Stones outside of the grove

[StrangeWeather]

Though it's probably nothing, I was looking around the place Tuesday and found a strange stone structure.  If you are at the entrance of the grove, go right towards the downed tree.  About 10 feet away from the tree, outside of the fence, there is what appears to be a stone base, like the base to a monument, maybe 6' long by 1.5 to 2' wide.

Just curious if anyone had seen it or knew what it was.

SW

[kappy0405]

hmm sounds interesting, im gonna take a look next time im there to see what it is.. i wonder if it could be one of the missin tombstones??

[angryelk]

When I was out last weekend, I noticed the same thing on the edge of the creek, Just to the right of the Newman stone on the other side of the fence, it looks like an old stone wall.

[bachelorsgrove_com]

I think I finally have part of the mystery solved for the location you are speaking of. I was aware of this "thing" for quite some time but I wanted to gather some more information before I really said anything.

Upon my first visit to the cemetery back in 1996 I came across this area and I, as I'm sure many others, found it a bit odd. For a few moments I thought it had something to do with water because it looked a bit familiar to some other structures I had seen in the past. I'm a bit of a relic hunter but to make a long story short it looked like a place where people would fill water for various reasons such as washing clothes. It would be the base to something that would have been primarily made of wood. Being made of wood makes it a lot harder to verify since that would be long gone for obvious reasons. Of course thinking all of this this made it even more strange because it is next to a cemetery. But the story continues....

After walking around this structure for a while a friend and I had the privilege of finding a small round metal plate with a date on it. It had a date around the mid to late 1800s on it. This metal plate looked to also have something to do with water but I haven't been able to investigate it much further. I plan on posting a photograph of this plate but keep in mind that it would be from video footage, not 35mm, so it's not super clear. But it can still be read. We were both very dumb at the time and didn't take it home which is another issue I will bring up at a later date. But again, the story continues....

A few weeks ago, when the weather was unusually warm, I headed out to the cemetery with a piece of surveying equipment used by utility companies such as gas and water. It is basically a metal detector but very precise and is designed to locate things such as underground pipes. Much the same way you find people looking for underground lines and pipes and putting a little flag in the ground to mark the location.

I was more or less just playing around with this equipment as I was curious if I could detect any graves underground inside the cemetery. After about 3-4 hours of getting used to detecting certain areas and knowing if I was detecting a grave or simply "junk" I came upon the idea of checking out a theory.

I have spoken to many visitors at the cemetery over the years and it appears that most people think that the area where this structure is located is a burial site or has something to do with burials. So I suppose if you happen to agree with that position then this should interest you.... I got fairly good at detecting quite a few (not all) of the burials inside the cemetery. While sweeping the area outside the cemetery I had "0" indication that there was any grave, or at least one that would have had any metal whatsoever to detect. But I was able to detect small objects of very little significance. There was, however, one area where the equipment was pegged very high.... It was the largest signal I detected the entire day there. Being extremely curious I took about an hour of sweeping this particular area with very bizarre results. So after I was certain that what ever I was detecting was less than a foot underground I decided to dig (please keep in mind this was OUTSIDE of the cemetery).

So it was less than a foot of digging when I found what was creating such a large signal. It was a pipe. A very OLD and large pipe. At least large compared to what we are used to seeing such as water pipes in the house. This appeared to be a cast iron pipe with a 90 degree angle piece attached to it, which also points straight up (to the sky so to speak). So I did a little more digging.... After digging about two feet horizontally from the location of this angled piece I stopped. I wondered how long this pipe really was and if I was wasting my time removing it so I got out the equipment and started another sweep. It took a little while but guess what I found?...... This pipe goes from the location of where this "stone" or "concrete" structure is all the way INTO the pond itself.

I am tempted to make a video of doing a sweep of this area with the audio of the equipment patched into it for presentation purposes. But I guess you will just have to take my word for it at the moment that what I traced is in fact a pipe going into the pond. Anyway, at this point I am concluding that this structure really did have something to do with water and that the pipe which was found had something to do with a water pump much like you would find on some wells. It would also be easier to bury a pipe a foot or two underground and draw water from a pond rather than try to dig an actual well. Otherwise, why would anyone invest the money and the time to bury a fairly long and very heavy pipe and drop it into a pond?.... Especially if this pipe is really as old as it appears to be. It is simply back-breaking work and they would need a very good reason to go through all of that trouble.

But again, this is very odd to be next to the cemetery. The only thing I can think of at this point is that the stories of the cemetery, with the people using it like a park, and the fact that there were two homes a very short distance west of the cemetery... that in all likelihood this was a location that was used to store water for people much like you would store water for a horse. I'm not saying that it is for horses but what I am suggesting is that it may very well have been used as a drinking area or possibly used as an area where a particular family washed their clothes if they enjoyed doing such a thing while visiting their loved ones. Another point to make, and is about why this structure appeared to be used for water, is that if you study the structure it has an area that goes "up" and is very crude in nature. It looks like a crude "stepping stool" for people too short to reach the water. Put in place for children to use perhaps? Of course this is just a theory but it would fit with other structures created a long time ago for the purpose of water.

I will eventually try to pass this information to someone that knew people from a long time ago that would use the area but I'm not sure I will get any answers as to if this was a well pump that was abandoned before they arrived. Maybe I can get an answer as far as "Yes, I remember there being a pump out there but it never worked" or "Yes, there used to be an old pump but the parts were laying everywhere."

So we have a metal plate that had something to do with water, a metal pipe going into a pond and an area that resembles a structure used to store water... A lot of this is food for thought and I figured it was time to share some of my findings. The concerns that this may have been a burial site should probably be put to rest. Of course there is always a chance that the County didn't get the cemetery boundaries correct but this particular area is probably no longer a concern. If anyone has anything to add please feel free to share!


Pete

[bachelorsgrove_com]

Here are a couple of sample photos. One is of the pipe found and the other is of the device used to locate it. I will hopefully get around to finding the photograph of the small plate. Otherwise I will have to dig out the video and create a new one. When the weather gets better I will take a better shot of the pipe. After that I am going to bury what can be seen of it to avoid any damge by vandals.

[Aten]

Pete what you say makes sense about the pipe. It could of been a community place to draw water because i`m sure at the time it was put in, the water was safe to drink. Having a fresh water pond for a water source is convenient for settlers and they made use of it. Probably was put in before the cemetery was established. Now another possible theory the pump could of been put there for the visitors to clean tombstones and to water flowers. Most cemeteries have a water supply for the visitors to get water for such purposes. Maybe you will get to the bottom of this and good for the detector you have it sure came in handy. Now would`nt it be nice if there could be a marker on the graves you discovered with the detector the persons name ect!  What a nice way to have them all remembered being the settlers of the area, guess I think big ideas when information is told to me.

John

[MarkMc1990]

Very interesting find, Pete! I can't say I ever noticed such a structure outside the cemetery gates, but it sounds interesting. I'll be sure to look for it next time I go (but God knows when that will be). Any chance of anyone having a picture of it that they can post?

[bachelorsgrove_com]

Here is a photo of the structure. I still haven't found the photo of the metal plate just yet.

[bachelorsgrove_com]

Here is a photograph of the metal plate that was found laying inside the stone structure back in 1996. The quality is poor due to being taken from VHS footage. It has a date of 1887 imprinted on the back.

A $50 reward will go to the person who can help recover this metal plate. Contact www.bachelorsgrove.com to claim your reward.

Pete

[rashore]

this mystery struck me as familiar.... I grew up in an area where odd structures can often be found, and not so often explained... but the more I thought about it, I realized why the stonework and pipe seemed familiar... from what I can tell of topography maps, yet never visiting the site, the set up seems plausible to be a drainage system, cira 1887....



this is an example of such a drainage system setup, and it would make sense to have it drain into the pond instead of the reservoir shown in the diagram...  now, the diagram is for a house foundation, but similar setups were occasionally used to help drain farmland that was a mite swampy from the natural pooling of the "kettles" vs the "moraines" found in the area... as there is no mention of any further stonework in the area surrounding the graveyard, this may just be a bad guess on my part. More plausible is yea, a water pump. The notch cut into the stone seems to further this point, as it was common to shape a drain off right into the floor of the pump. Looking at the photograph you provided, a horse trough is right out... at that time, it would have been cast out of cement/mortared rock as part of the structure, and that is not in evidence. Is the pipe you discovered at a right angle to or behind the notch in the stone? A question rises out of the pond itself.. if it is a quarry pond as many posts seem to indicate, is it a pond for providing water to a quarry, or is it a pond formed of a spring struck in the quarry? If the latter, the nearby "wells" may actually be "chiller wells", which were dug down to act as refrigeration. A still working version of "chiller wells"  can be found on the grounds of Little Norway in Wi. That version uses a creek, though an underground spring would work just as well. It would also make the notion of a pump far more plausible than a sewer drain off. As the histories state a German influx of settlers, and similar settlers came into Wi at the same time, it isn't too far fetched to think they would use the same methods half a state away here in Cook Co. And the plate itself may not be connected to the stonework at all, but tossed in there sometime over the last 130 years... not seeing both sides of the plate and knowing if the other side is smooth or not, it may be a burner plate commonly found in cast iron stoves at the time, the raised lip around the outside and large lump to one side being the means to align it properly into the stove. If this is the case, the missing side of the plate would have the "lift notch" cut into it that allowed the plate to be removed from the stove in a way similar to a manhole cover. Such plates, when they did crack, almost always broke like the plate in the pic, often into 2 smaller pieces around the "lift notch" with a larger third piece being half the plate. Is there anything more than 1887 on the plate? I can't make out anything for reading from the pic, but it does look strikingly like a burner plate, and you should (if still legible) find a makers mark in the center. I so need to take a drive to the southside one of these days soon and start checking this place out instead of relying on other folks information to try to give helpful theories.

[rashore]

Wandering through back issues of Legends and Lore of Illinois, I found an interesting pic in one of their issues, about the Devil's Gate, Volume 1 issue 3, page 5.

http://www.blackoakmedia.org/Legendsand ... ssue_3.pdf

If you look at the base of the old pump station, it looks like a match for the stones outside the grove with it's deep channel groove. It makes me wonder how much of it may still be under the earth at BG....

[Aten]

Rashore the pipe runs all the way to the pond Pete found that out with his metal detector.

[jim1968]

This stone you are seeing is a parking curb for cars.