People of the Plow

The very first Europeans to have any contact with the Native Americans of this area were the French explorers and fur traders of the late 17th century. The earliest of the white American citizens drifted in when Illinois became a state in 1818, but that was almost exclusively in the southern part of the state, arriving by the Ohio River.

But the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 drew settlers who could travel from the East, along with their goods, much more cheaply than before. It connected the Hudson River with the Great Lakes region, and by 1835 settlers and speculators poured into this region of Illinois in droves. Hunger for land matched up with an even greater hunger for profits of the wealthy speculators of New York and other states and drove a great migration. This, in turn spurred politicians to come up with schemes to force native peoples out of the way.

The Chicago Treaty of 1830 was followed by the opening of the Chicago Land Office in 1835; and by that time a radical transformation of the land around Heatherhope was already underway. The great prairies and wet lands, shaped by ice and fire, had been only lightly touched by Native Americans. In the early 19th century the total number of Potawatomi numbered little more than 3,000 in all of southern Wisconsin, southern Michigan, and northern Illinois and Indiana. But now these lands were quickly surveyed, sectioned off and offered up for sale by the government of the United States.

In October of the very year the land office opened, a small party of emigrants, eager to stake their claims for land, followed Indian trails and arrived from Ohio just as evening was setting in. They were a bit surprised that evening as they came upon a Potawatomi town on land that is now the town of Cortland, Ilinois, a few miles from Heatherhope. These six rather poor but industrious families hunkered down for the winter near the Potawatomi; but they soon laid claim to prime land around Heatherhope, near the river and near a large grove of woods, protected from westward prairie fires by the Kishwaukee River. They called this Ohio Grove.

Two of these families were headed by George W. and Isaac Gandy. Two years later, George’s half-brother, Henry Harris Gandy, Jr. walked from Union County, Ohio to join this new settlement. Along the way, Henry found a few dollars and used them to buy his first pair of shoes before finishing his trip, and buying this parcel of acres we now call Heatherhope. By the late 1900s the Gandy family collectively had claimed 1,000 acres of land in Cortland Township. In 1839 they donated the patch of land a couple hundred yards south of Heatherope to create Ohio Grove Cemetery, and as the plot for a Baptist church, which stood here until 1951. The same H. H. Gandy who was the first “owner” of Heatherhope’s land is now buried in that Ohio Grove Cemetery. These earliest settlers were soon joined in the spring by a dozen other families.

Juicy Interlude: A Spooky Body Snatcher Story

The following story is taken from the history of Ohio Grove Cemetery, https://outandabout.stqry.app/story/201905

One fascinating piece of history connected to nearby Ohio Grove Cemetery is the story of a body snatching in 1849. As the story goes, Mrs. Marilla Kinyon died on March 26, 1849. She had contracted cholera, and was buried in Ohio Grove Cemetery. Kinyon was only 16 years old and recently married to George M. Kinyon, who came to Cortland Township a few years earlier at the age of 19 to claim land and start a new life on the Illinois prairie.

Around this same time, about twenty miles away, the Franklin Institute in St. Charles, Illinois’ first medical school, was becoming well-established. Dr. George W. Richards opened the Institute in 1842. However, even though the institution was respected, rumors of body snatching persisted during the seven years it was in operation. Body snatching became a semi-common occurrence in the 1800s, as it was considered an easier way to obtain bodies for anatomy students to study. The only legal way to acquire a corpse was to wait for gallows victims, since studying or experimenting on a body was considered disrespectful to the dead, but executions didn’t provide enough material for most anatomist societies, so many schools turned to less than legal means. The body snatchers were called “resurrectionists”, digging up recently buried corpses so students would have fresh specimens, and often being handsomely rewarded for their efforts. Preventions against body snatching could often only be afforded by the wealthy, with items like cement blocks atop coffin lids or mortsafes (an iron cage around the coffin of a newly deceased individual to prevent someone from breaking the lid and removing the body) constructed in hopes of allowing the dead a peaceful rest. Poorer mourners were advised to layer straw and dirt over the graves so they would be more difficult to disturb, or to place a plant on top so any disturbances would be more noticeable (though a smart grave robber could easily dig the body up and replace the plant afterwards).

One fateful evening at Lovell’s Tavern, Emeline, the owner’s daughter, was waiting tables when she overheard three men discussing body snatching. She told her father what she’d heard, and Lovell asked one of his sons to check the group’s wagon just outside the tavern. The son found shovels, ropes, and other tools resurrectionists might use to steal the bodies of those who were recently buried. Lovell only knew of two fresh graves in the area: Marilla’s in Ohio Grove Cemetery, and a “friendless German[’s]” in Sycamore. Thinking quickly, Lovell asked a neighbor to be on the lookout for resurrectionists at the Sycamore Cemetery. Then he went to warn David Churchill, Marilla’s father, to watch over her grave. Sadly, after examining the young woman’s gravesite, they discovered they were too late. The coffin was empty except for Marilla’s clothing.

Meanwhile, in Sycamore, the resurrectionists were caught and recognized as students from the Franklin Institute. Two were identified by name: John Rood and Dr. Richard’s son, also named George. They were searched, but nothing was found on them, and without any evidence, they were simply told to leave town. The resurrectionists headed back to St. Charles. However, there was a rumor circulating that the party took Marilla’s body earlier and hid it in a straw stack halfway between Ohio Grove and St. Charles. The plan was to return when it was safe, and then bring the body back to St. Charles.

Soon afterwards, George Kinyon, David Churchill, and a few others went to St. Charles to search the Franklin Institute for any signs of the body. After questioning Dr. Richards about the abduction, the group pleaded for the body back. He denied having any knowledge of the grave robbery. The group returned to the Sycamore area empty-handed to regroup. On April 19, 1849, the party ventured back to St. Charles with a larger group of people, all armed with guns and other weapons. They started a riot in front of Dr. Richards’ house and ended up killing John Rood, one of the medical students associated with the body snatching. They also shot Dr. Richards in the shoulder, causing permanent paralysis of one arm. Still, Dr. Richards claimed to know nothing about Marilla’s body.

At this point, William D. Barry, an acquaintance of Churchill and a St. Charles lawyer, came to help. Barry encouraged the rioters to return to Sycamore, promising to assist with finding the body and ensuring its safe return. With Barry’s aid alongside a few other affluent people in St. Charles history, they located Marilla's body. One of her St. Charles relatives, Mr. Prescott, was given a location somewhere along the Fox River, and she was returned to Ohio Grove for a second burial. Today, Marilla’s grave stands between the Churchill marker and her parents’ headstones.

By the 1850s all the Potawatomi had gone West in the “removal,” the number of homes had grown, and in the growing nearby town of Cortland neighbors had put up a tavern, and a few shops. In 1853 the railroad and a station came, and the village of Cortland had grown up and was even competing in size with the nearby towns of Sycamore and DeKalb.

This single score of years, between 1830 and 1850 already saw most of the elements that would define the rest of the story of Heatherhope, and indeed shape many of the challenges that face any people who wish to make this place a truly livable home.

Heatherhope’s Connection to “Nature’s Metropolis”

William Cronon, in his magisterial book, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West argues that to properly understand our place in this world we need to stop mistakenly partitioning it. He argues against two chief culprits: our tendency to think imagine urban, rural, and wilderness zones as isolated from one another rather than intimately connected, and our tendency to want to erase or ignore the ambiguity about the human place in nature—are we inside or outside nature.

Cronon’s book is then “a series of stories, each tracing the path between an urban [commodity] market and the natural systems that supply it.” He sees, nineteenth-century Chicago, and its hinterlands, as absolutely crucial to the making of the “Great West”--that is, everything from Lake Michigan to the Pacific Ocean.

This kind of urban-rural-wilderness binding—this absolute ambiguity about whether humans are outside or inside nature—has certainly shaped the world we live in today. World history has been creeping in this direction since the beginning, but in nineteenth-century, and especially in these twenty years between the Treaty of Chicago and the ethnic cleansing of the first peoples, to the coming of the railroad to a station just down the road from Heatherhope, we saw a GIANT LEAP in the market’s mark on nature.

First, the surveyors marked out the land for sales. Farmers wanted the land. Developers and investors comodified the land and the produce of it. They set up markets for land, grain, lumber, livestock, and a bit of everything—first in New York, and then in Chicago. The canals, and then the railways linked everyone up. Then the farmers got to work taming the landscape. They put in tiling to drain the many wet lands that the beaver had helped fill. But by 1830 all the beaver had been trapped and skinned and transported to Europe where beaver hats were fashionable, and even required in some places. Their new crops were not as flammable, and they suppressed the prairie fires, and then the prairie plants that had built up the soils for millennia. They plowed and planted corn and wheat, and later soybeans, the produce of which filled the hopper cars on the many railroads; and their livestock could be whisked into the Chicago stockyards to be changed to beef, pork and lamb to be transported back East.

One famous link in this chain that bound humans to nature, and city to the Great West, was a farmer from nearby DeKalb, Illinois, named Joseph Glidden. At a county fair he saw a single-stranded barbed wire invented by Henry Rose. Glidden improved the concept by using twin strands of wire twisted together to hold the barbs in place. In fewer than ten years after his patent Glidden’s barbed wire had spread all across the west. Poor farmers could afford it. It was easy to erect, didn’t catch the wind or make snow drifts, and lasted longer than wood—ideal for prairies and plains. It changed the way people interacted with the non-human natural world. Of course it also disrupted not only the ways of the roaming, hunting ways of the native peoples, many of whom were driven from their eastern homes, but also, later, the ways of cattlemen who were used to driving their cattle to railheads. Disruptions in the non-human natural world always mean disruptions in the human, political world.

Markets and Mother Nature

For most of my life my imagination turned to wilderness. My father took me to the Boundary Waters to canoe. I chummed with my friends on canoe and rowboat excursions up the Ohio River to camp on an island 18 miles up from Louisville. I used the thick shrubbery around our urban home to get away from it all. Then I became fascinated with Border Collies and sheep and began looking for green pastures to take me away from suburbia where I lived. Heatherhope has now been our home for over 22 years—longer than I have ever lived in one place. But talk of money numbs my senses. When the financial news comes on, I switch stations. And even though we get the farm news every week, I can’t get myself to look at the tables and the trends of the prices of bushels of wheat or bellies of pork.

But, as William Cronan points out in his book, “…few economic institutions more powerfully affect human communities and natural ecosystems in the modern capitalist world [than commodity markets.]” His point is a good one. For better or worse, we depend on these markets and upon this entire network that ties the human and non-human side of nature—and the urban, rural and wilderness together into one world. We are fed, clothed, and sheltered by a system with commodity markets in the center.

But while markets are the machine of our survival, our collective conscience programs the machine. And we must never shirk, but take responsibility for the decisions that make for life worth living.

In the movie, “The Jerk,” Navin, the title character played by Steve Martin, is part of the commodity machine in his role as a carnival huckster guessing people’s weight. He is concerned that his failures at guessing weights may mean too many prizes are awarded until his boss explains that the prizes are cheap junk, while the chances to win far outstrip them. Navin’s eyes widen when he finally gets it. It’s “the profit deal.”

This whole world is now entwined in commodity, and hostage to that old profit motive that dictates that the wide public gets junk and the shareholders get the “profit deal.” And this, coupled with an ever exploding global population, explains why the trees disappear, the chemicals and plastics poison, and the climate keeps warming. Markets mean we survive, but just barely. Only our consciences can steer us to a truly livable future in a world where human and non-human nature cooperate rationally and faithfully.