Battle Creek Sanitarium

As you may have noticed, I haven’t written much of substance recently, thanks in large part my my thorough enjoyment of this last summer before starting the PhD program. I’ve been a little hard on myself for not accomplishing all the grandiose plans I laid out at the begining of the summer, but my colleagues here in Chambana have encouraged me to lighten up. OK, so I only moved my blog, configured a few wikis, worked full time, and got to see Tom Waits twice. Not bad work for a summer. And I’ve moved..again…to another nice old house in Champaign. After I moved into the last place I went to the local history archives at the Urbana Free Library (as the seat of Champaign County, Urbana holds the best collection of local history records) to do a little research. This weekend I made another trip back to learn about my new abode.

It always feels good to go back and do historical research. I’ve committed a lot of time to make resources available to researchers online, with some gut feeling about ways to do that. Sometimes I worry that I’ve gotten too far removed from the real work to still have a clear sense of what needs to be done. A little research trip now and then usually fixes me right up. I had to consult about 6 different databases, an unindexed folder of materials, newspapers on microfilm, and my best resource was still going year-by-year through the city directories. This isn’t to impugn the good work done at the Urbana Free/ As research experiences go, the local history archives does provide a lot of help, access to great resources, and a supportive and friendly staff. But it does suggest the large number of opportunities to improve access to these types of resources.

For a while, I’ve been interested in this history of “apartments,” having lived in so many of them (and I blame watching too many Thin Man movies.. It seems to be an under appreciated area of architectural and social history. I haven’t found much in libraries within reach, but there are lots of leads in Amazon. Even architectural journals don’t seem to talk much about them (at least from a quick search). I brought 740 Park: History of America’s Richest Apartment Building home from the library tonight – we’ll see where citation chaining takes me from here. Even though these are some of the largest and most impressive houses in Champaign, local history resources appear to ignore homes that have been turned into apartments in favor of family-owned homes or those that have been put to institutional purposes.

My previous home was commissioned in 1893 by A.C. Burnham, who funded the first library in Champaign, the Burnham Athenaeum, later to become the Champaign Public Library. While the Athenaeum was being built the library briefly took up residence at the house I lived in (although probably not my apartment). The house was later sold to the Harris family, who made their fortunes by first ranching cattle and later as bankers. I lost track of it’s history after 1929 (not the best time to be a banker). By the early 1950s the house was already turned into apartments.

My new home has a similar history. Lura and Marion Tackett, another banking family, built it in 1903. It was noted by the Champaign Daily Gazette for it’s unusual “southern” neoclassical style. Between 1908 and 1912 William F. Goss owned it. Most interestingly however, the house became a sanitarium from 1912 until 1918. Anna Balding and Irene Howell ran the sanitarium for “non contagious” cases using the Battle Creek method. – aka Dr. John Kellogg, inventor of corn flakes. Although formally known as the Balding & Howell Sanitarium, around town it was known as the Battle Creek Sanitarium. I haven’t turned up any digital historical pictures yet. The house passed through a few other hands before being bought by S.K. Hughes, another banker who owned it until 1928 when the building was turned into apartments. Thankfully through all its incarnations, the house has kept many of it’s charms. The pocket doors don’t work anymore, but the woodwork hasn’t been painted over, the hardwood floors are still original, and though the fireplace doesn’t work, the mantle-piece is still in great condition.

Signing off from home sweet home, I have to get back to my corn flakes before they get soggy….

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