10:47 p.m. - 2006-03-11
A good place to spend a day

Visit to the Library

Today, I spent the day at The Beautiful Gail Borden Library overlooking the Fox River in beautiful downtown Elgin. The library is named after the founder of Borden Milk. It is on the site of THE Borden dairy where they invented and made condensed milk. However it is named after Gail Borden (Mr. Gail Borden) because the Borden family donated the money for the original library which no longer exists.

It is a huge, new state of the art facility with everything you can imagine except their DVD collection sucks. On the 2nd floor overlooking the river is a quiet reading room with a fireplace with a hearth on each side. You can sit in front of the fire or sit in front of the giant floor to ceiling, plate glass window and watch the river roll.

Although I�ve been there many times before, I have never spent the day there. When I went to use the bathroom it was locked�..you have to get the key from the check out lady�this is the first indication that I now live in a city and not a suburb. (Although compared to Chicago, it is a small city and I think that most Chicagoans and even Elginites fancy that we are a Chicago suburb, but we are not. We are one of those small, yet Grand old city�s whose history is beautifully preserved

After checking out a DVD and a couple of Mary Higgins Clark Books on Tape which I have found is a wonderful way to use a 45 minute drive to work and back, I headed up stairs to the mystery novel section. I am taking a class in mystery novel writing and need to read a shit load (such a elegant term to describe literature) of mysterys and try to identify key plot points in them so I can get a better handle on how to structure my own mystery�which in itself is a mystery.

Mike and I have decided to research our home. Filling out an application with information about the home and everyone that has ever lived there and their occupations and connections to the development of Elgin, and $15.00 will get you a hand painted plaque with the year your house was built and the name of the builder. Not only are we interested but having a researched house could increase the salability or the value of the home some day, plus it will be cool to have this beautiful plaque on the house. It could very well be a Sears home which, if it is will be so cool. A genuine antique, and that fact alone could up the value of the house.

Anyway, I ended up spending over an hour looking at microfilm of old Sandborn Insurance maps and made copies of one from 1931, showing our street, but no house, then 1941 showing our house. We knew our house was build in 1936 but now I know the subdivision and the developer of the neighborhood. I also looked through the 1939 Elgin directory. They have directories for every year going back to the mid 1800�s of everyone who ever lived in Elgin. They are like old hardbound phone books with advertising in them. The not only list the persons name and address and phone number when it gets to the years that phones were regularly used, but also the persons employer and in some cases the occupation.

Our next move is to go to the Kane County recorder of deeds and look at all the deeds since the home was built and then we can look up the names of the people who lived here and see who they worked for and what they did for a living. Wouldn�t it be fun to find someone prominent who lived here? It is a small home though and it couldn�t have housed anyone too important.

We also need to find the office where construction permits are recorded and kept for information on our addition.

The last thing before application is that we need to finish our front yard landscaping. The house is completely restored on the outside and they will only give the plaque to homes that are kept immaculate looking.

It is so much fun for a history buff to live in a city so rich in history that is so well kept.

Another sign that I now live in a city and not in a white bread bedroom community. The err-uhm�.gentlemen�uh�on the computer next to me was standing there in the middle of the library looking at porn and commenting on it�.loudly. This was not in some cubicle or sectioned off room�.it was right in the middle of an open area of the library where anyone could walk behind and see what he was looking at.

They say we all have a right to read what we want at the library�so I guess he�s allowed. Maybe they should make a porno room and offer paper towels at every carrel.

This scene is not typical of this library though. It really is an awesome library.

P. I. Yarnsmith

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