Name This Peoria Landmark

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

PEORIA – The body of a man found hanged inside a barn along the Illinois River was identified Tuesday as that of a Peoria Heights man reported missing in January.

Peoria County Coroner Johnna Ingersoll said William “Bill” Oakes was identified from personal belongings, including an ID card, which was found with the body.

Oakes, 54, a resident of Forest Park Apartments in Peoria Heighs, was reported missing by a family member in January.

Ingersoll said foul play doesn’t appear to have played a role in Oakes’ death. Inside his apartment, police found handwritten notes indicating the man may have been contemplating suicide.

Ingersoll said it is not known how long Oakes was inside the barn before his discovery on Monday.

The boarded-up barn where the body was found is about a half-mile south of San Koty Lane, a gravel road leading east off Galena Road. It is located about a mile northeast of Oakes’ apartment.

The Love Shack

Katney: “There are a couple of buildings back in the woods off of Rt 29 owned by the park district – if I remember right this is the smaller one and it is pretty scary inside.”

I didn’t look inside.  As Katney said, it looked pretty scary inside and I wasn’t about to find out what was in there!  If someone would like to go down and check it out for themselves, it’s on the south side of the barn (NTPL#219) located off of SanKoty and Galena Rd.

Both ends of a long forgotten Peoria Park District soccer field.

Check out StfRon’s GeoCache of this place. Pretty cool.

A sign at the trail entrance says Wildlife Preserve, Parcel #5157, Peoria Park District. To get here, pull into SanKoty Ln, just down from Gardner Ln off Galena Rd. Park on the side of the road just where SanKoty curves. To the south you will see a small break in an old fence. That is the beginning of the trail.

Aerial view of what is officially parcel# 1414100008, via PeoriaGIS:

You can relax, Billy, although I understand your frustration, I’m almost certain that this was never a sanctioned Park District soccer field.

A big thank you to Scott O’Brien for taking these photos and sending me off to a place I previously never knew existed.

A view from the windshield.

It’s a view from a windshield because after driving past the 12th “no trespassing” sign, I didn’t really feel like getting out of the truck to take more pics. Besides, all I was trying to do was turn around without getting stuck in a mud road on a rainy day.

I had not heard of this place until last week, but according to their outdated website, they’ve been around since 1959.

Reminds me of a song…

Nothing special here. Just a picture of a field.

Illinois American Water owns property on both sides of Galena Road just north of Forest Park Road. This photo is of the field on the east side of Galena at San Koty Drive. [Google map] To the best of my knowledge the buildings in the distance are owned by Il-Amer Water from which they pump water from the Sankoty Aquifer.

A map from 1954 shows the boundaries of the property:

According to Wikipedia, “The Sankoty sand serves as one of the most extensive aquifers in the State. The Sankoty sand frequently is 100 feet thick and tends to lie below elevations of 520 to 530 feet (above sea level). It has been used as a water source, in the Peoria area, since at least 1892.”

Thanks to Josh Harris for confirming and JW from PeoriaHistory.com for his behind the scenes help.

For those who are interested, some additional reading:

A geological study of the Illinois river valley including the Sankoty. [here]

A ‘remedial geography lesson’ from CJ Summers relating to the Sankoty Aquifer and it’s relation to the proposed toxic landfill expansion in Pottstown. [here]

Illinois American Water Sankoty Station EPA Fact Sheet. [here]

Vonster: Practice tank car at the PFD training center on Galena Rd.

A funny anecdote about Peoria’s volunteer fire department of the mid 1800′s:

As the City grew and changed, so did the volunteer companies. Some members were becoming increasingly unruly and more difficult for City officials to control. To insure rapid responses to fire alarms, the City decided to give the first company on the scene of a fire five dollars for throwing water on the flames. This caused fierce competition, and fire companies used any means possible to be the first crew on the scene, including fist fights and sabotage of a rival engine company’s supply hose.

You can read more history on the City of Peoria’s website.

A fellow encountered a bear in a wasteland. There was nobody else there. Both were frightened and ran away. Fellow to the north, bear to the west. Suddenly the fellow stopped, aimed his gun to the south and shot the bear. What color was the bear?

Sign for Wildlife Prairie on Route 150 in Kickapoo, and the bear was indeed shot at the North Pole, therefore was a White Polar Bear.

I’m going to take a leap of faith here and assume that the town of Kickapoo was named after the Kickapoo Indians. Here’s a brief history of their time in Illinois courtesy of NativeAmericans.com:

“Kickapoo Native North Americans, whose language belongs to the Algonquian branch of the Algonquian-Wakashan linguistic stock and who in the late 17th cent. occupied SW Wisconsin. They were closely related to the Sac and Fox. The culture of the Kickapoo was essentially that of the Eastern Woodlands area, but they also hunted buffalo, one of the few traits that the Kickapoo adopted from their neighbors in the Plains area. After the allied Kickapoo, Ojibwa, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Sac and Fox tribes massacred (c.1769) the Illinois, they partitioned the Illinois territory. The Kickapoo, numbering about 3,000, moved south to central Illinois. Later they split in two; the Vermilion group settled on the Vermilion River, a tributary of the Wabash, and the Prairie group on the Sangamon River. The Kickapoo, a power in the region, sided with the British in the American Revolution and in the War of 1812, when they aided the Shawnee chief Tecumseh. By the Treaty of Edwardsville (1819) the Kickapoo ceded all their lands in Illinois to the United States.”