If This House Could Talk...

By Bonnie Heidinger

If this Anna house could talk, it would reveal that, like the White House, it too has a Lincoln bedroom. David L. Phillips had the house built for his family in 1855, one year after Phillips and his two land office partners platted the new town of Anna.

Abraham Lincoln came to Anna by train to debate U. S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln, the Republican candidate in 1858, was running to capture the U. S. Senate seat occupied by Douglas, a Chicago Democrat. Phillips, a fellow Republican running for a seat in the U. S. House, invited Lincoln to stay at his home the night before the debate and the night after. The two candidates debated at what was then the Jonesboro Fairgrounds on September 15, 1858.

The spacious two-story home was a grand home in the mid-1800s, and it is again today after the current owners bought it in 1991 and performed considerable restoration work. Empty for awhile and rented as two apartments before that, the house showed neglect. Since the new owners had renovated three homes already, they were not daunted by the considerable amount of work that needed to be done. The two-gabled roof was leaking and had to be re-shingled. When removing the old roof and the old siding, the original boards were revealed to be poplar, a wood not used much in construction today.
The current residents rewired the house and replaced some plumbing. The dark paneling in the spacious music room and in the Lincoln bedroom was removed. Most of the hard maple flooring was expertly refinished.

Paint was stripped from the wide window facings (there are 40 plus windows in the house), the wide base boards, the pocket door into the living room, other doors, and the curved staircase. Underneath the paint was revealed a beautiful wood called “pumpkin pie” by carpenters. This wood is somewhat similar to the color of light to medium oak but is uniquely grained and shaded.

The thick horsehair plaster in some of the rooms had to be replaced with sheet rock. The kitchen was redone completely, and the partial basement (dug after the house was built) was finished to make a TV room and attractive display areas for the owner’s wood carvings and paintings.

A side porch was enlarged and enclosed to make room for a laundry room and a full bath. The addition of a screened porch in the back gives a comfortable area to relax in the spring and summer. A separate garage was added.

Even with all the renovation work and some additions, most of the essential inside and outside features of the house remain the same. The spacious rooms follow the same floor plan as the original home. The 9 feet ceilings downstairs and the 10 feet ceilings upstairs remain. The large music room situated under the front gable of the house has a gorgeous, gleaming piano, similar to the days when the Dr. C. R. Walser family lived there from circa 1912 until the 1950s. However, the room where Lincoln slept is no longer used as a sitting and smoking room as it was when the Walsers lived there, but is a bedroom once again.
Do you know the address of this house and its current owners? If so, e-mail your responses to PAST at pastinformation@pastonline.org or mail your answers to PAST, PO Box 778, Jonesboro, IL, 62952. If you are the first to contact PAST with the correct answers, you will receive a prize.

PAST is compiling a list of pre-1865 buildings that are intact today as a part of the Lincoln-Douglas Debate Sesquicentennial Celebration in 2008. If you know of such a structure, please send the information to PAST President Linda Hileman at one of the addresses above.

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