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  Clay started with the Illinois Audubon Society at the end of March 2006. On his first day, he drove from Springfield to Danville, where the society’s office was then located. He helped load 110 years of the organization’s history into moving trucks and headed back to the capital city. The society temporarily moved in with the Illinois Association of Park Districts on Monroe Street, intending to reconfigure the Margery Adams home into a permanent headquarters.
Margery Adams was born in 1897 and lived with her family on the 28-acre parcel of land that now sits between Clear Lake and Forrest avenues. Her grandparents had purchased the property in the 1860s; it was later cultivated into a farm, orchard and vineyard.
After the 1930s, the family stopped maintaining the property and let nature run wild. Adams never married and lived all 86 years of her life on the property. When she died in 1983, she donated the land and her home to the Illinois Audubon Society. An anonymous donor recently gave the society 12 adjacent acres, bringing the property’s total to 40 acres.
The society, managed by two full-time and one part-time employee, first wanted to replace the Margery Adams home with a larger, more energy-efficient building. But Springfield’s historic preservation community criticized the plan, arguing that the home, built it 1857 dur- continued on page 12 |
