Reflections: Limestone a building block of pioneer life

While the pioneers flooding into the Fox Valley in the 1830s favored the traditional log cabin as their first homes, it didn’t take long for some to rebuild using much more permanent materials. After that first log cabin rush, native limestone became a valuable building material in both the Fox and DuPage river valleys in the 1800s.

In the Fox Valley, most communities had access to limestone of varying quality for reasons that stretch back into the mists of prehistory.

For millions of years, what is now the Fox Valley was the floor of a shallow saltwater sea. Over millennia, tiny sea creatures died and sank to the bottom. The shells of those creatures slowly built up in layers on the sea floor creating a compressed layer several feet thick.

Then other titanic changes took place as the Earth’s tectonic plates moved against each other causing the rise and fall of the planet’s crust, covering the old sea floor with other types of rock to a depth of many feet, and compressing the shells of the tiny sea creatures into limestone.

Then, during a series of ice ages, huge glaciers scraped away much of the soil and softer rock atop the limestone. As the glaciers retreated, they left moraines, or ridges, of gravel in their wake. To top it off, the retreating glaciers changed the climate and huge windstorms whipped the rapidly drying, finely ground sand and organic debris left in the glaciers’ wake, separating it and eroding it even finer. This extremely fine material is called loess, and the post-glacier windstorms deposited it in a thick, organically rich layer atop the glacier-created gravel moraines. And that created the topography we see in the Fox Valley today. Along with the loess, however, came that climate change noted above resulted in rains and winds and accompanying erosion that laid bare limestone outcroppings in areas up and down the Fox Valley.

So, thanks to Mother Nature and her ice ages, when the first settlers arrived along the Fox River in the early 1830s, outcroppings of good quality limestone were found within a few feet of the surface – and often on the surface itself. In many places, the river and the creeks that flow into it had cut through the limestone as it rebounded, free of the immense weight of the ice sheets, leaving the layers exposed.

The area’s Native American inhabitants had already used the limestone outcroppings, but not for the limestone itself. Rather, the Native People used the nodules of hard flint-like chert they found between layers of limestone to manufacture stone tools and weapons. One such chert mine was located between limestone layers in the cliff wall in the valley of Waubonsie Creek behind the Oswego Public Library.

The settlers, though, were uninterested in chert. It was the limestone they wanted and needed. Early on, they used stone found on the ground or loosely scattered at the foot of bluffs along the river and creeks for log cabin foundations and chimneys. Lime kilns were soon built to cook limestone into the ingredients needed for mortar to hold laid stone and, later, bricks together.

Early setters didn’t include many skilled masons, however. It took the proposed construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal to draw people with stone working skills to Illinois. The canal had just gotten under construction when the Panic of 1837 hit, throwing the skilled masons – many of them Irish immigrants– hired to build the canal’s stone lock basins out of work. So instead of building a canal, many of them turned their hands to building houses and other buildings.

Social unrest in Europe also benefitted the Fox Valley, as many Germans immigrated in the troubled 1840s. Most of the Germans were farmers, but many, like John Hemm who settled in Oswego Township, also had other skills, including skills with masonry.

Stone homes were built in Kendall County as early as the early 1840s. Levi Gorton, who built the first dam across the Fox River north of Oswego in the mid-1830s, had a fine two-story Greek Revival limestone house built on the bluff overlooking his dam and gristmill. The Gorton House, located on Route 25 in Oswego, has a Greek Revival-style front porch stretching across its entire front supported by a set of imposing white pillars added in the late 1940s, which changed its looks considerably. And the Crothers house across the street from Oswego’s Little White School Museum is another excellent example of native limestone architecture.

Houses weren’t the only structures being built of limestone, however. Down in Millington (called Millford in those days), Nelson Messinger built a stone factory to manufacture his Messenger Gopher, a rowcrop cultivator. Several mills along the Fox River were built of limestone, and a prime example of this style industrial architecture – Gray’s Mill – that was built by Daniel Gray is still around for us to admire in Montgomery. In Plano, W.W. Marsh and John Hollister built a limestone factory to manufacture their grain harvesters. Over the years, the business was consolidated and the factory greatly enlarged before being bought out by William Deering. And, of course, the historic limestone church of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, finished in 1868, also still proudly stands in Plano along with the classic old Lisbon Congregational Church, now a storage building.

In addition to buildings, the area still has many excellent examples of limestone arch bridges built during the stagecoach era, and some of the older bridges across the Fox River, including the Hudson Crossing Bridge Park in Oswego, still retain their native limestone piers.

Limestone was important to the economic development of the Fox Valley, although it was more important to some communities than others. Oswego, for instance, was literally built on limestone since the ford across the river that encouraged the first pioneers to settle there was part of the limestone outcropping that underlay the whole area.

Today, it’s just one more feature of the landscape so many of us take for granted.

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