Northern Illinois Civil War Era House: A Basement Bunker That Might Just Be a Basement

The video calls this a Civil War era house in northern Illinois. It has books left inside, barns, an in ground pool and a bunker that someone told us about. The exact location stays off this page.

The main question was the bunker. By the end I wasn’t sure we’d found one.

What we found

The first thing we saw was a really cool old barn, and some deer. We went to the house first, since that’s where the good stuff usually is. The front door was wide open, which made me a little nervous. It’s a very pretty house, and I stopped to take some photos.

Vandals have really gotten to this one, with lots of graffiti. The floors are pretty sad. I was surprised how much was left over, especially the books. There are a lot of books, and the fireplace got covered. I smelled mold, and one section has no roof.

We found the way to the basement and checked it first. The steps are a little soft. Someone had said there was a bunker, and I wasn’t sure what that meant, a protection bunker or something else. We found a gun safe or a gun rack, and a closet, and then more stairs. One spot looked like it could be the nose of a bunker, and we could barely see it. The room had racks on the bottom. There was a book down there too.

I don’t know if we found it. It looked like it could have been livable down there. The ceiling is wood. If something happened and it was a bunker, it could just be that somebody called it one and it isn’t. That’s possible.

Upstairs there’s a bathroom with a pretty sink and a lot of peeling paint, and plenty of storage. It doesn’t even look like we explored the whole house.

Outside, the garage had nothing in it. Then we saw the pool, and I wouldn’t have expected one here. It looked like someone had filled it in with rocks. A graffiti artist had been through.

The barns were next, under a cotton candy sky. One is a horse stable, so this guy owned horses. Inside I found books, encyclopedias and a bunch of screens. There were a few other buildings, including a chicken coop and a garage for tractors. A little way off there were four deer running in the background.

The last stop was a small concrete structure. I was a little disappointed, because if that was the bunker it just looks like a basement. It has concrete walls and concrete steps, and the roof is wood, which I called kind of scary. It isn’t very big. Inside there’s what looked like a water tank, electric, and maybe a sewer tank. There’s a little hatch. It could have doubled as a bomb shelter or a tornado shelter, and it was cool, but it was small.

Why places like this end up empty

The video doesn’t explain what happened to this property, so here is the background on old farmsteads in Illinois. Between 1997 and 2002 the state lost more than 6,000 farms. More than 300,000 acres stopped being farmland, though the state still had more than 27 million farmed acres. The average farm grew to about 375 acres from 350 in 1997 and 262 in 1974. The state’s agriculture director said the drop came from urban development and consolidation of family farms.

That has continued. The 2017 Census of Agriculture found about 2,430 fewer Illinois farms than in 2012. The average farm was 372 acres, and the average farmer was 58 years old.

When family farms consolidate, the houses and barns on them can be left standing. That’s the general picture, not an explanation for this property.

The last structure we found has concrete walls, a wood roof and a water tank.