What a Christmas gift for Garfield Farm and for those who value Kane County history.

Rising to the challenge by the Jeffris Family Foundation to raise $230,000, the friends of Garfield Farm Museum announced on Christmas Eve 2014 that it has won a $115,000 challenge grant from the Wisconsin-based foundation to fully restore the museum’s 1842 hay and grain barn.

After 37 years since its founding, Garfield Farm Museum has reached one of its initial goals of restoration with this award. Restoration has begun as Trillium Dell Timber Works of Knoxville, IL, has lifted of the barn 4 feet with hydraulic jacks so a new foundation can be built.

Under a three-year deadline, in just 15 months, the supporters of the museum contributed sufficient funds to win the grant from the Jeffris Family Foundation, one of only two foundations nationwide that fund exclusively
historic preservation activities.

Helping to complete the campaign, the Kane County-based Victoria Grand Casino Elgin Fund made a $28,750 grant this past fall that was key to the fundraising success.

The 1842 barn is a prime example of Kane County’s farming history.

The barn was built by Timothy Garfield to house sheaves of fresh cut wheat giving the family time to process it for the Chicago-European market. A central drive through aisle served as a threshing floor where the wheat could be flailed, trod upon by horses, or threshed with some of the first mechanical threshers to knock the kernels from the stalks.

The barn was built of hand-hewn timbers as the framing was raised in April of 1842 and was shingled and sided by June in time for the Garfield’s first wheat crop. By 1864, the wheat belt had moved farther west and the railroads of the 1850s now made dairying a profitable enterprise with the now one-hour distant Chicago market. Robert Garfield, who inherited his father’s farm, had the barn moved from its original location to a hillside where a walk in cellar had been dug into the side of the hill. In 1911, it was moved to its present day location.

Nown in 2014, the barn has been moved vertically 4 feet but instead of screw jacks and logs for rollers, hydraulic jacks and 12,000 pounds of steel I-beams on wood cribbing support the 30,000 pound structure.

Trillium Dell Timberworks located near Galesburg, IL, is one of the few firms in the country that undertakes barn restoration and new timber frame construction.

More than 400 donors contributed to the reconstruction effort. The owners of Niche in Geneva, IL held a fundraising dinner at the restaurant in October of 2013 that helped create the momentum for the campaign. A $20,000 grant from the Community Foundation of the Fox River Valley allowed initial archaeological investigation around the barn and the September announcement by the Kane County Riverboat Fund awarding a $28,000 grant helped complete the goal.

This is the second barn that is being restored at Garfield Farm Museum. The 1849 horse barn built to house the customers’ horses of Timothy Garfield’s inn or tavern operation was restored in 1980.

Of course, the key player in making this restoration possible is the Jeffris Family Foundation of Janesville, WI.

“This high level of preservation and restoration standards is truly a hallmark of the Jeffris Foundation’s concern for preserving the accurate picture of America’s heritage” said Jerome Johnson, executive director and a co-founder of Garfield Farm Museum.

The Jeffris Family Foundation established the Jeffris Heartland Fund to support the development of important historic preservation projects that strive for high preservation standards and show a strong degree of local support in the states of Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin.

About Garfield Farm

Garfield Farm and Tavern Museum is a 375 acre historically intact former Illinois prairie farmstead and teamster inn being restored as an 1840s working farm and inn museum. Since 1977, more than 3,800 households from
more than 37 states have contributed in excess of $10 million and tens of thousands of hours of labor to preserve and restore the farm. The museum is located five miles west of Geneva, IL, on Garfield Road in Campton Hills.

Donations to continue restoration of the farm can be sent to Garfield Farm Museum P.O.Box 403 LaFox, IL 60147 or online at www.garfieldfarm.org. Further information is available at (630) 584-8485 or email info@garfieldfarm.org.