In Illinois: Cigars and Bottled History

By Jane O'Reilly

Bloomington, Ill., creates a bend in U.S. 66, midway on the long, straight run across the dark prairie from St. Louis to Chicago. A traveler notices the sign --POPULATION 41,500--and wonders why the place resonates slightly in the mind. Is this the Bloomington of the movie Breaking Away? No, that Bloomington is in Indiana. Ah! Memory serves. This Bloomington is the place where Adlai Stevenson II grew up a renegade (i.e., a Democrat) and now lies buried with his ancestors, men of substance in the town since the very beginning; men who had urged a Republican circuit lawyer named Abraham Lincoln to run for President.

The traveler, a Middle Westerner turned self-made Eastern snob, assumes nothing else interesting has ever happened in Bloomington. The traveler is wrong. Bloomington, Ill., is the county seat of McLean County. If you are talking corn and soybeans, McLean County is the capital of the world. If you are talking heartland, you are standing on it: topsoil two, three, five feet deep, divided on the plot map into square-mile sections still owned by descendants of German and Scotch-Irish immigrants who cleared and settled their way across Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana, out onto the prairie. If you are talking history in McLean County, you are talking about a place that has achieved its destiny, and now has time for a backward look. The traveler discovers the pathos of the conquest of the prairie sod, and romance in the development of hybrid corn by the Funk Brothers Seed Co.

Such stories are regional legacies, essential to understanding of time and place. All over the U.S. they now are being reclaimed from attics, dusty files and the memories of the old timers by the phenomenal burgeoning of local historical societies.

Over the past 20 years or so, for example, the McLean County Historical Society has been keeping an eye on an object in its care known as the McNulta time capsule. The McNulta in question, a Bloomington man, was a Civil War general in the 94th Illinois Volunteers. The time capsule was an etched glass bottle, seven inches high and sealed with a broken stopper, containing several mysterious thin packages wrapped in cloth. A notification tucked into its base read: "Souvenirs of the meeting of the Society of the Army of Tennessee. Held at Chicago November 1879. To be kept unopened for 100 years."

McNulta went upstate to Chicago in 1895, and died in 1900 at the age of 62. In 1858 he had started moving west from New York City, working as a horse dealer and "race rider." He sold tobacco in Bloomington, enlisted in the Army in 1861 and made brigadier general in four years. But in 1874 he was defeated for reelection to the U.S. Congress by Adlai Stevenson (Adlai Stevenson the first, people stress in McLean County, meaning the one who went on to become Vice President under Grover Cleveland from 1893 to 1897). McNulta read law, as was the go-getter's custom, and almost certainly profited by his duties as appointed receiver for an extraordinary number of bankrupt railroads. He was a man of his time and place, and he thought in terms of securing the future.

The day that the McLean Historical Society chose to declare McNulta's hundred years officially up was a sunny Sunday in November. The ceremony, observed at Bloomington's Miller Park Pavilion, proved a great occasion. Civil War songs were played and sung. Uniforms were displayed. Mrs. Emma Hoffman, 96, was there. Her father George Ulmer served in McNulta's regiment, and she remembers going to reunions and hearing her father sing When Johnny Comes Marching Home when he worked alone in the fields. Mrs. Kathryn McNulta, 94, the general's daughter-in-law, flew in from Charleston, S.C. Her grandsons, Paul and Herbert Beich, arrived from Denver and joined their Bloomington brother Otto Beich II. "Everybody is wild with anxiety to know what it is all about," said Mrs. McNulta.

At last, the bottle was unsealed. Barbara Dunbar, director of the historical society, and Archivist Greg Koos used forceps to draw out the little mummies, wrapped in white linen and tied round and round with thread. General McNulta's sense of history turned out to be touchingly immediate. He had left, so elaborately wrapped and labeled:

Two pictures of himself and one of his wife Laura. The menu and program for a lavish dinner the Tennessee Army veterans held at the Palmer House and the entire seating plan. An 1868 reunion ribbon, some handwritten notes, two pieces of wartime paper money. One memento to his future heirs was sealed with red wax and carefully labeled: "Cigar given to John McNulta by General U.S. Grant, November 14, 1879, must not be opened for 100 years and then smoked by some one of the descendants or by some soldier who has rendered good service to his country." As a final souvenir, McNulta had tucked inside his bottle a set of newspaper clippings which breathlessly detailed the "Grant boom," complete with Grant buttons and cheap portraits, that struck Chicago during the popular former President's visit. The clippings described how the ladies wore their new diamonds and court trains to "brilliant" receptions, and imaginative pickpockets plagued the crowds that swarmed to town to see the electric illuminations. Evidently McNulta agreed with the newspaper that said: "As the hours passed on, it became more and more evident that this was really to be Chicago's greatest day."

By 1879 the bitterness of the Civil War had been transformed, by memory and new fortunes, into an event which, in retrospect, conferred virtue and glory upon all (Union) participants. At the Palmer House dinner, the menu, appropriately glorious, featured oysters, champagne, prairie chicken, buffalo, shrimp salad, hardtack and cigars. At 10:45 the speeches began. General U.S. Grant, the guest of honor, had just returned from a world tour. He expressed a slightly be fuddled surprise at being called upon to speak, and declared that Americans "are beginning to be regarded a little by other powers as we, in our vanity, have here tofore regarded ourselves." Table-top fireworks, the Star-Spangled Banner, universal shouts of approval followed Grant's remarks. After the speeches and 15 toasts (the last one to "the babies, as they comfort us in our sorrows, let us not forget them in our festivities"), a literary guest named Samuel Clemens responded: "We haven't all had the good fortune to be ladies; we haven't all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground."

The history of McLean County during this century is mostly a story of dreams richly come true. The seed the Funk brothers developed yields 150 to 160 bushels of corn an acre. The Funk Prairie Home, once center of a 25,000-acre farm, is now a museum, and the seed company is a division of Ciba-Geigy. Land that McNulta bought for $150 an acre now hovers around $4,000 an acre, too much for anyone ever to start out farming there now, but not a bad price for to day's farmer/investor to use as a tax write-off. The Osage orange hedges, planted a hundred years ago against the chilling wind, are being torn out, because machinery these days needs more room just to turn around. The wind sweeps down, carrying off the topsoil, buffeting the farmer who can, thanks to progress, plant 300 acres in two days all alone with $100,000 worth of machinery.

Mrs. Hoffman's nephew Ulmer Beetzel, now 61, and his wife Doris, 57, have lived for 26 years on the farm his grandfather worked after the Civil War. "It's an industry now, not a life," says Doris. "It's the life of Riley," says Ulmer, correcting her. No livestock, no need for extra help, the ticker tape running constantly at the Anchor co-operative grain elevator, bringing prices from the commodity exchange up in Chicago. But only one of the Beetzel's four children is a farmer.

The three Beich brothers obliged their great-grandfather McNulta, and smoked General Grant's gift cigar. They found it mild and surprisingly fresh, but they didn't smoke it too far down. General Grant was known for his habit of giving out exploding cigars. -Jane O'Reilly

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