By DEBORAH BEHRENDS
Illinois Correspondent

ELGIN, Ill. — After more than 120 years, Father Time and Mother Nature took their toll on the historic Teeple Barn – Illinois’ only 16-sided barn collapsed in 30 mph winds on May 26.

A reminder of Kane County’s agriculture heritage, the barn is now nothing more than a pile of timbers. Although a local group calling itself AgTech worked to raise money to restore the barn, time was not on its side.

According to the group’s website, the barn was built around 1885 by Lester Teeple, when Elgin was a dairy center and the Elgin Board of Trade set butter prices for the nation. The barn was designed by prominent Elgin architect W.W. Abell, who also designed many buildings still standing in the area.

It was built by lumber from a yard in Huntley. The wood siding was lapped and nailed to the uprights with square nails. The original roof was constructed of wood shakes.

The carpenters who built the original structure were paid $1 a day. The building is 85 feet in diameter and 85 feet high. The X-bracing system which supported the wall panels are similar to the system used to build Chicago’s Hancock building.

The balloon frame construction of the walls had vertical members braced in an “X” design. The complex roof truss system was not centrally-supported; rather, it sat upon the walls. That particular construction method allowed for free open space unencumbered by support posts.

The barn originally was capped with a cupola, but two tornadoes damaged it beyond repair and it was replaced with a simple cap.
The cost to preserve and restore the building was estimated at roughly $1 million, according to Steve Arnold, executive director of the Kane County Farm Bureau, which created AgTech as a fundraising and educational subsidiary. More than $300,000 in state and county grants and other funds had been used in recent years to stabilize the structure, Arnold said.

“It is unfortunate to lose it,” he said, calling the barn a symbol of agricultural heritage. “The concern was that something like this would happen before the money could be raised.”

Title to the barn and part of the farmstead was put in escrow in 1999 by the Panasonic Division of the Matsushita Electronics Corp. of America, which bought the surrounding fields and developed the site in 1989. The industrial site was acquired recently by John B. Sanfilippo & Son Inc., a snack-food and nut-processing company.

The city of Elgin agreed to the expansion of the site by Sanfilippo only on the condition that the company preserve the barn and work with AgTech to that end. Bill Collins, president of AgTech, and Ken Teeple are meeting with Sanfilippo representatives to discuss salvage and cleanup operations.

The barn was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and, at one time, was on the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois’ list of most endangered sites. It has stood empty since 1988, when the last of the Teeple family moved off the property.