KC students pitch in for Jane Addams home
By DAILY CHRONICLE
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The Kishwaukee College Horticulture Department has received a special request: Design the landscaping around the Jane Addams Homestead in Cedarville, located near Freeport.
Students in Jim Knoll’s HORT 166 Beginning Landscape Design class visited the homestead Sept. 8 to begin the design process.
The home is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places as the home of the John H. Addams family. Jane Addams, founder of Hull House and first American woman recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, was born in the home on Sept. 6, 1860. Her father was a prominent businessman in Stephenson County, owning a successful mill business; holding positions in bank, railway companies and the legislature; and founding the Mutual Fire Insurance Co. The house itself was built in the 1840s with renovations made in the 1870s. The nearly 11-acre property also includes a Pennsylvania-style barn and the original grist mill.
Kathleen Glaze and her family bought the homestead two years ago and began cleaning up the untended and overgrown foliage around the property. Clearing it and pulling out plants was the easy part – deciding what to plant in its stead was a different matter. A neighbor suggested she contact Jim Knoll at Kishwaukee College. Glaze knew she wanted the landscaping to reflect the historical nature of the home. She hopes one day to open the home to visitors because of its history and the legacy of Jane Addams. Glaze met with Knoll over the summer and he proposed having a class design the landscaping. Glaze, a former educator herself, readily agreed, according to a news release.
Knoll had the class research the era and the architecture, as well as the Addams family history before visiting the property.
“The owner wants the landscaping to be in keeping with the history of the house," Kelly Bloom, a hort student from Durand, said in the release. Bloom is one of the class of 13 students working on the project. "We won’t use any newer trends in landscape designs – like no water elements, for example. We’ll probably use native plants with just a few newer plants for contrast.”
“The property is large enough and has enough different types of natural elements that we can do a lot with it. We really want to use whatever plants are native to the area,” Sean Hughes of Maple Park said in the release. Hughes is another student in the class.
The site visit in September was part history and part preliminary landscape design. Knoll said Glaze treated students to lemonade and cookies while she relayed the history of the property. After a question and answer period, the students took site measurements that would later be transferred to a scaled base plan.
Each student created their own landscape design, under Knoll’s supervision, in class. Glaze visited the class in October to view the students’ designs and choose the design she prefers or which aspects from each she would like. After receiving her feedback, the class will draft a more final design for her final approval.
Because of the size of the property, Knoll plans to do the design in phases. Unfortunately, the class will not be involved in the installation of the design because of the homestead’s distance from Kishwaukee College. However, they will keep up with the progress of their project and look forward to the day when they can visit and know that they were instrumental in the restored beauty of the Jane Addams Homestead, a place where history was born.
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