter egg hunt for all the graves of my many relatives.  So much of who I am is there.  We moved away when I was three and I grew up in Indiana,  As an adult, I now live in Michigan where I have lived for decades, yet Paxton is more me than anywhere else I've been. 

Dad, Mom, Cindy and I lived in a little two bedroom house with green shutters not far from Pell's Park where once President Taft spoke in a Chautauqua at the Pavilion.  A Chautauqua, as I first learned from reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was a place where people gathered together and often they met in a tent or large meeting place. These gathering took the place, I suppose, of movie houses, TV, or radio as a form of entertainment.  A Chautauqua provided a place where authors and famous people toured the country--Dickens did so on several tours of American, Mark Twain and others--and they would give speeches or do readings from their books.  

The Pell's Park Pavilion

So Pell's Park Pavilion was place I had passed many times following the back of my mother's knees on walks.  Pell's Park itself was on land donated by Mrs. Charles Bogardus, the daughter of William Pell who was one of the town's founders and interesting stories are there to be told later, but, to all of that history, I was oblivious as I strolled along behind the knees of my mother, listening to the cooing of pigeons and distracted by the scurry of squirrels.

Mom is in that group of 1930's school kids somewhere. 
This is in "the cut" in Paxton that was constructed
by Illinois Central Rail Road.

Paxton is a litany--kind of like a refrain in a song.  It's the part of the song you remember more than anything because it is a cycle and repeats over and over again.  It seems I always come back there over and over again in the course of my life.  Weddings, funerals, reunions--mostly funerals these days, it seems.  It is a joy to see my cousins and a rush--a strange nostalgic thrill ride to Christmases past and Easters and summer visits with blue skies and long days and evenings of folks sitting in the lawn chairs underneath Grandma Sophie's elms, and listening to the chant of the locusts.  

For good or ill, I was raised in an evangelical movement known as The Restoration Movement, and we were referred to as Campbellite churches and not to be confused with Christian Church of the Disciples of Christ, nor Non-instrumental Church of Christ.   I even attended Lincoln Christian College, the center of the Restoration Movement, for about a year and a half myself.  Dad knew many of my professors from summer camp when he was a kid.  So, again, so much of who I am has its source here at the end of this salmon stream. You can see from the sign in the photo below that says the preacher of the church was Vern F. Barr.   He was an old-time preacher complete with rasp in the voice as he bellowed from the pulpit.  When I was in bible college during the 74/75 school year, he made a visit to LCC as a part of number of seminars and he and his wife presented on how to spread the gospel to children through puppets.  I went and took a several of my classmates with me to listen and watch.  Unfortunately Barr and his wife were oblivious to some pretty racially insensitive content in their puppet show, and my classmates looked at me in shock.  It was a rather awkward moment.  White churches, white houses, white people, white assumptions about a lot of things.  Yeah, I have to own that that too is where I came from, but I don't have to stay there.  I've got a brain and a heart and a mind of my own.  I'm old enough now to say "bullshit" and I don't care what anyone says.  I love my family, my life, my Paxton, but I don't love that. 

This is the original Church of Christ in Paxton.  The photo was taken in 1960 at the church's 75th Anniversary.  I can find my sister Cindy, my grandmother (the church organist), my cousin Jeff.  Dad, Wilber and Paul and my grandfather are near the front door, But I can't find me or my mother, so I'm guessing, since I was about 4, that she was taking care of me perhaps.

On my last trip to Paxton, after my Aunt's funeral, we decided to drive and see some of the old homesteads.  And were shocked to see, or rather not see, Grandma and Grandpa's old house.  We thought we were on the wrong street at first, but we all had the same shock reaction at the same time and had to stop to and ask some neighbors what happened.  Apparently it had fallen into a terrible blight after the last few owners and the realtor had it bulldozed down just to sell the lot.  I may have one of the last photos since I had just been there a year or so earlier after Uncle Donny had died and snapped a picture with my phone. 

The last picture I have of 449 E. Union. 
My Grandma and Grandpa's house.

I don't know what to say about the pain of seeing a house that holds so many memories vanish like that.  When the Israelites crossed the dry Jordan River, God commanded them to take great stones from the river one per tribe carried by the strongest member of each tribe and pile them up so that they might remember this spot.  My Dad used to walk about the house singing, "See these stones from beneath the River Jordan brought by our father's just as they received of God's command. Tis Joshua's shrine to commemorate the day that God stayed the floodtide and Israel passed into the promised land."  Houses can be that way memorials to our past.  

I wonder.  When we grieve for lost things, it is because houses, people, and memories are a part of what makes us us--things that get stitched to the fabric of our own life--and a chunk of our very self goes with them when they go.  They go, they go, they go, again and again and all we have is memory in a brain that will also go until it all becomes humas in the ground.  Oh, unhappy thought, I shall leave you here. 

Here at Glen cemetery lie most of the people who have made me me. My grandparents, uncles, aunts, including the ones who died as children in the early 1900's.  In the spring, a stone for my parents will be placed there, not far from the graves of my grandparents, and my Aunt Margie and Uncle Herschel.  We have the ashes of both mom and dad to put there and we hope for some resolution and acceptance.  They didn't want even this.  They didn't want a funeral or a stone.  They donated their bodies to sciences and wanted to leave it at that.  But we don't think they understood how important it was for all of us to come to terms with their death.  The mind may know that they died, but that thing we call "the heart" is of another opinion.  I'll leave this blog for now, with the right to revise or add later.  I'll leave a few more pictures.

The house where I first lived.  56' to 59' I remember
everything about it.  

My Grandma Sophie, feeding her Cocker Spaniels.

The four graves of Grandma's children who died as children at Glen Cemetery. 
The middle one belongs to Loraine
Notice that there is a lone peony growing by her stone.  Grandma had a special bond with her and
may never have come to terms with her death.

Uncle Bones' skating rink, now a Baptist church.  Somewhere, I may have an old faded article
from the Paxton Record announcing that the "mystery building"
being constructed would be a skating rink.

Grandma Sophie's old house.  It has changed a lot and fallen into dereliction, even though there are still owners living there.  The elm trees are gone, the shed, the Catalpa trees, the apple trees are all gone.

Links that I used (There are several more, but I can't remember where I got all my info.)

https://ford.illinoisgenweb.org/biographies/bogardushannah1908.htm

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40187071?seq=1

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Paxton