In 1896 this extraordinary house was the home of Frank R. Baker, a very prosperous farmer with extensive land holdings in McLean and other counties in Illinois. The home was at 905 N. McLean and had very interesting features, including the octagonal corner of the house. On the east side of Franklin Park, this home was the height of luxury. In 1910, however, Mr. Baker left this house behind to build a new home on East Taylor.
During a hog cholera epidemic, Frank R. Baker wrote a letter of advice to the Pantagraph. He stated that one of his farm managers had successfully kept the hog cholera at bay by mixing lye in the feed of the hogs. As odd as this sounds, a popular farming magazine, The Prairie Farmer, advertised the Merry War Powdered Lye Treatment for hog cholera. This sounds like a pretty unappetizing way of treating the meat they ate!
In the 1940s, the house was home to the Wesleyan Delta Omicron sorority. Note the changes to the porch since the 1896 photo (source: IWU 1940 Annual). In 1943 it was home to the John A. Lovelock family (possibly Mrs. Lovelock was housemother), which had two children serving in the Navy: John A. Lovelock as a naval air cadet and Patricia Lovelock in the Naval Reserve as an air control officer in Pasadena. By 1950 the home no longer listed as a sorority and the home was broken up into apartments
Today the home appears almost unchanged. The fancy paintwork is missing from the octagonal corner, but the new owners have renewed the paint on the dormer over the porch to the original design, which was missing in the 1940 photo.
