Untitled Document
As a little boy growing up in Elkhart, Bob McCue
didn’t know that he was related to anybody famous until organizers of
a local pageant — part of the village’s centennial celebrations
in 1955 — came to see his mother. The visitors were looking for photographs of
prominent residents, including Capt. Adam H. Bogardus, a famous marksman in
the second half of the 19th century. Finding out that his great-great-grandfather was one
of the nation’s most acclaimed shooters launched the 9-year-old on a
lifelong quest to learn about his family’s and community’s
histories. Now in his sixties, McCue regularly dresses up in
period costume to portray his famous ancestor and tell stories about the
way things were. That’s how visitors to next week’s Spring
Festival will find McCue as he guides visitors through historic Elkhart
Cemetery. The one-day festival, 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday, May 19, will
include tours of the historic Gillett Mansion, a show of antique tractors
and engines, bluegrass music, a farmers’ market, a display of Indian
points, and other activities. Drivers who pass Elkhart on Interstate 55 may
recognize the village by the giant hill resembling a giant slagheap or
Cahokia-like burial mound. It is, in fact, a legacy of what geologists call
the Illinoian and
Wisconsin glaciers, which covered 80 percent of Illinois thousands of years
ago. Rising about 225 feet, the hill is home to hundreds of deer and is
covered with virgin timber and plants that aren’t native to the
prairie below. Once a major agricultural center, Elkhart still
boasts the largest grain elevator in Logan County and memories of a passing
parade of famous people, including Abe Lincoln and a retired Illinois
governor, who found a lot to like about the thriving community.
Elkhart’s population of 430 (as of mid-2000) has remained relatively
stable in recent years.
“My dad used to say, every time some girl had a
baby, some guy left town,” McCue says. But that’s not why he left town.
After graduating from high school, McCue joined the
Marines and served in combat during Vietnam. Then he spent 35 years as a
sheet-metal worker before retiring three years ago.
Now he spends his time as a walking encyclopedia of
local lore and has been known to regale total strangers at the drop of a
hint. Few others could point out the trackside shamble that was once the
Crowhurst Siding, a special rail-passenger landing constructed so that
industrialist George Pullman could visit his lady friend Jessie Dean
Gillett, daughter of cattle baron John Dean Gillett. The landing permitted
Pullman to travel from Chicago to her home without getting mud on his
boots.
Before Elkhart appeared on a map, McCue explains, the
settlement was known as Elkhart Grove. Some maps show it as Latham’s
Settlement. James Latham and his son, Richard, came to the area in 1819 and
planted their first corn crops in 1821. A field on Elkhart’s north
side has been in grain production ever since, according to McCue. The
Lathams built a cabin on the hill, near what was already known as Edwards
Trace. Dating back to prehistoric times, the trace was a visible dip in the
land, a trail from Cahokia past Springfield and Elkhart and ending in
Peoria, worn down by early animals moving from shelter to shelter, water
source to water source. Indians traveled the same way, following the wild
game. “John Latham built some rental cabins, trying
to get more people to move in. Richard built Kentucky House, the first inn
in Logan County. In the field in front of that, he built a four-horse grain
mill,” McCue says. Horses turned the millstone. “At the time,
to get to a water mill, farmers had to travel down to Cahokia. The water
mill at New Salem had not yet been built.” Descendants of the Lathams
are buried in the Latham family cemetery, not far from the site of John
Latham’s original cabin and some distance from Elkhart Cemetery.
In 1848, John Shockey arrived and built a house on
the hill. “The story goes that Shockey looked down from the hill on
this area below and determined this would be a great place for a
town,” McCue says. “When plans for the railroad came through,
that cinched it.” John and Catharine Shockey formalized the
settlement as a village in 1855. “He and Mrs. Shockey had 17 children in 23
years. I tell people that his greatest contribution was populating the
area,” he says with a wink. There are still Shockey relatives living
in the Elkhart area. For many years John and Catharine were buried at the
summit, but they were reinterred after Elkhart Cemetery was established
farther down the slope. The original grave markers, which replaced the
cedar stumps believed to have been the first markers of the graves, remain
silent sentinels at the top of Elkhart Hill. The village’s most prominent resident, John
Dean Gillett, arrived from Pennsylvania in 1850 and began amassing 20,000
acres. Gillett is credited with introducing shorthorn cattle to Illinois
and is said to have been the first American to export livestock back to
Europe, McCue says. Much of Gillett’s land was used for grain.
“Gillett hired farmers to mind the grain and bought it back to feed
his cattle. When they had surplus grain, they sold it on the open market,
and profits were shared with those who worked the land. One year, winter
came early with lots of rain, which thoroughly soaked the corn before it
could be harvested. His tenant farmers could expect no income from tons of
grain about to rot. Gillette told his farmers to bring the grain in anyway.
That same year, Hiram Walker, producers of fine whiskey, began in Peoria.
They didn’t care if the corn was wet.” Today the Old Gillett
Farm remains a private residence, but tours are available by appointment.
Three-time Illinois Gov. Richard J. Oglesby married
Gillett’s oldest daughter, Emma, and retired to a palatial mansion on
the hill, but the home was demolished some years ago after it was
determined that the cost of restoration was prohibitively high. The
Oglesbys are buried in the Oglesby Mausoleum at Elkhart Cemetery.
Capt. Bogardus,
McCue’s great-great-grandfather, was born in Berne, N.Y., in 1833. “When he was 22 years old, he moved to a cabin
on the Sangamon River by Petersburg. He was a carpenter by trade, but he
hunted, and he became a market hunter.” A market hunter harvests wild
game for mass consumption in large cities. “When the railroad came
through Elkhart, he moved here in 1857 so he could ship birds in ice and
oats and they could be to the market in Chicago and St. Louis on the same
day. He hunted the hills, including where the cemetery is now,” McCue
notes with obvious pride.
“In a book published about his life, he
mentioned that he enjoyed hunting the fields of John Gillett. Some of them
ran seven miles ‘at the through,’ and they were divided by
hedgerows of Osage orange, which provided good cover for the birds. When he
moved here, he became Elkhart’s first roads commissioner. As a
carpenter, he built our first wood sidewalks. “Bogardus fascinated the locals when he came to
Elkhart,” McCue says, “because he hunted with hunting dogs like
they did out East. He introduced hunting dogs to this area. They also
couldn’t understand why he had six or eight guns when nobody around
here had more than two. The reason why was that he hunted a lot.”
Bogardus was one of the first in the new nation to
recognize the need for game conservation. He spoke out against the practice
of driving birds into large nets and then picking them off. The danger of
killing all game in an area was as obvious then as it is today. Other
hunters devised a large weapon called a transom gun. Mounted on the transom
of a boat, it fired a lot of lead shot at a time. “Hunters would
place it, camouflaged, on a pond where flocks of bird were likely to
land” he says. “One blast could kill the entire
flock.”
Early shooting tournaments were also a concern.
“At some of these events, they would shoot up to 300 birds. To
discourage that kind of game consumption, Bogardus refined the mechanical
target-launching gear invented in Cincinnati years before and invented a
glass ball filled with bird feathers — early versions of
today’s clay pigeons. It was obvious at any range when they were
hit.”
Bogardus went to the Civil War twice. “Logan
County never had a draft during that war,” McCue says. “Every
time they were given a quota of men, it was filled or exceeded by
volunteers. Bogardus had a livelihood as a market hunter to maintain, so he
agreed to take a consignment of men but not as an enlisted member of the
military. It was understood that he could return to Logan County in the
spring, when the geese came north, and in the fall, when they went south.
He served two 90-day consignments, the first as a lieutenant and the second
as a captain. Part of his job, according to family history, was training
sharpshooters — what we call snipers today.
“People did a lot of their marketing in Peoria.
Some of his friends met an exhibition shooter who was challenging everyone.
They arranged a bet that Bogardus could outshoot the exhibition performer
with the provision that if their compatriot carpenter would not be a part of it, they
would forfeit the money they put up. “Bogardus was not too sold on the idea, but he
didn’t want them to lose their money, so he shot and he won —
and he shot and won a few more times. He started getting good press, making
money. A few years later, he and his four sons joined Buffalo Bill
Cody’s touring Wild West show,” McCue says. “His youngest
son, Eddie, 8 years old, would shoot a 3-inch glass ball out of his
father’s mouth with a rifle.”
The show-business career was short-lived, however.
Bogardus and Cody rented a riverboat together and planned to put on
month-long show in New Orleans during a major celebration there. The
riverboat sank after being involved in a collision, and so the show had to
be staged on land. The terrible weather during the contracted month there
had catastrophic effects on attendance and Cody’s finances, and he
and the Bogarduses came to an unhappy parting of the ways. Bogardus
appeared briefly with the Annie Oakley show before returning to Lincoln,
just up the road a piece from Elkhart. There he set up a shooting gallery
and gave shooting instruction. McCue says that Bogardus returned to the open road
years later. In 1903, Oakley sued several small newspapers for publishing a
story about a prostitute who had claimed to be the sharpshooter and defiled
her reputation. To help her raise money for her legal action, Bogardus
traveled with Oakley’s Wild West show. He amazed crowds with his
marksmanship at age 70, shooting from a rocking chair. Bogardus said that
it was not hard and that much of his market hunting was done seated. He
died in Lincoln, in 1913, and was buried at Elkhart Cemetery.
Unlike many rural
“celebrations,” Elkhart’s Spring Festival is a one-day
do. “We aim this whole thing at family,” says Andrea
Niehaus, founder of the Elkhart Festival Association and chairwoman of this
year’s event. “We’ll have a flea and craft market and
an archaeology expert on hand to tell you about artifacts you may have
collected,” she says. Niehaus considers McCue one of the village’s
treasured artifacts, thanks to his convivial sharing of local history and
his devotion to the community.
Everyone, she says, looks forward to his guided tours
of the cemetery. “You’ll find I’m pretty windy when
I get rolling about the history here,” McCue says. Visitors to Elkhart’s Spring Festival will
probably appreciate the breeze.
For more information about Elkhart, go to
www.elkhartillinois.com.
Job Conger is a Springfield journalist and poet.
This article appears in May 3-9, 2007.
