Got Mesker? Illinois wants to know

State officials want to put owners of Mesker homes on the map. A “Mesker” is a late 1800s to early 1900s building that features an ornamental iron façade or storefront components manufactured by the Mesker Brothers Iron Works of St. Louis, Mo., and the George L. Mesker Company of Evansville, Ind. The two men were brothers. A Web site developed by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, http://www.got-mesker.com, features a new Google Earth map of every known Mesker building in the country. Organizers are asking residents across America to locate additional Meskers in their communities that can then be listed on the map. More than 570 Mesker Buildings have been identified so far in Illinois - including one each in Genoa, Hinckley, Kingston and Kirkland - and there are more than 2,600 Meskers featured on the nationwide map, according to the list on the Web site http://www.gotmesker.com. The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency estimates that at one point there were more than 45,000 Mesker installations across the nation, according to a news release from agency. The Meskers specialized in ornamental facades and storefront components which were ordered through catalogs and easily shipped by rail to any interested building owner, according to the news release.