Illinois Store Gains Facade of Lost Building
By Elizabeth McNamara | Online Only | June 30, 2009
The Mesker-manufactured facade of a demolished opera house was installed on this building in Arcola, Ill.
Credit: Illinois Historic Preservation Agency
Three years ago, a badly deteriorating 116-year-old opera house in Stewardson, Ill., was torn down, but its cast-iron facade lives on. This month, the salvaged facade was reassembled on another building 45 miles away.
The historic railroad towns of Central Illinois may be separated by miles of farmland, but they share many characteristics: Main Street storefronts with cast-iron facades and Classical Revival motifs. Behind these similarities are three businessmen: Bernard, Frank, and George Mesker.
In the late 1800s, the three brothers founded two separate companies that manufactured storefronts from galvanized sheet metal. They sold prefabricated pilasters, scrolls, pediments, brackets, and dentils in mail-order catalogs, and their products brought architectural ornamentation to remote towns.
The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency (IHPA) has identified 715 Mesker facades in 257 of the state's communities through a database it created in 2005. This month, the agency witnessed the first Mesker "transplant."
"One hundred years from now, do you think people will be able to completely dismantle and reuse a building from today's modern world?" says Anna Margaret Barris, project designer for the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. "It really speaks to the ingenuity of the material, that it can be dismantled and then put back together."
The transplant happened somewhat serendipitously. While Barris was advising Arcola property owner Wilmer Otto about the restoration of his building, whose Mesker facade was destroyed by fire in the 1950s, she heard about the Opera Hall in Stewardson. Damaged by a tornado, the opera house was beyond restoration, but its Mesker facade was intact. In October 2006, Otto and Barris had the Mesker dismantled, restored, and stored.
"We labeled each piece, photographed each piece, then I drew a map of the facade," Barris says. "It's like a kit of parts, or a puzzle; you can use this piece and attach it to another."
It took three days to dismantle the sheet-metal facade, more than two years to restore the pieces, and four days to reassemble the facade. During that time David Mesker, grandson of Frank Mesker, became involved.
"I'm just happy people aren't making landfill out of [the facades] because there is a lot more charm to look at these buildings than an up-to-date strip mall, which I find dry and thin and uninteresting," says Mesker. "We tear things down every year, and then we go to Europe to see what we've torn down. Why don't we just preserve a few of our own?"
Mesker, 78, calls himself the "family historian" and, though he later made his career at a brokerage firm, he worked in the Mesker Brothers factory for several years.
Mesker visited the Arcola site this week. "I didn't think anybody else will have an interest in this, but I've been pleasantly surprised."
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