Archaeologist restores old Urbana house

URBANA -- It was the house that Urbana's own Casey Jones built, with railroad iron in its foundation, and it was about to be restored to its 1899 grandeur when a fire snaked up from the porch to the third floor in May.

Now a University of Illinois archaeologist, Brian Adams, is putting back together the Queen Anne house built for Zachariah F. Sharp, the tough-as-nails engineer for the Indiana, Bloomington and Western Railroad (IBW), better known as the I'd Better Walk.

Because of the house's balloon construction, the fire, which probably started in a porch light, was able to find pathways up the front of the house. That has required tearing out the plaster work done by a friend in period style.

Adams bought the house for $95,000 in 2000. Since he moved here for archaeology graduate school almost 20 years ago, he has advocated for granting homes here historical status.

Karen Kummer, director of the Preservation and Conservation Association, calls the structure "a very nice Queen Anne, turn of century Colonial Revival. It looks much more like it used to since the porch has been restored."

Kummer said the house is valuable to the community because it "certainly adds to the streetscape and the significance of Elm Street as a whole, a street of upscale, large, handsome houses in its time." Adams has lived in its third floor, renting out the other two floors as apartments to help pay for the painstaking reconstruction, but he currently lives next door.

The house was meant to be a retirement home for Sharp, who was well-known in the Midwest for heroic feats of engineering.

In 1880, the engineer fought off "vicious tramps" to save his locomotive; in the same year he slashed his hand in an accident. A decade later, he was nearly killed when a rod flew off the engine and sliced the cabin, according to a Champaign County Herald article Adams found.

But it was not a flying part or a vicious tramp that got Sharp in the end. Just before his house was built, he died in his High Street residence of an unspecified illness, aged 62.

His widow, Mary Sharp, lived in the house almost 30 years, in silence for much of it after she lost her hearing.

"This is kind of a Widow's Row here," Adams says, pointing at Queen Anne homes surrounded by 1960s apartment buildings on Elm Street, just east of the UI campus.

The Queen Annes and Victorians have been broken down into apartments, including the Sharp house.

Adams shows off the pocket doors that were plastered over, leaded glass windows that were covered when part of the porch was enclosed. Plaster walls were ruined by paneling tacked over them.

There are original doorknobs throughout. A diamond-shaped window in a kitchen shows where a staircase "for the help" used to run. Oak floors everywhere. Adams had fixed the lead weight pulley system on many of the 1899 windows.

But breaking up the house has left its mark. Gerald F. Smith of Champaign lived in the house in the late 1930s and early '40s and remembers how it was sectioned off for boarders, possibly by Mary Sharp, who died in 1927.

Smith drove by the house after the fire in May and gave Adams copies of photos taken circa 1940, when he was a little boy dressed up for Halloween. Behind him, Adams was able to trace the original design of the wraparound porch.

Smith remembers the house being cold. There was no insulation then, and he lived in the attic, a space he shared with canaries and cardinals his grandfather was breeding.

"When it was legal to have cardinals," Smith says.