The Busch Family Ownership Group (minus Billy and Adolphus IV) welcomes you to Grant’s Farm! We paid an evening visit to the Busch family estate recently. I learned the structure below was the ice skating building. This was part of the original holdings of the Dent Family, and the Hardscrabble log cabin is one of…
Tag: Farms
Family Farm, Deer Creek Township, Illinois, March 2023
I woke up to a dusting of snow on the ground, which I was not expecting at this point in the season; apparently the same thing happened in St. Louis. It was very, very cold out, to say the least. But the sky was clear and blue in the morning.
Howard Bend, February 2023
I’ve been driving out and around the Howard Bend area since the early 1990s, and it’s interesting t see how it’s been changing. In fact, one of my earliest posts, almost fifteen years ago, looked at the area when it was still rural. Finally, after years of false starts, Maryland Heights’s dreams of developing the…
Family Farm, Deer Creek Township, Illinois, June 2022
I took a short trip up to my family’s farm east of Peoria and the crops were just starting to mature out in the fields. I didn’t expect to find these flowers growing so big on the north side of the old ice house. And the tree that is just about dead seems to have…
Around Woodford County, Illinois, June 2022
I went around and looked at some of the towns northeast of the family farm. I started with Eureka, the county seat of Woodford County. I could have sworn I had featured the courthouse before, but apparently not. Got to love the bank where they filled in the windows–who needs natural light when there’s amazing…
Dawn, Family Farm, Deer Creek Township, March 2022
I woke up early and caught the sunrise coming up over the fields to the east. The fields are fallow for now, but in a month or two they will be brought back to life.
Farmstead, Surrounded by Highways
We spotted this farmhouse, which had received some more decorative millwork but is still essentially a Greek Revival wood frame structure, sitting on a rapidly shrinking plot of land on St. Peters Parkway, just to the north of the Page Avenue Extension. What is interesting is that fair number of outbuildings are still standing. I’m…
Early Morning, Family Farm, Deer Creek Township, Tazewell County, Illinois
When I first woke up the sun was shining, but then the fog materialized an hour after sunrise. As I drove up the road to the north to photograph the longhorns at a neighbor’s farm, the mists suddenly lifted only enough for me to take pictures of my family farm’s barns emerging from the mist….
Dusk, Family Farm, Deer Creek Township, Tazewell County, Illinois
The sun sets early in December but I was still able to get these photos of the family farm. Update: The cattle barn below was destroyed by a tornado in March of 2023.
Current Affairs This Summer
I went by the Theophile Papin House on the last Saturday of June. It’s being demolished. It’s sad, but honestly, it had been so heavily altered that it wouldn’t really have been feasible or worthwhile to restore it back to its original appearance. It would have been an ersatz structure. During demolition some interesting stone…