Though years of volunteer efforts were spent trying to preserve and restore a 16-sided barn in Elgin -- the last of its kind in the state -- it took only a few hours of strong winds last week to level the 122-year-old structure.
As word of the Teeple Barn’s collapse spread over the holiday weekend, a steady stream of visitors was drawn to the site at Randall Road and the Northwest Tollway, said Bill Collins, president of Ag-Tech, the non-profit organization that for years had directed an effort to fund the barn’s stabilization and hoped-for restoration.
Collins and Ken Teeple, whose family once owned the barn and surrounding 240-acre dairy farm, said Tuesday that they will be among the preservationists who expect to meet later this week with representatives from the food and nut processing company that owns the barn to discuss a salvage and cleanup operation.
Teeple said losing the barn, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, was like losing a family member.
“It was terribly windy, and wind is what brought it down, pure and simple,” said Teeple, of northwest suburban Sleepy Hollow. “It just caved right in.”
Built in 1885 by Teeple’s great-grandfather Lester Teeple, it had an unusual design, including the polygonal shape and unique “X-bracing” supports. At its center was a large wooden crane operated by a complex system of pulleys for lifting hay.
The structure succumbed late Thursday or early Friday to southerly wind gusts of more than 30 m.p.h. that had buffeted the building for hours, forcing its side walls away from its roof and causing its collapse.
Collins said the first report of the collapse was received at 6 a.m. Friday.
“There was just overwhelming interest all weekend,” Collins said. “The people going by there and getting out and looking at it was just amazing.”
Collins said the immediate goal is to keep the barn’s remains from merely being “scooped up and brought to a landfill or ground up into wood chips.”
“There have been a lot of people who have put a lot of money and effort into this thing that want to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Collins said. “It looks to me that the only thing we’ll probably be able to save is the cupola. One question would be, ’Where are we going to put that? Where is that going to go?’”
“The lumber that is in there is historical lumber, and the preservation people like that. Can we put that in some of the county museums that are around? Basically, to find ways to recognize the Teeple Barn for what it was for all these years. We want to preserve whatever can be preserved within reason.”. |
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Although ownership of the barn and former Teeple dairy farm had long passed out of his family’s hands, Teeple said he had continued to be involved in various volunteer efforts to preserve and restore the building. The original intention was to try to convert it into a visitors and educational center and agricultural museum.
The cost to preserve and restore the building had been estimated at roughly $1 million, according to Steve Arnold, executive director of the Kane County Farm Bureau, which created Ag-Tech as a fundraising and education subsidiary. More than $300,000 in state and county grants and other funds had been used in recent years to help stabilize the barn, he said.
“The last plan was maybe not to go quite that far, but just to restore it enough to keep it standing and maybe take tours through,” Teeple said.
Several years of fundraising had failed to generate the hundreds of thousands of dollars required to do that, however.
Teeple said it is unlikely that the barn could be rebuilt.
“It is unfortunate to lose it, certainly,” Arnold said. He called the barn “a symbol of our agricultural heritage.”
“The concern was that something like this would happen before the money could be raised,” Arnold said.
The barn, designed by Elgin architect W.W. Abell, was 13,500 square feet, 85 feet in diameter and 80 feet tall.
Along with being listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the barn was placed on the state Landmarks Preservation Council’s list of “endangered places” in 1999. In 2000 it was granted the coveted “Save America’s Treasures” designation from a preservation partnership composed of the White House Millennium Council, National Park Service and National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Title to the barn and part of the Teeple farmstead was put in escrow in 1999 by Matsushita Electric Corp. of America, which bought the surrounding farm fields and developed the site in 1989.
The industrial site was acquired recently by John B. Sanfilippo & Son Inc., the giant snack food and nut processing company, which has been moving its headquarters and operations to Elgin from Elk Grove Village as part of a consolidation plan. Representatives from Sanfilippo could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
Teeple said preservationists had been waiting for the company to become settled in Elgin before approaching it about the barn.
“In the last month I had been in there twice with some people, and I could tell there were some changes for the worse,” Teeple said. “I was afraid that something like this was going to happen.”
bpresecky@tribune.com
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