How This Started
My name is Dale Hutchins. I'm an electrician. I've lived on Barron Boulevard in Grayslake my whole life, a few blocks from the Metra NCS tracks. In September 1998 I found a field journal in the crawlspace during a renovation. Water-damaged, spine cracked. One volume. It belonged to a Wisconsin Central Railroad surveyor named Elias Foote, who had been staking the right-of-way through this part of Avon Township in 1884.
I put it on the shelf and didn't think much about it for a year. Then I picked it up again out of curiosity, got a surveying manual from the library so I could understand what I was reading, and worked through it over several evenings.
Most of the journal is what you'd expect: compass bearings, distances in chains and links, elevation readings. Foote's route went through land owned by a woman named Bridget Connell, who had been farming it for more than twenty years. She had refused to sell. The railroad took the parcel by condemnation; the Lake County Sheriff carried out the removal in August 1884.
Three days after the removal, Foote was back on the parcel finishing his survey. At the bottom of the page, after three pages of bearing columns, he wrote a short paragraph. I've read it many times. The last line is shown at the top of this page.
That's what made me keep reading.
If you want to check it yourself
Washington Street NCS platform, west side, north end. Before four-thirty. Late October into November, after the clocks change. Stand still and don't talk.
Stay behind the yellow line; I'm serious about that.
If the air changes, write me and tell me what time it was.
Why I Built This
I launched a small version of this site in 2003. At the time I had a file drawer of material that no one I knew wanted to hear more about, and putting it online seemed like a way to see if anyone else had come across any of it. The site sat mostly unchanged for a few years.
On Tuesday, October 31, 2006, I had an experience at the Washington Street station that I've had a hard time accounting for. It changed how I thought about the research I'd been doing, and it's why I came back to this and put it into the current form. I've described it on the Research Notes page.
What I believe, after ten years of looking at this: something about that parcel made Foote's 1884 survey crew unwilling to work there after a specific time of day. I think Bridget Connell knew something about why. And I think what Foote recorded in that journal is consistent with an experience I had 122 years later, at a different time of year, in the same place.
I can't prove any of that. But I've stopped pretending I think it's coincidence.
Where to Start
The Research Notes are a chronological record of how I got from finding the journal to building this site. They include the 2006 experience.
The Documents page has photographs of the journal pages, including the August 1884 entries about the Connell removal and the crew's behavior, and the margin note I found in 2002 that I still can't fully explain.
The Chronology is the historical background and the incident record I've built from the Waukegan newspaper archive.
The Corrections page is where I've logged things I got wrong in earlier versions. There are several, and I'd rather you find them before quoting me.
I usually go in the morning now.
