Welcome to Forgotonia

Henderson County Museum – Originally uploaded by Rural Rose (Alison on Flickr)

A cultural opportunity in Raritan, IL (population 140, give or take a few).

It was Sunday morning, so it wasn’t open. I’m not sure what we might have found. Though I did enjoy the birds’ nests in some of the MUSEUM letters.

Here are a few more highlights from this tidy village in Forgottonia:

Last Sunday on the chilly but bright morning, C-Nor (a.k.a. Chris) and I set out for a photo trip, and our journey led us to the town of Roseville, Ill.

Roseville is a town I traveled through countless times as a college student, but haven’t been through in years, ever since the section of four-lane highway between Macomb and Monmouth, IL,  was finished. Roseville, to me, is poetic for that very reason–a self-sufficient town that is now cut off by the long fought-for interstate.

Anyway, as we rolled down Main Street and I tried to remember how many years it’s been since the four-lane was finished, I was surprised to see what appeared to be a magnificent ghost sign appearing in front of me. On the side of what appeared to be an abandoned building on Main Street, just before the four-way stop (at Main Street and Highway 116), the ghost of a Firestone ad/business sign could be detected.

(more, below the photo)

Despite my having traveled this very path many times over many years, I never noticed this little piece of the past, probably because

A) another business next door, which has since been torn down to create a gaping spot on Main Street, had been covering it up, and/or

B) I’ve only recently caught the ghost sign bug, and so never stopped to pay attention.

But either way, I certainly noticed it, and when we got out of the car to take a few pictures, I noticed upon a bit of squinting that,  just behind the word “TIRES” in the center, it looked like the ghost of a “Ford” symbol was peaking out, too. (We would discover at little later that we were right. More on that in a minute.) A few guys on tractors with loader buckets were working around us, but didn’t seem to mind us poking around.

But then, when we walked further down the south side of the building, discovering the blue bulldozer parked outside, a guy on a tractor rolled over to us. When he approached me, he pulled his sunglasses to the end of his nose, revealing a set of dark eyes and a suspicious but not entirely unfriendly look. “Where you folks from?” he said.

“Hi, we’re just, uh, amateur photographers, we like old signs,” I said, in one nervous rush. “This okay, okay if we take a picture?”

He was already putting the tractor in reverse, and as he backed up, he called out, “Okay, but we’re about ready to tear it down, so…” And then he went back to work picking up bricks with the loader.

“Wow,” I said to Chris. “Timing, huh?”

(More, below the slideshow)

After this, we sat in the park in some of the purest, brightest sunshine I’ve felt in a long time, sharing our picnic lunch and talking about wedding/moving plans and other stuff of life. We stopped at the little antique store on the corner at the 4-way stop,  “Cluckers Corners,” where two white-haired ladies greeted us at the door but seemed less than excited at having customers. We took some more shots around town. One place that caught my eye was a tiny brick building with a ghost sign for a former newspaper and/or printing press on the side. As I was trying to get a picture of it, a guy with shaggy gray hair and a baseball cap emerged.

“I like the sign on the side of your building,” I said, (kind of like “We come in peace.”)  “Okay if we’re taking pictures?”

“Sure,” he said.

And then, small-town girl that I am, having grown up in a Roseville look-alike (Carthage, IL), I started chatting with the guy, telling him how we’d just been down by the old Firestone building and how I thought it was a shame it was being torn down.

“Yeah,” he said, “my great-grandfather had that place built. He was a farmer, came in to town and had the business…”

The guy walked to a work van parked in front of the newspaper building and set something inside. Then he dug a tin of tobacco out of his pocket and took a pinch. He said that his building, and the old Firestone, were expensive to keep up. “The city had been on him,” he said, referring to the owner of Firestone.

We could hear the clangs and backing-up-signal beepin of the cleanup crew tearing the place down, less than a block away. “I don’t get too upset about stuff like that,” he said, and I didn’t know if he meant about city ordinances, or about pieces of his family or town history going by the wayside, so I didn’t know what to say. He gestured toward the newspaper building. “I just use this to store stuff,” he said. “Junk, mostly.”

And we thanked him and walked away.

When we got back to our car, the workers at the old Firestone had broken into that south wall with the ghost sign. It would probably be gone by the end of the day.

On a somewhat related note: the Galesburg Register-Mail reported that same day on razing part of Abingdon’s downtown. But hey, if I’m totally depressing you, here is some good news on the local history/landmark beat).

Well, I guess I can no longer claim to be from the smallest town in the world.

Behold! :

Turn and face the strange ch-ch-changes, people; Carthage, Illinois is getting a stoplight!

This is a big deal because the  signature characteristics of my tiny hometown, since the beginning of time, were:

1. being home to a man named Wendell who greeted every single person he saw, giving them their own nicknames like “Little Darlin’ ” (or, depending on your lineage, “Alvin’s Son”),
2. sending high school sports teams to state championships, and
3. a red light at the 4-way, hanging on a wire between the Hardee’s and the DQ, blinking away at the non-existent traffic.

Now, as I told you previously, this project has actually been in the works for quite some time. In fact, construction on the intersection was supposed to start 15 years ago, when the Methode car-parts factory was still functioning at full steam and there might be a stream of cars when a shift was letting out. (You can read all the details on the Hancock County Journal-Pilot online.)

But, with all due respect to the mayor, who tells the paper, “I think we’re very lucky that we haven’t seen accidents where people have been seriously hurt,” I respectfully submit that we’re still talking about Carthage, here:  population >2,800.

It’s that time of year for the announcement of the “Most Endangered” places in Illinois. This year, Rock Island makes the list again. (And on a related note, the Quad City Times reports that the house in Moline once owned by John Deere—about which I’ve previously posted— is “still of grave concern.”

Other than the Rock Island item on this year’s roster (a building used by the Elks Club), the closest place on the 2011 list is a bridge in Sangamon County.

(More, below the image).

Screen shot of Landmarks Illinois web site

A couple of places I’d like to add to the list, (or at least to a subcategory of places that need attention):

• The Macomb Maid Rite,
• The Randolph House on the Macomb Square,
• and what remains of the former Carthage College campus, (where the Circle K organization was started, among other historical tidbits).

So, what about you?

What other local landmarks in the general western Illinois region would you be sad to see destroyed?

List them below, or drop me a line.

David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, will hit stores April 15. Chances are, if you follow the book/lit/publishing world at all, you’re already well aware of this fact.

I first read about it on NPR.org (“The Magic Of David Foster Wallace’s Unfinished ‘King’”). The next day I did a tiny metaphorical eye-roll when I opened TIME to find another feature on Wallace’s “Unfinished Business.” I mean, perhaps Wallace never even meant to have it published. And what about all the struggling, living writers with finished works that aren’t getting any attention? Wallace killed himself while working on The Pale King. And, forgive me,  but there is the media-saturated part of me that feels like our culture lionizes too many writers and bandleaders after they’ve committed suicide.

That said, Wallace was indeed one of the most important contemporary American writers, not at least in part because, as Lev Grossman puts it in that TIME article, his novel Infinite Jest “reshaped the skyline of American literature.”

And it is kind of fascinating, (if not a little bit morbid), to read about how others put the book together after Wallace died, and to obsess a bit over what was going through Wallace’s mind before he decided to end his life.

But perhaps most importantly, how could I not be interested when I learned this little tidbit about the work that Wallace left behind?

His agent, Bonnie Nadell, knew he’d been working on it…. [but] she had no idea how much of it he’d managed to finish. She did know it had an unlikely subject: the lives of a group of IRS employees in Peoria, Ill.

I can’t help but be curious about how and why Wallace had Peoria, of all places, on his (brilliant, troubled) mind. Did he feel tied to central Illinois (or, conversely, critical of it) because he was born in Champaign and had lived and taught in Bloomington-Normal? It’s equally fascinating to wonder if he found Peoria valuable as a poetic or metaphorical setting. (A few years ago, one his short stories published in the New Yorker was set in Peoria, too).

And as for the title? The TIME article mentions that the editor who helped piece together the unfinished book never figured out what that phrase “The Pale King” refers to; it’s used to describe a certain character only once and then never explained.

I coulda told ‘em. (Obviously, the TIME writer and the editor are not from the pasty Midwest).

Chris and I have officially received (via e-mailed link) the online quiz that will tell us whether we’re really ready to marry each other.

We’re each supposed to take it separately, and refrain from discussing it with each other until the pastor has seen our results  (although, Chris, of course, is already taunting me with little things like, “Put ‘false’ for number three. Do it!”)

The name of this premarital program is PREPARE-ENRICH (yes, in all caps. OK! WE WILL!). And, as the pastor explained, the point is to help us with discussion points about our expectations or beliefs about marriage. I also look at it as a healthy way to help us face topics we might not have discussed while we’ve been  having fun and enjoying each others’ company–rather than, say, writing down our thoughts on death and taxes–in the three years since we met.

I see the point of this whole exercise. And I wouldn’t have elected to do the whole pre-marital counseling thing if I didn’t.

And in all seriousness, I think we know each other quite well, and we have talked about our goals and what we hope for our future.

But I can’t help thinking of this questionnaire/exercise as a booby trap, set up so that one of us will expose the other somehow, or prove us to be clueless to the larger concerns of couplehood. (Hopefully, at least, the pastor won’t ask us to guess each others’ answer for  “Where is the strangest  place you’ve ever made whoopee?”)

Two items in the local news you might have missed:

1) I’ve heard of the whole Sudafed thing, but… odor eaters? Really?

2) The klassiest sounding new business in central IL since Detox.