This (Really) Old House



The "Jake" Strang House, 1880 (left).  Photo:  Craig Bender






 Appeared in Pioneer Press newspapers
September 2, 2010

Well, it took a while – and a whole lot of complaining -- to get construction off the ground (a particularly inapt phrase, wouldn’t you say?), but now that it’s rolling under the energetic aegis of Jefferson, our dynamo builder, we’re making up for lost time.

            In the proverbial jiffy, the old addition was off, returning the house to its original form – well, original plus a big, green tarp where there used to be a brick wall.  Now there’s a great big hole, filled with beautiful cee-ment, and we can see the shape of the rooms to come in the new addition.  It’s all getting pretty real.

            Which would make this an opportune time to tell you the tale of the house itself.

            On the Illinois Register of Historic Places it’s listed as the “Jake” Strang House, a home-spun combination of Federal, Italianate, and Greek Revival styles popular at the time.  It was built by John “Jake” Strang with money made in the California Gold Rush.  As the story has it, he couldn’t get hold of enough bricks to complete the house before winter came on in 1856, so he closed up the one-storey section that had been erected, and added the two-storey section the following year. 

As a result, for many years the house had two front doors.  Over time the original entry, in the one-storey section, gave way to French doors, which were subsequently mooted by tall bushes grown in front of them.  Part of our project is restoring them to use.

For a sense of perspective, the oldest existing structure in Lake County is the Casper Ott Cabin in Deerfield, dating to 1837.  The County was incorporated in 1839, as a break-away from McHenry County.  And the town of Millburn – then the local metropolis, since incorporated into Old Mill Creek, but represented by the well-preserved Millburn Historic District -- was settled in 1843.

So, it’s a pretty damn old house.  Abe Lincoln was still a Springfield lawyer when Jake put it up. And, as the local laird at the time, he built it to last.  The walls are made of double brick from the old Lake Villa Brick Yard; the foundation’s made of two-foot-thick local field stone, surrounding a dirt-floored basement that looks and feels like a stop on the Underground Railroad (which was, actually, active in the neighborhood at the time).

And every one of those original bricks, as well as every pane of wavy, original glass (of which there are still many) are sacred in the eyes of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, with whom we’re working to preserve the historic character of the house, while bringing some things up to date and adding on the new wing. So, while we thought we could replace the old windows with new, energy-efficient ones, we’ll be adding new, hand-milled storms and screens, instead; and Jefferson has worked some magic to remove 150 years’ worth of paint and return them to operability.

Both sections of the house originally had flat roofs.  As you might imagine, that didn’t work so well.  Over time, gabled roofs were built over the flat ones.  This enclosure created the attic (presently a mud wasp habitat), which, for some large number of years, has been accessible only through what used to be used an exterior window, turned into an idiosyncratic “door” when it was closed in.

            For all this history, however, we’re only the house’s fifth owners.  Jake enjoyed it for almost 40 years, until his death in 1895.  It then passed to his daughter, Jessie. Beatrice Anderson, whose praises are still sung in the neighborhood, owned it for the longest time, from 1920 till the 1980s.  It was she who put the house on the Illinois and National registers, with the help of the Historic Millburn Association.  It was then owned for about 25 years by members of the Bonner family, which shares roots in the county as old and deep as the Strangs, as demonstrated by the Lake County Forest Preserve’s Bonner Heritage Farm property in Lindenhurst.  In fact, the original carpentry work in the house was done for Jake Strang by one of the ancestors of the folks from whom we bought the house.

            And so it comes down to us.  A new chapter in a long legacy that we love.  And we couldn’t choose a more wonderful place to go broke in.