Cemetery tour teaches history of small town

SPRING GROVE, Ill. -- Miles Cole and his wife, Sally Bixby, arrived in Burton Township in November 1838, traveling from New Hampshire in seven weeks in two covered wagons.

The Coles became wealthy farmers and their offspring settled in the area, as did other founding families: Stevens, Baker, Pierce, Shotliff, Wagner, Norton and Hatch.

One changed history through her death in a fire. Another changed farming history through a new way to store silage. The only black person in town was a former slave, taken in by a local family and accepted as one of their own.

About a dozen people attended a Cole Cemetery Tour recently to stand at the founders' graves and hear about their lives and contributions to the community.

Irene Pierce Borre, 85, of Spring Grove, who is descended from the original families, said the tour helped teach newcomers about the town.

"It's good for the new people who are interested to learn about what we have to offer," Borre said.

Borre served as a tour guide along with Village Clerk Laura Frumet, Fire Chief Rich Tobiasz, and Gary Miller, who maintains the cemetery.

Among local historical figures was Bertha Stevens Norton. The mother of nine accidentally set fire to her house while lighting a wood cookstove in 1925, Tobiasz said.

She got all her children out safely, but she was burned badly, and there was no rescue squad. A private car took the 38-year-old woman to Cottage Hospital in Harvard, but she died the next day.

"As a result of Bertha Norton's tragedy, we have the Spring Grove Rescue Squad," Tobiasz said.

Then there was Fred Hatch, son of farmer Lewis and Mandana Cole Hatch, who was part of the second graduating class of the agricultural college at the University of Illinois in 1873. He persuaded his father to store winter silage for the cows in the world's first silo. Before that, Tobiasz said, farmers would store cattle feed in long trenches, but the corn would spoil from the ground's dampness.

Hatch's idea to store the silage vertically, off the ground, and inside the barn, kept it warm and fresh enough so that the cows gave more milk during the winter.

A former slave, John Henry Hegler, came to Spring Grove around the turn of the century, the only black man in Burton Township, Tobiasz said. John Henry had been owned by a cruel man named Smith and a kind man named Hegler. So when he left the South, he took the last name Hegler.

Chester and Alice Stevens welcomed Hegler as part of their family: He worked with them, fed the babies and told children bedtime stories. When he died in 1946, locals figured him to be about 100 years old. His headstone in Cole Cemetery, beneath a towering maple tree, is decorated with a bright red geranium.

Mary Prondzinski, 42, of Spring Grove, said she came to the tour out of curiosity as her family lives in a 1908 house once owned by the Coles.

"It was very interesting," she said.