If a fence could talk
MONMOUTH, Ill. — Sometimes an architectural feature of a residential property can survive long after the residence associated with it is gone. A good example is the sturdy brick and iron fence surrounding Warfield Manor apartments at the corner of East Broadway and North 3rd Street.
Constructed more than a century ago, the fence tells a portion of the history of the block, as does the remnant of an earlier fence adjoining it.
Five prominent names from Monmouth history figure in the block’s history — Babcock, Paine, Pattee, Tubbs and Warfield.
One of Monmouth’s earliest settlers, dry goods merchant Draper Babcock, purchased a home which had stood on the corner site since 1837 and enlarged it. His father, Elijah, who arrived in Monmouth in 1842, had already built some fine Greek Revival residences in the same neighborhood.
Eleazer Paine, an 1839 West Point graduate who practiced law in Monmouth and would become a prominent Civil War general, purchased the property immediately west of Babcock’s home in 1851 and likely built a house on it. Returning to Monmouth after the war, Paine sold the property in 1867 and it was soon purchased by Lucia Elliott Green, a wealthy widow from New York, who was the sister of Draper Babcock’s wife.
By the 1870s, a fine brick mansion occupied the property at 316 East Broadway, and it seems probable that Mrs. Green was the builder. While local historian Ralph Eckley maintained that Gen. Paine built the mansion, the 1869 bird’s eye map of Monmouth shows a house on the lot that looks considerably smaller than surrounding homes. Paine took out a mortgage to buy the property in 1851, so my guess is that he built a more modest wooden house and it was razed around 1867 by the wealthy widow, who wanted a more fashionable Broadway residence next to her sister’s house.
When the block between 2nd and 3rd Streets was dominated by the Babcocks, a wrought iron fence with stone piers stretched the entire length of the block. Today, a portion of that fence still stands in front of George Morris’s house at 310 East Broadway.
Lucia Green was a longtime invalid and in 1878 she sold her mansion in order to return to New York for health treatments. The buyer was Elizabeth Morgan Pattee, wife of Henry Hubbard Pattee, who with his brother, Howard, had recently begun manufacturing tongueless cultivators in Monmouth. The Pattees would become one of Monmouth’s leading families, and the large home suited Henry and Elizabeth, particularly since her mother and brother would also move in with them.
Tragically, Henry and Elizabeth’s only child died in 1876. When Elizabeth’s health began failing two years later, she went to stay with her mother in her native New Hampshire, dying there at age 33 in 1879. Two years later, Henry married Miss Anna Willets, daughter of a prominent local judge and an 1874 Monmouth College graduate. Anna had already made a mark in history, as she was one of the six founders of Kappa Kappa Gamma in 1870. Henry and Anna had one child — Allan — born in 1885, but misfortune would continue to plague the family.
Anna died suddenly following an operation in April 1909, less than two weeks after son Allan had married Lucie Eby. Henry died two weeks after Anna’s death.
By this time, Allan had attended Monmouth College and the University of Chicago, and succeeded his father at the plow company. He was a fan of technology and purchased the first electric car in Monmouth in 1904. The garage behind the house where he kept it still stands. He also decided to expand the property, tearing down the old Babcock house on the corner to make way for gardens and a tennis court. Just before World War I, he erected the massive brick fence which still defines the block.
But in 1919, Allan died unexpectedly of pneumonia, in the same home where he had been born 33 years earlier, leaving his young wife in charge of the property and raising their three young children — Henry, Allan Jr. and Frances. Lucie’s 18-year-old brother, Carl, moved in to assist with the chores. Fortunately for Lucie, she met Ray Tubbs, a widower with two children who was vice president for the National Bank of Monmouth. The couple was married in 1924.
Known thereafter as the Tubbs Mansion, the home would soon become a popular social hub as Lucie’s children and Ray’s children moved into their teens. By 1930, that brood included Mary and Margaret Tubbs, ages 16 and 18, along with Henry, Allan and Frances Pattee, ages 19, 16 and 14.
The residence would remain in the Tubbs family until 1963, when Lucie died in a nursing home in Naperville, near the home of her son Henry. Ray decided it was time to leave the massive home, and in October of that year, he sold it to local lumber dealer and real estate developer Paul Warfield.
With his son, David, Warfield announced he would build an apartment complex consisting of three six-apartment buildings — two facing North Third Street, where Allan Pattee’s garden and tennis court formerly stood, and one facing Broadway, on the site of the Tubbs Mansion. Construction of Warfield Manor began immediately, and early in 1964 the Tubbs Mansion behind the complex was razed. Only the two buildings facing Third Street were constructed.
The public got its first view of Warfield Manor on May 8, when it was featured in the Kappa Kappa Gamma Alumnae Association’s annual tour of homes. Ray Tubbs lived until 1970, spending his final years in La Grange, near his daughter, Mary.
Jeff Rankin is a retired editor and historian for Monmouth College. He has been researching, writing and speaking about western Illinois history for more than 40 years.
