BARN TOUR REAQUAINTS RESIDENTS WITH HERITAGE

Jacquie Eddleman led a tour through a 1917 barn behind her farmhouse near Dongola, Ill. Saturday.

DONGOLA, Ill. -- Jacquie Kimber and Jack Eddleman grew up on adjacent farms outside Dongola. Their marriage created the Kimber-Eddleman farm sprawling across more than 500 acres of Union County.

The Eddlemans both had professional careers, Jim with the United States Department of Agriculture and Jacquie teaching home economics and early child development at SIU. But they never stopped farming. Most people who live in the region don't have to go very far back into their family lineage to find a farmer, Jacquie says. "It's in your blood."

Their farm was the second stop Saturday in the Barnstorming Union County Tour sponsored by the Union County Chamber of Commerce. Thirty people rode a chartered bus up and down seldom traveled roads to walk in the barns and breathe the earthy air of the county's disappearing rural life.

Participants in the tour sat on hay bales in a wagon pulled by a tractor that delivered them down a narrow, muddy road to a barn believed to have been built in the 1880s. The unpainted barn is held together by pegs, or what architecture professor Robert Swenson called "tree nails." The barn has fulfilled a variety of purposes through the years. It now sits empty except for the deer that bed down inside at night.

But the barn is still in good shape. It sits on 170 of land a cousin from St. Louis bought with the intention of renovating the old farmhouse and turning it into a bed and breakfast. He also plans to restore the barn and a log cabin built by Eli Eddleman in 1840.

Like Richard Hase, a number of those on the tour grew up on Union County farms but left to pursue other ways of life. Hase is a pharmacist in Anna who at 14 said "no thanks" to his father's offer of acreage to work once he graduated from high school. Their farm was near the Eddlemans'.

When Jack Eddleman talked about the sweat required to fill the corn crib or lift hay into the loft, Hase nodded ruefully.

The group also toured a 1917 barn behind the Eddlemans' house. It once had horse stalls and now contains chicken wire left over from when Jacquie's father "attempted chickens." There Swenson delivered a primer on barns -- their architecture and uses.

Some were built with openings to allow owls in to control rodents. On salt box barns, the part of the roof facing the sun was the largest to make use of solar heating. Tobacco barns were made so the sides could be tilted allow to allow air to circulate.

Barns have been put to many uses.

"Barns were the first advertising signs," Swenson said.

Jim Goddard, who was along for Saturday's tour, owns one of the barns in Swenson's slide show. It houses Goddard's Store on Route 146 in Anna. His grandfather's brother built the barn in 1920 to store sweet potatoes. Through the years the family has sold feed and cream and eggs out of the barn, and Goddard's father did seed cleaning there. In the 1960s it became more of a general store selling bagged feed, overalls and blue jeans.

Friday night, participants in the Barnstorming Union County Tour attended an art show in Anna and heard talks by Jane Adams of the SIU anthropology department and by Swenson. Adams has written a book about rural life.

The rest of Saturday's tour took them to lunch at Fragrant Fields, a barn that has been transformed into a restaurant in Dongola, and to other barns before concluding with a chuck wagon supper and barn dance.

The Barnstorming Union County Tour was organized by Tony Calabrese, president of the Union County Chamber of Commerce, as a way of making people more aware of the county's rural heritage and the need to preserve it.

Today's final day of the scheduled tour consisting of a farm breakfast and participation in the Campground Church 150th anniversary celebration has been canceled. Calabrese said the lack of interest in the event probably was due to its proximity to Memorial Day.

Swenson encouraged those on the tour to help preserve barns like these by developing rural historic districts similar to the districts many cities have in their older sections. A member of the Illinois Task Force for Historic Sites, Swenson grew up on a farm in Massac County and says these old barns are more to us than just buildings.

"We all need a sense of place," he said. "You can't go back here but you have to have a home, a sense of where you came from."