Running water was just one modern convenience that had not yet reached the family farm about three miles west of Gurnee when Estelle Faulkner was growing up at the outset of the 20th century.

"We went clear down to the well by the barn and brought it back by the pailful," said Faulkner, 105, a resident of the Winchester House in Libertyville.

Faulkner recalls having to clean the gas lamps that lit their house at night until her father bought an electric generator.

When she was a little older, the occasional automobile passed by the farm, causing heads to turn. Her father never did own a car, always opting for a horse and buggy, instead.

Born at home on May 27, 1894, Faulkner is one of an estimated 125 or so centenarians in Lake County on the verge of living into their third century.

While many are no longer able to recall their youth, others have varied recollections of a time when they say life was more of a struggle and people expected less.

Several centenarians mentioned the expansion of electricity into their homes as the most noteworthy advancement of their long lifetimes. The first sight of an airplane flying overhead or using a telephone for the first time had profound effects on others.

Among the news events that stood out in the mind of more than one Lake County centenarian was the March 10, 1911, explosion of the gunpowder factory in Pleasant Prairie, Wis. The blast leveled the town and shook the ground many miles away.

"It shook the pictures on the wall at home," Faulkner said.

Ruth Robinson, 102, recalled attending a party at a neighboring farm outside Rockefeller - now called Mundelein - at the time of the explosion.

"Everything shook. Doors were swinging back and forth," said Robinson, who today lives in Waukegan.

Robinson's family farm stood next to where St. Mary of the Lake Seminary was built and she recalls being a young woman in June 1926 when the 28th International Eucharistic Conference was held there. Thousands upon thousands of Catholics took the train out of Chicago to attend.

"They weren't prepared for such a mob of people," Robinson said.

With few public toilets and little water on a hot day, people were begging for water from their well, she recalled. Then when a rainstorm hit late in the day, the throngs all tried boarding trains at once, overwhelming the ability of the railroad to get them home.

Although she lived on the Northwest Side of Chicago, in many ways Helen Barrowman's childhood was not that far removed from those living on the farm in Lake County.

Barrowman, 100, lived near an onion farm, where her father worked the harvest when he wasn't on the job as a typesetter. The fields around their home, long since gone, provided fertile ground for local children to play.

"It looked like out in the country, country roads, not paved," said Barrowman, now a resident of the Alden of Long Grove nursing home. "It was just like a little neighborhood street."

And like her counterparts growing up in Lake County, Barrowman started school by attending a small, wooden schoolhouse near her home.

"We had three little wooden schools behind us. My mother used to be a janitor there," she said.

Money was tight in a family with five kids at a time when it cost 3 cents to ride the street car into the city. Without money to buy chewing gum, she and her sister, Ione, would chew tar used to smooth out the rutted streets. It had little taste and satisfied their urge to chew.

"You didn't get everything you wanted the minute you asked for it," she said. "We weren't as particular as kids are today. Kids have too much today. Everything is handed to them."

Betty Weissman isn't as nostalgic about the past as some others, having fled the czar's persecution of Jews in Russia when she was 12 years old. She is thought to have turned 105 years old in June, but there is no way to know for sure because Jewish children did not receive birth certificates.

The daughter of a Hebrew teacher, Weissman enjoys modern life better.

"We are given the privilege of choosing what we want to eat and going places when we want to go," said Weissman, a resident of the Claremont Rehabilitation and Living Center in Buffalo Grove. "It is up to us to live good, clean lives."

Asking these centenarians about what the future holds or what they think about the prospect of entering a third century was usually met with a shrug or, "Oh, I don't know."

Thoughts of the future are few when there is so much to remember from the past.

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