Getting to the bottom of that tower
'A lot of people, they come by here, they see it, but they don't know what it is," said Mike Carson. "We get a lot of that. They've been driving by here for years, and they get a day off, vacation or whatever, and they say, 'What is this thing? I've been coming by here for years. What is it?' And we tell them what it is."
"It" is the Douglas Tomb, a 96-foot-tall structure of granite, marble and bronze, a Victorian mortuary folly, surrounded by aged oak and elm trees, that has somehow survived the sweeping hand of time, tucked away in a spacious-yet-obscure tract of the South Side on East 35th Street. You can see it from Lake Shore Drive.
In the base of the tomb, within a sarcophagus of Vermont marble, lie the remains of Stephen A. Douglas, the U.S. senator from Illinois best known for debating Abraham Lincoln in 1858 when the two ran against each other for the Senate. Douglas beat Lincoln, but lost to him running for president in 1860.
And who is Mike Carson? He is the site specialist -- do not call him a "caretaker" -- living in a modest brick house on the 2½-acre grounds.
"I was raised in Pembroke, Illinois," Carson said. "Sixty-five miles southeast. The poorest town in Illinois, or one of the poorest towns."
And what was it like growing up in perhaps the poorest town in Illinois?
"You hurry and try to grow up and get away."
Carson got away to Joliet, where he worked as a prison guard for 17 years.
Tough job?
"Beats unemployment."
His wife, Renita, and three children still live in Joliet ("They hate Chicago with a passion," he explained. "Joliet was a big city to us, coming from Pembroke.") Carson returns to Joliet once a week to spend a couple of days with his family.
His bachelor existence is a stark contrast to a previous site specialist, Herman Williamson, who raised eight children in the house, which has four tiny bedrooms.
Carson began working at the Douglas Tomb in 1995. He is responsible for its daily maintenance, and his presence acts as a deterrence, to keep troublemakers away.
"No crime. No graffiti," he said.
Carson displayed a quality I don't often encounter -- genuine modesty.
"I prefer you do the story on Stephen Douglas and not me," he said.
Funny you should mention that, I replied, because the reason I came here is that a reader, Sam Langham, of Beecher -- a salesman of landscaping equipment whose profession brought him to the tomb -- thought it ironic, an African-American tending to the grave of Stephen Douglas, who was, if not quite a backer of slavery, then certainly someone willing to give the practice more latitude than Abraham Lincoln did.
"You think that's some kind of oxymoron, huh?" said Carson. "You look into his history, he did own slaves, but they were given to him in an inheritance. He never actually participated in the buying and selling of slaves. Back then slaves were property -- not to defend him, but that's how it was."
To view the Lincoln/Douglas matchup as anti-slave and pro-slave is to impoverish the complexity of history. Lincoln saw it as a moral evil; Douglas as a commercial enterprise the states should regulate individually.
"The institution of slavery was crumbling within itself," said Carson. "It would have never stood up. And Douglas, his view was: Let the states decide."
Douglas died in 1861, age 48 (Carson and I are both 49, born, we discovered, two weeks apart. "Forty-nine, that's a crazy age," he said. "You think you're cruisin.' You think you're settling down, but you're right in the middle of the swim, buddy." Which sounds about right to me).
Douglas' tomb was the first historic site purchased by the State of Illinois, in 1865. Across the street is the Soldiers' Home, a white, four-story structure that is the only surviving Chicago building associated with the Civil War, when it was a hospital for wounded Civil War vets. Later, the Archdiocese of Chicago purchased the building.
"That used to be an orphanage," Carson said. "In the 1930s and 1940s. When I started working here I used to get former orphans who'd come here and sit on the benches and reflect. The stories they'd tell . . ."
A train rumbled by on one of the tracks that form the site's eastern border.
"This is the rail line they used to bring the troops in," Carson said. "The mall -- by Dunkin' Donuts off King Drive -- was a prisoner of war camp. They'd stop the train and march them right through the city."
The cornerstone for the memorial over the tomb was laid on Sept. 6, 1866, by President Andrew Johnson, accompanied by -- and stick this one in your People Who Visited Chicago Who You Never Thought Would Have Visited Chicago file -- George Armstrong Custer, still a decade away from his rendezvous with Crazy Horse at the Little Bighorn. A hundred thousand people lined the parade route.
No such fuss now. Stephen Douglas' grave is an oasis of serene timelessness in a bustling city. Carson said he enjoys both the occasional visits of school groups and tourists, the general quiet, and regular routines. "Plant flowers, landscaping," he said. "Shovel snow and keep the place clean."
A lot better job than being a prison guard in Joliet, I observed.
He laughed.
"The flowers and leaves never cuss you back."