The view from Elkhart Hill
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Latham Cemetery, the oldest graveyard in Logan County. Son Richard Latham stayed on and built a stagecoach stop along the trace on Elkhart Hill called the Kentucky House, a two-story frame building with a two-story porch on the front. Kentucky House did a thriving business, attracting circuit-riding lawyers like Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas and David Davis. In 1853, about the time the railroad first came to Elkhart, Richard Latham sold the hotel and the family land on Elkhart Hill to John Shockey.
The youngest Latham, Robert — along with John Gillett and Lincoln — became one of the key players convincing the railroad to come through Elkhart. The railroad would be an important factor to the success of Ransom’s great-great grandfather, John Dean Gillett.
Gillett originally settled in nearby Cornland, where he began raising cattle. In need of a good attorney, he found a young Springfield man who met his legal needs, thus beginning a partnership between him and Lincoln. They first became business associates, and together laid out the town of nearby Lincoln, according to Ransom.
The two men became close friends, even at one time courting the same woman, Lemira Parke, who would later marry Gillett.
Eventually moving to Elkhart, the couple built a house and barns on Elkhart Hill in 1870, but fire destroyed the home one year later. They rebuilt in 1873. Gillett was noted for importing Durham cattle from Scotland and developing the Shorthorn breed. He shipped more than 2,000 head of cattle and 1,000 head of hogs to Europe annually. The London Gazette dubbed him “Cattle King of the World.”
Elkhart for many years was one of the largest shipping points on the Chicago and Alton Railroad, thanks to Gillett’s success.
Today, Gillett’s dwellings are part of The Old Gillett Farm, a historic seventh generation family farm still owned by his descendants.
The farm encompasses 700 acres of lawns, gardens, woodlands and open fields. In addition to the main house, a three-bedroom guesthouse and chapel in Elkhart Hill’s other cemetery are available for private bookings.
Overnight accommodations, special events, weddings and tours can be arranged but because it is still a private family residence and a working farm, arrangements must be made on an individual basis prior to any visits. For more information, log on to www.oldgillettfarm.org.
The Lincoln connection
Yet another Lincoln-Gillett-Elkhart connection concerns Richard J. Oglesby, Illinois’ Civil War hero, renowned orator and only non-consecutive three-time governor. Late in life, Oglesby married the Gilletts’ oldest daughter, Emma. “Oglesby was a close personal friend of Lincoln. He suggested the ‘railsplitter’ name for the 1860 presidential campaign. He had the last business appointment with Lincoln on the day that the president was killed,” Ransom said. “He was invited to go along to Ford’s Theater but declined and was called to Lincoln’s deathbed. Oglesby appears in the famous painting of the dying Lincoln. And he was the man who helped start raising the funds for Lincoln’s tomb. He gave the keynote address at the tomb dedication, as a matter of fact. “There is just a tremendous amount of interlocking history here,” Ransom points out. “The village is loaded with more history per capita than any other place its size. For a very small town we have some tremendous connections to history.”
The Elkhart Historical Society, of which Ransom is a member, recently purchased Hunter House with plans to eventually renovate it. The society sponsors spring wildflower walks on Elkhart Hill and candlelight Christmas services in Elkhart Cemetery’s John Dean Gillett Memorial Chapel, built by Lemira Gillett in memory of her husband.
(The chapel is the only privately owned, selfsupporting church in the state.) “We’re small. We’re doing the best we can,” said Ransom. “We don’t have a lot of money and only have so many worker bees. Something will happen I’m sure. We will find the right combination to keep a good feeling about Elkhart going.”
The arched bridge
Another historic Elkhart structure that is part of Gillett family history is the walking arched bridge that crosses the Elkhart-Mt. Pulaski road as a shortcut to the Elkhart Cemetery. It was built by Emma Gillett Oglesby in memory of her brother, John Parke Gillett.
Ransom said “the word was that the bridge allowed Emma to go to the chapel without getting her petticoats wet.” At one point the county wanted to demolish the bridge. “I went ballistic,” she said, then laughed. The back door to Elkhart just wouldn’t be the same if the arched bridge were destroyed, and something special would have disappeared.
“Especially in the summer, coming from Mt. Pulaski, crossing the hot cornfields with the sun beating down on you. When you get to the base of the hill, when the road starts to rise, and the trees start to arch together overhead and the temperature immediately drops in the shade and you climb the hill, reaching its crest and you go under the bridge, why, it’s like you are arriving in a kingdom of some sort,” she said. “It’s magic.”
Rick Wade is a freelance writer whose new passion is Illinois history. He is a Decatur native who’s worked for both religious and secular newspapers in Illinois and Colorado for almost 30 years. A graduate of Sangamon State University (UIS) in Springfield, Wade lives in Pekin with his wife and their two no-kill shelter graduate dogs.
