You may recall the post about Effie’s Aunt Effie and her house in Monmouth IL and Grandma’s memory of driving with Grandpa to help clean it out in the 1930’s. I was searching for photos of my 3x great grandfather William Cowan (no luck) and came across this 2017 article by Monmouth and western Illinois historian Jeff Rankin: The Historic Monmouth Schoolhouse They Couldn’t Tear Down. Turns out Effie’s home had been passed down from her grandfather (William Cowan) whom Rankin describes thus:
“Cowan had a colorful life. The son of a tanner, he was born in Pennsylvania in 1815 and apprenticed to a blacksmith at age 17. He worked for a time in Lancaster, Pennsylvania for Hiram Baldwin, who would later open the Baldwin House hotel in Monmouth. He then worked for the locomotive shops in Philadelphia, before traveling to Missouri, where he fought under Zachary Taylor in the Seminole War. He came to Monmouth in 1839, where he would later serve as an alderman, marshal and two terms as mayor.”
There’s a lot of interesting information in the article and you should go read it, but the really cool thing is that the house was apparently moved to a different location with the intention to demolish, however it sounds like the house did not agree with that idea and still stands today.
[PS. As an aside, I am currently reviving and overhauling this website after several years of it being lost in internet purgatory. I have a new host and a new WordPress install and am going through post by post, reconnecting photos, fixing text issues that have arisen in the migration, adding things I have discovered in the interim, and updating dead links. While I am leaving the site live as I work on it, please know it’s a work in progress and pretty rough around the edges. It will improve over time. Thank you for your patience!]
