Published December 18, 2011
By Joel Koch
Of the four homes Quincy
founder John Wood built, least is known about his second. It was highly unusual
in its day. Most of the approximately 300 Quincy homesteads at the end of the
1820s were single-roomed log cabins. In contrast, Wood’s home was a two-story
log cabin. It was built on the northwest side of Wood Street and Burton Road,
today’s 12th and State Streets.
When Wood married Ann M. Streeter in January 1825, she moved
into Wood’s one-room cabin, which he had built along the riverfront in 1822, the
year he arrived to settle permanently on his quarter-section of land. In 1827
the Woods left Quincy — so named by the state legislature in 1825 — to join
speculators around the lead fields in Galena in northwest Illinois.
It is likely Wood built their two-story cabin when they
returned to Quincy in 1829. Their family was growing. Daughter Ann Eliza was
two and Daniel was born that year. Wood sited his “up and down cabin,” just
west of his huge orchard, which extended from today’s 12th to 24th Street. Wood
and his family lived in the bi-level cabin until they moved into his mansion,
in 1837.
Although Wood’s up and down cabin has long since vanished, a
nearly identical cabin, donated by the George Lewis family of Quincy, has taken
its place on the old Wood family property at 12th and State. The site today is
owned and managed by the Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County.
Situated just east of Wood’s 14-room Greek Revival mansion, the cabin offers a
remarkable contrast in the way two contemporary families lived.
The cabin on the HSQAC grounds today was one of six “up and
down cabins” that were built in 1835 — the year Wood started his mansion — by
Swedish emigrants who settled three miles east of Perry, Missouri. Each family
had acquired eighty acres of farmland and each helped the others build their
log cabins at about the center of each property.
As the families grew, so did the need for space. By the early
1900s, many of the two-story cabins were enveloped within two-story frame
houses. Over time, as descendants moved on, land was sold and by 1970 only one
of the cabins remained. The six-room frame house built around the cabin had
protected it from the weather but it was no longer occupied, its only
neighbors sapling trees and sucker shoots. To save the cabin, the owner offered
to give it to anyone who would remove it from his farm.
The Lewis family, owners of Crestview Farm east of Quincy,
responded to the offer after finding the 150-year-old cabin in what George
Lewis called “amazingly good condition.” When regulations and costs blocked
attempts to move the cabin in larger sections, the family dismantled the
cabin, marking the logs, floor beams, rafters and chimney bricks piece by
piece. With plans drawn up by son Gary, the cabin was reconstructed at
Crestview. The chimney was restored, the logs filled with fresh chinking.
Rafters shouldered a new shake-shingled roof. And considerate neighbors Earl
and Esther Peters provided a new three-hole outhouse as a housewarming gift.
The Lewises had welcomed Cub Scouts and Boy
Scouts to use the cabin to learn how
settlers of the 19th century got along without modern conveniences. In 2002,
the Lewises donated the cabin, now known as the “Lewis Log Cabin,” to the
Historical Society. The Society has continued the Lewis family’s interest in
education by using it for similar demonstrations for local elementary school
students. Volunteers show as many as 300 young people each year how families
got along without grocery or clothing stores, running water, electricity or
indoor plumbing.
Wood’s two cabins were special to the city’s history,
although neither exists any longer. From his first cabin, Wood briefly operated
the area’s first post office before the first permanent facility was built at
today’s 4th and Maine and received Quincy’s first mail in 1825.
The two-story cabin was torn down not long after the
completion of Wood’s Greek Revival Mansion in 1838, and no artifacts record its
existence. Representing the Woods’ second home, the Lewis Log Cabin
demonstrates a bi-level home that was as unique as Wood’s huge framed mansion
that replaced it. The juxtaposition of the two structures on the Historical
Society’s property make the contrast readily apparent.
Among the Historical Society’s purposes is a teaching
mission, a reason for emphasis on education into the history of log cabins. The
Lewis Log Cabin is one of our largest artifacts with which the Society meets
that objective. It serves as an example of the aspirations of pioneers who
cleared the prairies, rising from subsistence to productive citizens.
Wood hosted Quincy’s first
Christmas party
In his
book Quincy and Adams County, Illinois, published in 1936, local historian Thad
W. Ward noted that John Wood hosted the first Christmas party in 1822. It would
have been in Wood’s single-room log cabin at the foot of today’s Delaware
Street at Front.
In his
History of Quincy, John Tillson described Wood’s first house as “a log
cabin of the most primitive sort, 20 by 18 feet in size, built with the use of
a single nail, a stranger to the aristocracy of ‘sawed lumber,’ clay chinked,
with puncheon floor, rough stone fire place and chimney built of sticks
bedaubed with clay.”
If Wood’s
cabin seemed rudimentary to Tillson, it was welcome refuge to those who
observed Christmas with Wood that night. Ward wrote:
“There
were about a dozen guests. They had bear, venison, wild turkey and honey, but
no butter. [Wood] had a lot of whiskey and the guests remained all night.”
Joel Koch of Quincy is an intern with the Historical
Society. A senior majoring in history at Western Illinois University, Koch’s
projects included creation of the Society’s first database of all one-room
schoolhouses in Adams County and a compilation of references to John Wood.
Sources:
Lewis, George J., “History of Log Cabin now
located on the grounds of the Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County at
12th and State.” December 1, 2011. “Research” file, HSQAC.
“Map: Quincy 1835.” Framed and displayed
on the society office south wall, HSQAC.
Perry, Cicero F., “Opening of the John Wood
Homestead.” Address to Quincy Historical Society, Quincy, IL, November 21,
1907, File MSQ, “Quincy – Historic Houses – John Wood Mansion,”
HSQAC.
“Report of Committee on House and Grounds [to
Quincy Historical Society].” November 21, 1907, MSQ Files 1, “Quincy
– Historic Houses – John Wood Mansion,” HSQAC.
“Research on the John Wood Mansion, 425 South
Twelfth Street, Owned by the Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County, By
the Research and Restoration Committees.” File MS WOO,
“Research,” HSQAC.
Scholz, Nancy, “Genealogy Report on John Wood
and Family.” File MS WOO, “Research,” HSQAC.
