Candlelight at the Inn illuminates holidays on 1840s farm
This weekend in Campton Township, you can enjoy the wonderment of light and music in both a modern and traditional way.
You may know about the modern light show and electronic music that accompany the holiday decorations of a private home off Route 38 and Anderson Road but odds are, few have made the connection to Garfield Farm Museum's Candlelight at the Inn program.
This evening of candlelight and live traditional music on hammer dulcimer has been a 37-year tradition for many to kick off their holiday season.
Discover the similarities and differences of 170 years of marking the year's end from 3 to 7 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 3-4, at Garfield Farm and Inn Museum, off Route 38 and Garfield Road.
When Timothy Garfield ran his home as a country inn for weary travelers in 1846, beckoning candlelight and a fiddler's tunes muffled by the inn's thick brick walls promised relief and celebration for just surviving the cold winter's roads for travelers of all types.
Today, leaving one's car, one walks along the candle lighted path toward the warm inn drinking deep of an experience people of 170 years ago also knew, stepping down from their stagecoach, climbing the front steps of the then newly opened inn. The soft glow of candlelight that throws fanciful shadows upon the walls as the ballroom dulcimer music drifts down the stairs to the taproom and ladies' parlor, recalls deep seated ancestral memories of those who lived in such times.
The simplicity of celebration and the quiet reserve with which these sons and daughters of New England Puritans held for actual Christmas Day contrasts to modern life as the last six weeks of the year is a mad scramble by merchants to make most of their year's revenues and party after party can confuse the significance at hand.
Garfield Farm and Inn Museum's Candlelight at the Inn also features a bake sale with interpretive displays in the museum's Atwell Burr House, relocated to the farm 25 years ago to serve as a visitors' center and museum headquarters. From 3 to 5 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 4, Dr. Steven Smunt and The Century Air Minstrels will perform traditional American and Irish seasonal music in the Burr House.
Dona and Dan Benkert and the Scantlin' Reunion will perform both days in the brick inn on dulcimers and penny whistle, with lumberjacks for the rhythmically inclined of all ages. Visitors will be offered spice tea and tea breads.
So traveling the former St. Charles-Oregon Road that became Lincoln Highway (now known as Route 38), just a three-mile distance can transport one between the life of today and 170 years ago, from computerized symphonies and LED displays to live instrumental performances, interacting with museum friends and visitors, all bathed in a golden glow of flickering candlelight.
Donations are appreciated. Opportunities for museum membership, purchases of baked goods or the children's book, "Angie of Garfield Farm," all help support this project now in its 39th year. Garfield Farm & Inn Museum is a 375-acre historically intact former 1840s Illinois prairie farmstead and country inn that is being restored to serve as an 1840s participatory living history museum.
The museum is located on Garfield Road, off Route 38, five miles west of Geneva. For information, call (630) 584-8485 or contact info@garfieldfarm.org. Visit www.garfieldfarm.org or www.facebook.com/GarfieldFarmMuseum/.