Leonard and Clay McAdams built the log cabin on your right in the 1920s in the timbered-covered hills in southwestern Jersey County. The cabin was home to a family of six and looked much as it does today, with one room downstairs and a small loft above. Christina (McAdams) Lyming, who lived in the cabin until age 13, donated it to the Jersey County Historical Society in 2003. Workers disassembled the cabin and numbered each log. The cabin was reassembled at its present location and opened for tours in 2007.
Joshua and Melvina Plummer owned the cabin in the center. It was located in Rosedale Township, near the northern border of Pere Marquette Park. Joshua planted an apple orchard and farmed the hilly land with mules. Melvina tended White Leghorn chickens, canned fruit and vegetables, and raised eight children. By 1938, the Plummer family lived in a farmhouse and used the cabin as a smoke house and as a place to make apple cider.
Felix Hagen Sr. built the log cabin on your left in the late 1880s near Deer Plain in neighboring Calhoun County. It originally had two stories and porches upstairs and down. Before Felix built the cabin's interior staircase, he climbed a ladder each night to sleep in a second-floor bedroom. He and his wife, Luvena, raised 11 children in the cabin. After the Hagen family moved to a larger
home, the cabin was used to house migrant workers who picked apples at Hagen's Orchard.
Louis Stumpe, Jr. bought the Plummer and Hagen cabins in the 1970s and relocated them to the family farm near McClusky. In 2014, Eveyln Stumpe and her family donated the cabins to the Historical Society. The Plummer cabin was moved to our grounds that summer and opened for tours that fall. Before relocating the Hagen cabin to our grounds in 2016, the second story and porches were removed. The Hagen cabin was finished and opened for tours in 2017.
(photo caption:)
Recreating Hickory Grove
The completion of the Hagen cabin marked the end of more than a decade of work to reproduce Hickory Grove, the tiny settlement that existed here before being renamed Jerseyville in 1834. That settlement included three log cabins and the Red House.
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