Illinois Farmhouse Left in 2018: Blueprints, Soda Cans With Soda Still in Them

This farmhouse in Illinois was left behind in 2018, and it’s the most cluttered abandoned house I’ve ever been in. Every room is stacked with blueprints, binders, books and clothes.

I don’t know what happened to the owners. I guessed one was an architect and one was an accountant, and I spent the whole explore looking for clues. The exact location stays off this page.

What we found

There are personal documents all over the place that I won’t show on camera. A calendar on the wall says 2015, which isn’t that long ago. Part of one ceiling has collapsed, and the blueprints are everywhere. It made me wonder what this person did for a living.

In the living room there’s peeling paint, a basketball hoop on the wall, a couch I think looks kind of cool, a TV monitor, a backgammon game and some Redbox movies. Slides turn up in room after room.

Downstairs has a really gross room with some razors in it, and a shower with a cute little curtain. The first room upstairs is an absolute disaster. There’s an old Dell computer with a printer, a lot of pill bottles, and what would have been all of their clothes. A CPA review course booklet was in there, which is where the accountant guess came from. There was also a little baby plate dated 1990.

The other bathroom had a bottle of sparkling wine. Then the cans, Canada Dry and 7Up, that still have soda in them. They’re pushed out from expanding. After that came vodka, wedding pictures, a briefcase with a pen in it and an old tube TV.

The last room upstairs is the one I skipped on an earlier visit because it was so messy. It has a tool kit, another old TV, a Tom Clancy book and a lot of cowboys and ducks. Whoever lived here liked to read, liked the cowboys and liked ducks.

Back on the ground floor there’s a jewelry box (empty), a really old scale, magazines, an Illinois map, a tic tac toe set with pieces that look like chess pieces, and so many globes. There’s an old house phone and something about Route 66, the road that runs from Chicago to California.

The home office is where the third guess came from. There are garden books, cement company paperwork, paint swatches, carpet samples, stone designs and a thermodynamics textbook. I said it was safe to say this person was probably a civil engineer. While I was in there I heard what sounded like a truck pulling up and somebody right outside the window. I stopped and waited until I decided we were good.

The closets are really lockers. Most are empty and a few aren’t locked. One held a man’s hats and coats, including something from a park district, so maybe he worked for one. There are remodeling and alteration files that are very moldy, design tables, and a paper that says sheriff’s department with the year 1988 on it. There’s also a record player with a TV screen, no dumping signs, a little lawn chair and some kids’ artwork that their kid probably drew.

The kitchen is a disaster, but there’s real food in it. Canned goods, old pans, a cookbook, seasonings. The fridge is very gross, with a bottle of Jack Daniels in it. I also found a biohazard container with a specimen inside, and band aids in there too, which I can’t explain. There was old low fat milk that is obviously not milk anymore, green beans, a clock with fireworks on it and a carousel tray of slides. I heard a sound I took for the same one from earlier, and decided it was an airplane.

The last calendar I found had September 2018 and then November 2018. I think that was the last day they were here, if they marked it properly, and it looks like they did.

Why places like this end up empty

The video doesn’t say why this house emptied, so this is the general picture for farmhouses in Illinois. In 1970 the state had just over 100,000 farms. A University of Illinois piece from 2003 put it at about 71,000 and quoted a researcher saying the consensus is that little can be done about the continued concentration in production agriculture, which means fewer farms.

The trend has kept going. The 2017 Census of Agriculture counted about 2,430 fewer Illinois farms than in 2012. The average farm had grown to 372 acres, and the average Illinois farmer was 58, up from 56.3 five years earlier.

Fewer farms and older farmers add up to more houses that nobody comes back to. That’s the general picture and not an answer for this house.

The calendar on the wall stops in November 2018.