Delavan

There is a tiny speck of a farm town set down in the prairieland of central Illinois. Nothing is particularly unusual about the town as it resembles scores of other such places scattered about the far reaches of the mid-west. Only that for me, it has a special meaning. That little town of twelve hundred people of which I speak is Delavan, Illinois, and it was special to me because it was there that my widowed grandmother, Carrie Strauss Traub, lived for many years together with her two unmarried brothers, my great uncles, Gus and Sol Strauss.

Once or twice a year, my family - my mother and father, my sister Sally and my little brother Charles - would visit the town to see our relatives. Well before the day of the interstates, dad would drive us from our home in Louisville, Kentucky on the two-lane roads, mile after tedious mile across the vast farmland of southern Indiana and central Illinois. The only thing that made the journey interesting was that dad knew every town, creek and river along the way and would point them out to us in proud display of his knowledge. There was Terre Haute and Lafayette Indiana; Decatur and Bloomington, Illinois and many other little cities. Then there were the criss-crossing streams of water: the White Lick Creek, the Kickapoo Creek, the Mackinaw River and the fabled Wabash.

Ordinarily we would stay just a few days in my grandmother’s Delavan house. I will tell you more about that house later, but what I want to tell you now is that most everyone in my family hated Delavan, my mother, Sally, and Charles. I am not sure exactly what my father felt about Delavan. Growing up in nearby, larger Lincoln, Illinois it would seem he might have a closer connection to the place. But the rest of them surely thought Delavan a pitifully provincial, dull and dusty place, out of the way and forlorn, all of which it certainly was. But perhaps startling to the reader is the following admission: I secretly liked the town, a secret of course I kept to myself, until this very moment as I write this reminiscence.

The Delavan that I remember had one business street, Locust Street, with five or six residential streets stretching off to the west perpendicular to it. These streets would extend a few blocks and then end abruptly at the edge of cornfields, reaching out seemingly forever to the horizon. What was east of Locust Street, and there was something, does not stick in my memory. As far I was concerned, the area did not exist. It was the proverbial “other side of the tracks.”

During our visits the whole family including my uncles would walk up to Locust Street to eat lunch at the bustling restaurant planted down amidst the rows of shops along either side of the byway. The street, which in most other towns would be called Main Street, suggested a stage set for a cowboy movie with its string of Victorian facades, featuring ornate projecting bays, elaborately detailed cornices, topped with pediments of varying shapes and sizes. Despite this display of elaborate frontages, I don’t believe my family appreciated at the time the architectural virtues of the town.

In the restaurant, a type non-existent today, my uncles knew almost all of the dining townspeople. In lively spirit, they would approach their friends seated at their tables, and greet them with great cordiality. What I can hear in my ears now, as if it was yesterday, was my mother railing against what she considered the terrible food and grim atmosphere of the place. With great authority, she summarily dubbed the eatery, the “greasy spoon.” The restaurant epitomized everything that my mother hated about Delavan.

My grandmother’s house was on Fourth Street, the last of the lanes leading off Locust Street on the North side of town. Beyond the street to the West and to the North there were absolutely no buildings, just open farmland. Grandmother’s house was a white-painted wood clapboard one, typical of thousands of such dwellings to be seen across America’s hinterland. It had two stories with an attic sheltered by a steeply sloping, shingled roof, punctured by dormers. Turning off the sidewalk, which all of Delavan’s streets had, a walkway led directly up to an open front porch and then to the front entry door. To the left at the far extreme of the porch was a swinging seat with side arms hung with chains from the wooden ceiling. Oh did I love that swing and the happy times on it seated next to my brother, though perhaps he did not share my affection for the suspended amenity. These swings were fairly common in houses of the vintage, but in our neighborhood in Louisville, there was nothing like them. For me the swing was a novelty providing endless delight upon my visits to Delavan.

Inside the house were features which still reverberate in my memory. In the back of the second floor was Grandmother’s sewing room, a tiny space of about 6 x 10 feet. In it was an old-fashioned Singer Sewing Machine, operated by a pedal near the floor. Watching my grandmother sew, adroitly pushing away with her foot at the pedal was a special entertainment for the eight year old boy.

Of course there was the main stair leading up from the front hall with its grandfather clock, but most marvelous of all for me was the “back-stair” that led down from the second floor directly into the kitchen. To this day back-stairs remain in my consciousness as mysterious architectural insertion into those old houses. No longer built today, they are a curious relic of the past. For me, it was a special thrill to use that back-stair, sneaking down them from my bedroom to surprise my folks seated at the round breakfast table in the kitchen.

A vivid memory of my grandmother’s breakfast preparations was her famous bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches. Bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches for breakfast! Yes. As peculiar as that might seem, that is what she invariably offered me for my morning meal. With childlike enthusiasm I heaped abundant praise on her asserting that her BLTs were the best to be had anywhere. When you think about it, with the bacon, the toast, a BLT for breakfast is not all that inappropriate.

The attic above and the basement below were as, in any old house, repositories of the useless, the discarded, and even the treasured items for which the inhabitants can find otherwise no rightful storing place. The explorations of these shadow precincts in my grandmother’s house offered adventures that for a child can be likened to taking a trip to an exotic land. The attic expeditions were especially novel and intriguing as my Louisville house had no accessible attic. Viewing the assortment of items lying inertly on the floor and tables prompted questions about their mysterious provenance that then could not be answered.

Delavan like every town in America was and is a social microcosm. It possessed a hierarchy of families that was evident to me from the discussion I heard from my elders. There was always talk of the town’s aristocracy, peopled by such as the wealthy Culbertson family who produced an Illinois supreme court judge. At the other end of the scale, I remember my grandmother saying at breakfast that she heard a “prowler” skirting around the house last night. On the bohemian side there was artist Julia Thecla, born in Delavan in 1896, and who rebelled against the small town atmosphere running off to Chicago to study at the Art Institute. She went on to produce paintings in the Surrealist vein that were shown at the Museum of Modern Art and in Peggy Guggenheim’s 1943 exhibit of 31 women artists. On the scientific side there was Harriet Creighton born in the town in 1909 studying at Wellesley College, becoming a distinguished botanist. She was elected president of the Botanical Society of America in 1956. Creighton lived with another woman for many years and her personal relationship with Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock was dramatized in a 2023 play by Carolyn Gage.

With a feeling of nostalgia that comes upon one in advancing years, just some years ago in mid-summer, I made a return trip back to Delavan. After a visit to Chicago, I stopped by at my Alma Mater in Champaign-Urbana, staying overnight; the next morning on to New Salem, Springfield and to Lincoln, Illinois, my father’s hometown. The last leg of the trip was twenty five miles further on the dead straight road across the awesomely flat prairieland to Delavan. It was late in the afternoon, about 6:00 pm, when I approached the town. Arriving, I drove from the highway, over to the Locust Street, which as I have said was the main street. It was burning hot, and the sun was still high in the sky. Locust Street was completely deserted, no automobiles, initially, absolutely not a person in sight.

In wonderment, I drove slowly down the length of the street until finally toward the end I saw two young women sitting alone on a stoop at the door of one of the store fronts. Relieved to finally find some sign of life, I abruptly pulled the car to a halt literally leaving it parked in the middle of the street, feeling correctly that no one would care. With a certain reticence, I haltingly walked over to the women offering a hello that was a mix of amazement and curiosity. In the conversation that ensued, one of the women, Anne Bouchez, told me that she knew of my Delavan family, the Strausses. What a bit of serendipity – the very first person I met had a connection with my family. She went on to tell me that her fiancé was Warren Berger, whose father Manny had rented the store from my uncles years before. And there the three of us found ourselves sitting in front of that very store that had belonged to my uncles Gus and Sol. Long out of business, the place was abandoned and full of junk that the women were trying to sell. Looking into the store I saw a scene that resembled the attic in my grandmother’s house. The other woman was Vicky Finley who I later learned had died. I have never been together again in person with Anne Bouchez, but I have been in touch from time to time with her on the phone. Anne still lives in Delavan, and she is for me the abiding link to the place.

In the years of my visits to Delavan, my grandmother’s street, Fourth Street was the last street on the north side of town. Beyond that the corn fields were planted right up to the back yards of the houses that lined the street. Stepping outside my grandmother’s house, onto the front porch, looking across the street to the north between the row of houses lining the block, was a view that remains forever fixed in my mind and means more to me than any other of my myriad memories of Delavan. There was a narrow yard between the two houses directly across the street. My eye traveled through that narrow open space as if it were the view finder in a camera, and I saw an ocean of cornfields stretching out way into the distance. It was late in August and the corn was high. The yellow tassel atop the stalks waved in the breeze. I struggle here to articulate the feeling I had about what I saw. In a feeble attempt, I will say that the view imparted my child’s mind with an indefinable feeling that I can only liken to receiving a glimpse into the far future, may I say eternity, although at that time I am sure I did not define it to myself that way. It was only an inchoate, inspiring feeling hovering in my young mind.

If I were to stand in front of my grandmother’s house today and gaze upon it, it would evoke memories of the past, but those memories and what they were all about, are no longer, if one could say, embedded in the house’s substance. The house that I knew seventy-five years ago has become just a material fact. My grandmother and her two bachelor brothers, my uncles, are long dead. The furniture, the rugs, and the grandfather clock I remember so well, have been moved out. Someone else I do not know now lives in the house. It seems we can travel back to a place important in our past, but sadly we cannot return to a time when the then life-reality was in action. That would seem an obvious fact, but it is not so obvious to the life of the emotions.

As the architect I later became and a life-long student of urban form, Delavan represents to me the idea of the elemental town – a small human settlement as a singular entity. Since those early years visiting Delavan, I have visited with delight many other small towns in America and all over Europe. But especially, I have affection for the medieval, walled-cities of Italy such as Monteriggioni and Montagnana. Those walled constructions represent in the most extreme and striking way towns situated alone in space complete in their unity like a shell. But I have come to understand that Delavan too is walled with the cornfields pushing up against its streets all around the edge of town. With this new perspective achieved after seventy-five years, I realize now that Delavan was the first walled-town I was ever to know.

David S. Traub, Jr.

October 2026