The Lemuel Milk Carriage House or Stone Barn is a historic building in

Kankakee, Illinois Kankakee is a city in and the county seat of Kankakee County, Illinois, United States. As of 2020, the city's population was 24,052. Kankakee is a principal city of the Kankakee-Bourbonnais-Bradley Metropolitan Statistical Area. It serves as an ...

, United States. It is the last remnant of the estate of

Lemuel Milk Lemuel Milk (1820–1893) was an early settler to Eastern Illinois and, at one point, the largest landholder in the state. Born in New York, Milk came to Illinois after purchasing a large tract of land in Iroquois County. Milk came to own over ...

, who once owned over of land.

History

moved to

from New York around 1855. An early settler to the area, Milk was among the first to drain the Kankakee region for farming. By purchasing cheap, swampy land for draining, Milk was able to amass a large estate exceeding . This made him one of the largest landowners in Illinois. Milk opened a department store in Chebanse in 1868, which he ran until 1883. In 1876, he founded the Waldron Ice Company, harvesting ice from the nearby

Kankakee River The Kankakee River is a tributary of the Illinois River, approximately long, in the Central Corn Belt Plains of northwestern Indiana and northeastern Illinois in the United States. At one time, the river drained one of the largest wetlands in N ...

. Milk was a trustee on the board of the

Illinois Eastern Hospital for the Insane Samuel H. Shapiro Developmental Center, formerly named the Kankakee State Hospital, is a developmental center in Kankakee, Illinois, on the banks of the Kankakee River. History In 1877, the General Assembly established the Illinois Eastern Hospi ...

. Milk's most ambitious undertaking was the draining of Beaver Lake in Newton County, Indiana.Illinois Historic Preservation Agency
/ref> The carriage house, built at some point between 1861 and 1868, is the only remaining structure from Milk's large estate. Milk lived in a seventeen-room mansion at the corner of Oak and Indiana Avenues, which has since been demolished. Aside from sheltering his carriage, Milk also used the building to house livestock. The carriage house is now the third-oldest building remaining in Kankakee after the First Baptist Church and the Asbury United Methodist Church Sanctuary. The building was used as a barn until the early 1920s, when it was used as a painting garage. It later became a warehouse for Fred Swannell Sr.'s hardware store. The building was converted to a bakery and restaurant in 1973. The restaurant quickly went out of business and the building became a meeting place for civic groups. On June 4, 1979, the carriage house was recognized by the National Park Service with a listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

Architecture

The carriage house is built with locally quarried limestone. The roof features a cupola with a weather vane, placed at the crossing of the two gables. The building is largely undecorated except for a wide bracketed

cornice In architecture, a cornice (from the Italian ''cornice'' meaning "ledge") is generally any horizontal decorative moulding that crowns a building or furniture element—for example, the cornice over a door or window, around the top edge of a ...

. The interior retains its rough cut roof trusses. The floor was changed to concrete in the 1920s.

References

{{reflist Agricultural buildings and structures on the National Register of Historic Places in Illinois Italianate architecture in Illinois Residential buildings completed in 1865 Kankakee, Illinois National Register of Historic Places in Kankakee County, Illinois