The Amish Paradise Where You Party Like It's 1699

The Arcola, Illinois highway exit said, “theme park,” but the only “rides” are in buggies, there is no junk food except cheese, and who in their right mind waits in line to churn butter? 80 years of American roadtrippers, it turns out, and hundreds of them hit ye olde gift shop to snatch up the park’s coolest souvenir: a pencil with a horse and buggy on it and a vintage Amish saying, “We Grow Too Soon Oldt And Too Late Schmardt.”

Picture it: you’re riding in the back of the Family Roadster, the seafoam green one with the wood panel sides, staring out the back window watching stripes painted on the asphalt whiz by and aggressively playing license plate bingo with your sibling that won’t stay on their side of the seat. The car turns off Interstate 57 and a short time later comes to a stop. Everyone piles out of the car to go to Rockome Gardens, one of the world’s only Amish theme parks.

Signs such as “you must be *this tall* to raise a barn” and “wait to churn butter is 45 minutes from this point” may or may not have greeted Rockome Gardens visitors. But we do know that from 1937 to 2015, you could fill a whole day grabbing a snack of curds from the cheese shop before watching chickens play tic-tac-toe or piano (!), cutting a log at the horse-powered saw mill, or ill-advisedly gawking at actual Amish people in the model town, Colonial Williamsburg style.

After a long day of walking around, a buggy ride across the park would deposit you at the gift shop, where the co-owner Irene Yoder would sell you a pencils like this one, probably cash only, you know, since the whole “no electricity” thing. Irene ran the gift shop at least until she was 87 in 2005, when her son joked, "We've had to cut her down to a six-day workweek."

Our pencil harkens back to the mid 80s, about 40 years after the Mennonite Church had taken over from the original owners to build a retirement home for missionaries there. Apparently they were both oldt and schmardt, but not as schmardt as Amish/Mennonite farmers Elvan and Irene Yoder who bought Rockome Gardens in the 60s, stuck some Amish attractions on it, and officially opened it to the public. We have them to thank for this pencil.

Sadly, in 2015, Rockome Gardens was shuttered and turned into a “wildlife adventure” park. No word on what happened to the tic-tac-toe playing chickens, but this simple stick of graphite, paint, wood, aluminum and rubber will always remind us that central Illinois was once home to an oddly beloved Amish theme park.

143 Years of Death in the Family

When 101-year-old Herb Haertel died in 2015, so did the last living master of his family’s 143 years of expert gravestone making. Maybe thinking about death every day gives you a long, long life, because even as late as his 100th birthday, old Herb was on local TV in Minnesota doing pushups like a character straight out of Lake Wobegon Days.

Sometime before he hung up his chisel and he and his brother sold their Fairmont Monument Works in 1974, they got these handy business pencils made in a soothing silver color similar to the granite and marble they used the mark the final resting places of townfolks since they took over their dad’s business in 1946. Curiously like all those graves, one of these Haertel Brothers Fairmont Monument Works pencils has survived the vagaries of time to remind future generations (us) that they existed.

And boy what a headstone dynasty it was!

It was fun enough to discover that Herb and his brothers got their start working in dad Emanuel’s gravestone works, which the elder Haertel had founded in 1899. But it turns out that Em’s sons were carrying on an even older Haertel tradition: Emanuel himself was one of five brothers carrying on THEIR dad’s gravestone business, spread out across the midwest in Illinois, Wisconsin, and of course, Minnesota.

Grandpa Henry had founded Haertel Monuments in Illinois waaaaaay back in 1872, when he was about 30, and he got his sons Martin, Walter, Henry Jr., William, and our patriarch Emanuel started in the biz before he retired in 1902.

A year before our Herb was born in 1914, dad Emanuel was (ahem) already being memorialized in journals like American Stone Trade for fighting off imposters trying to use the Fairmont Works name to trick local undertakers (no kidding!). He sued the fakers’ pants off and then joined forces with his brothers to carve a cutting-edge (yuk yuk) grave monument to the man who started it all, their dad Henry, who took his trip six feet under a custom Haertel headstone in 1918.

The 1918 headstone of headstone mogul Henry Haertel, crafted by five of his headstone master sons including the founder of Fairmount Monument Works, Emanuel.

Whew!

It’s no wonder granite dust was practically in Herb and his brothers’ blood. After apprenticing in the family biz after high school, Herb faced death even more up close serving in World War II. Perhaps because of all the horror he saw in the Pacific theater of the war, the man who returned in 1946 to help take over Fairmont Monument Works was universally known as “an extremely friendly person that took great interest in knowing the history of families.”

Though Herb and his brothers sold Fairmont Monument Works back in 1974, the company -- now known as Fairmont Monument Co. -- appears to still be in business, proudly touting the fact that they were established in 1899, and adding the punny tagline, “Planet Granite.”

The Illinois branch of the family, meanwhile, also continued in the gravemarking biz. Granddad Henry’s Haertel Monuments in Illinois stayed in the family all the way until 1987 when grandson Harold (our Herb’s cousin) passed away, but that business also lives on.

Just like the silver Haertel Brothers pencil that’s still here among us on this mortal plane.

-Jessica Letkemann

From the Ruins of Chicago's 1893 World's Fair

Steps from the University of Chicago at the height of the Great Depression, work was completed on the city by the lake’s own grand institution of American ingenuity just in time for the 1933 Century of Progress world’s fair. It would become a famous tourist attraction for ever more, and it was so huge and important that after WWII it earned its own alphanumeric telephone exchange—MUseum 4— which was promptly imprinted on pencils for use by docents, execs, school children and anyone else who happened to need something to write with during their visit to the mind-bogglingly large and varied museum.

View fullsize

Like the 1933 fair’s other Art Deco edifices, the Museum of Science and Industry’s interior was reasonably Art Moderne, but its exterior was curiously ancient looking, almost as if it had been there for decades. That’s because it had.

When one of those everyday pencils printed sometime between 1948 and 1977 came into our possession recently, we knew we were holding a forgotten reminder of major Chicago history.

As a fourth-grader who lived two blocks away and played at the hulking Beaux Arts MSI every day after school in the 80s, I discovered many little incongruities on the grounds that made it seem like a portal to the 19th century. Why did the empty back of the building seem to be some kind of long lost grand entrance? Why was there a giant lagoon back there in an otherwise teeming part of the south side of Chicago?

I would eventually learn that the building was actually the last remnant of Chicago’s 1893 World Columbian Exposition, also known as the White City because of its faux marble structures. Fire destroyed many of the other genteel temporary structures, but the gorgeous Palace of Fine Arts somehow remained standing at 57th Street and Lake Shore Drive.

Directly after the 1893 fair, department store magnate Marshall Field paid for it to become the Columbian Museum of Chicago. In 1920 the renamed Field Museum left the old building for newer digs on the Chicago lakefront closer to downtown (where it still stands). The 1893 structure was left to rot as various pols and planners debated on what to do with it.

By 1926, Julius Rosenwald — the man best known as the “& Company” of Sears, Roebuck and Company — began laying down millions of dollars to endow it, incongruously, as an industrial museum. The rest is history.

Visitors can still walk the same huge halls they did when this pencil was made probably in the ‘50s around the same time the WWII German submarine and the chick hatchery debuted, all while making new memories: Barack Obama’s presidential library will be built on the 1893 park grounds behind the museum soon.

MSI is always old and new at the same time. Squint your eyes a little bit and you can be transported to 1893, 1933, or any mid-century yesteryear. Chicago adopted two-letter alphanumeric phone numbers including the one on our old MSI pencil in 1948 and finally abandoned them in 1977. But just like the time-warping magic of childhood, you can still dial MUseum 4-1414 and a Museum of Science and Industry operator will answer, just like they have for 70 years. -Jessica Letkemann