Brothers Cornelius and Leonard Volk were two of the eight sons of Garret and Elizabeth Gessner Volk who joined their father in his vocation as stonecutter. Garret Volk was a self-taught stonecutter who worked off and on in the craft. His ability to chisel life-like objects from alabaster and marble fascinated his boys.
Garret Volk began stonecutting in his native New York City. After military service as a private in the New York Volunteers in the War of 1812, he took up the trade and earned a reputation for perfection in his art of chiseling marble into Corinthian capitals for the columns of New York City Hall. The building—and Volk’s work—is still there. His interest and income trailed off, however, and he turned to farming, first in New Jersey, then upstate New York. Success each time eluded him, and he returned to his stone-cutting trade in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The family’s financial condition improved, but successes were matched by reversals from which the large family never fully recovered.
Cornelius Gessner Volk, born in 1822, farmed alongside his father into the late 1830s and attended subscription schools during the winter months. In the fall of 1839, he left his parents to make his home with his eldest brother in Avon, New York. It was brother John who developed the skilled craftsmanship in stonecutting in his younger brother. Cornelius’s mastery of the chisel earned him a commission in Canada in 1842, after which he journeyed to Bethany, New York. There, he made connections that influenced him to go west where in 1848 he settled on the western edge of Illinois at Quincy.
In Bethany, Volk had lodged with Dr. Jonathan King Barlow, a physician, and his wife, Honor Douglas Barlow. She was the sister of the Brandon, Vermont, physician, Dr. Stephen Arnold Douglas. The kinship and collegiality of the Barlow and Douglas families stitched them closely together. Three years after Dr. Douglas died in 1813, the Barlows named their first son Stephen Arnold Douglas for him. The infant shared the name with his older cousin, Stephen Arnold Douglas Jr., who was born in Brandon on April 23, 1813, and who, not yet three months old, was in his father’s lap on July 1, 1813, when Dr. Douglas suffered a stroke and died. This Stephen Arnold Douglas would also make Quincy his home from 1841 to 1847 as circuit judge and later as far Western Illinois’ congressman.
Although records do not show a continuing relationship between the Barlows and Dr. Douglas’s widow, Sarah, tangles in the families’ connections brought them together again as the couples’ children reached adulthood. On June 8, 1845, Martha Louise Barlow married Cornelius Volk, who at the time still resided with the Barlow family in Bethany. Their union made Cornelius a shirttail relative of Martha’s cousin, now Congressman Douglas of Quincy.
The story was similar for Cornelius’s younger brother Leonard Wells Volk, whom Cornelius encouraged to join him in Bethany. The 17-year-old Leonard did, and there he fell in love with Emily Clarissa Barlow, 13. The teenaged girl, exhibiting more maturity than her suitor, for seven years rejected Leonard’s pleas for marriage. They were married April 28, 1852.
Emily’s cousin, now U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, visited the couple when they lived in Galena and Rock Island, then suggested they move to Chicago. It was a fortuitous move for sculptor Volk and his family. The Volks moved into a cottage the senator owned in Chicago. And Douglas became Volk’s patron in art, sending and subsidizing him in 1855 and 1856 to Italy to study sculpture. The Volks named their second son Stephen Arnold Douglas Volk to honor their patron-cousin.
Volk returned to the United States in January 1857, and from a small studio executed a life-sized bust of Douglas, which with other works earned him applause throughout the Northwest. Douglas was the subject, also, of Volk’s first life-size statue, which today is exhibited on the second floor of the Old State Capitol in Springfield. The architect of the Illinois Capitol in September 2020 removed a similar statue by Leonard Volk of Douglas from the Rotunda of the State Capitol at the behest of then-Speaker Michael Madigan. The speaker erroneously contended Douglas had been a slave owner.
Cornelius Volk in 1848 moved to Quincy where he opened a studio at Third and Maine Streets. Monuments and markers were sent from the shop to cemeteries throughout the United States. Art critics of the day believed his “Embodied Purity” in Grecian marble, among his first stone creations, one of the finest conceptions by any sculptor in America. He also entered designs for monuments into competitions to honor the late American martyrs to freedom Elijah P. Lovejoy and Abraham Lincoln. Former Governors John Wood and John Palmer went to Alton to see them and praised them.
Volk’s “Soldiers’ Monument” rose from the crest of a drumlin on the west side of Woodland Cemetery. Crowned by an American Eagle, its obelisk rises nearly 100 feet from a stone pedestal visible from the Mississippi River below.
Best known to Quincyans is Volk’s bronze statue of Quincy founder and 12th Illinois governor, John Wood. Unveiled on July 4, 1883, three years after Wood’s death, the statue today stands at the southwest corner of Washington Park where it can be seen by those entering the city from the West and the South. The City of Quincy presented a duplicate statue to the State of Illinois, and it is displayed in an alcove on the second floor of the State Capitol.
Leonard and Emily Barlow Volk—both died in 1895—are buried in North Chicago. Cornelius (d. 1886) and Martha Barlow Volk (d. 1903) are buried in Woodland Cemetery, Quincy.
Barlow marriages made one more connection to Stephen A. Douglas. The marriage of Joseph C. Barlow, the family’s youngest child, to Eveline Streeter, made Douglas a shirttail cousin of Governor John Wood. Wood’s wife, Ann Streeter Wood, was Eveline’s older sister. Barlow and Eveline were married in the governor’s mansion at 12th and State Streets.
Sources:
Andreas, Alfred Theodore, History of Chicago from 1857 Until the Fire of 1871, Vol 2. (Chicago: A.T. Andreas Company, Publishers, 1885), 559.
Ankrom, Reg. Stephen A. Douglas: The Political Apprenticeship, 1833-1843. (Jefferson North Carolina: McFarland Publishing Company, 2015), ix, 16.
Hoffman, John. “’The Animal Himself:’ Tracing the Volk Lincoln Sculpture. Part I.” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 41. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020), 26
“Joseph E. Barlow,” File MS920 BAR, Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County.
Portrait and Biographical Record of Adams County, Illinois. (Chicago: Chapman Brothers, 1892), 480.
“Rotunda,” The Illinois State Capitol at
www.ilstatehouse.com/2nd_floor.htm
“Garret Volk,” at
www.geni.com/people/Garrett-Volk/6000000013506676379
“Leonard Wells Volk,” at
www.geni.com/people/Leonard-Wells-Volk/6000000013506304986