"Our office is really going to miss him," said Rosanne Brosamer, supervisor of assessments for Logan County. "I’ve had the opportunity to work with Harry since 1990, and he’s been a joy to work with."

"I hate to see him go," said Paul L. Donath, fellow Board of Review member. "He knows the ins and outs of property values in all of Logan County. He wanted to leave a couple of years ago, but we talked him into staying on."

This time Randolph, a fifth-generation descendent of one of the county’s original settlers, made the decision stick. At the county board meeting on June 20, he was presented with a plaque honoring him for "32 years dedicated to faithful service to the people of Logan County." He served 10 years, from 1990 to 2000, on the Board of Review, and 22 years, from 1949 to 1971, as a member of the Logan County Board of Supervisors, the governing board which preceded the present Logan County Board.

[Randolph poses with fellow Board of Review
member Paul L. Donath.]

The Board of Review, whose members are appointed by the Logan County Board, investigates complaints about property taxes that are made to the assessor’s office and tries to adjudicate the complaint at the local level. Randolph has been chairman of the three-man board.

"His knowledge of the county is unbelievable," Donath told the Lincoln Daily News. "Take him out anywhere, and he will know who lives there and how much property that person owns. It’s amazing at his age he keeps so much knowledge.

"What really impresses me," Donath continued, "I have not once ever heard him say a bad word about anyone. Harry is a class act."

Gerald Hayes, now of Delavan, who served on the Board of Supervisors with Randolph for several years, remembers him as "a very intelligent man. He was wise fiscally, well informed on what the state would funnel down to us. I was a Democrat, as he was, but the board never played politics, and when Harry spoke, they always listened."

Present county board member Richard A. Hurley describes Randolph as "a man of integrity. If he tells you something, it’s as good as grain in the bin. He never forgot that he was a public servant."

Randolph himself says, "Honesty is the best policy. If you develop a reputation for that, you’ve just about got it made."

Randolph’s contributions to the Logan County area make a long list. In 1938 he was elected to the board of education of the Bowles rural school near Beason (which later was consolidated with Chester-East Lincoln), and for 15 years served as president of the board. He was also a member of the Logan County school survey committee. He served as Sunday School superintendent of the United Methodist Church at Beason for 15 years and was active with the Beason Boy Scouts.

During World War II he was a fireman at the Illiopolis Ordnance plant, and in 1944-45 was a metallurgist for the Haudaille-Hershey plant in Decatur, which was part of the first atomic bomb project.

In 1949 he was elected township supervisor of Aetna Township, which then automatically made him a member of the Logan County Board of Supervisors. (At that time the board was made up of representatives from the various townships; later it was elected on a one-man, one-vote basis.) On the county board, he served on many committees, two of the more important being finance and highway committees.

"I’ve always patted myself on the back for one thing I did on the county board," Randolph recalls. "The dome of the courthouse used to leak, and people got impatient with it. They wanted to remove that beautiful glass dome. They had a man coming to take it off, but I protested. I said we had the prettiest courthouse in the state and we ought to keep it that way."

[Randolph displays a framed picture of the Logan County Courthouse given to him at his retirement party earlier this month, as Rosanne Brosamer, supervisor of assessments, looks on.

In 1962 he went to work for the State of Illinois Department of Revenue, property tax division, where he stayed for 15 years. His knowledge of land values was so good he was often "on loan" to the State Appeals Board and remembers handling tax appeals in 90 of the state’s 102 counties.

He has been a member of the Odd Fellows Lodge and the Masonic Lodge since 1928. He has been especially active in the York Rite branch of the Masonic organization and was awarded the York Rite Cross of Honor.

Randolph and his wife of 66 years, the former Millie Smith, still live in a house they built on property Randolph’s great-great-grandfather homesteaded 170 years ago. Their home is filled with photographs of the family, including their three sons, John, an ophthalmologist and eye surgeon at the Gailey Eye Clinic in Bloomington; Robert, who heads his own engineering firm in Peoria; and David, a wood technologist for the Georgia Pacific Lumber Company; eight grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. There are also photos of Randolph’s parents and of Randolph and his wife when they were Beason High School students. Randolph proudly displays a plaque from Lincoln College honoring Millie, a 1926 graduate, on the 70th anniversary of her graduation. Millie taught in country schools before she married, then later taught in Lawndale, Chestnut and Kenney schools.

Hearing Randolph talk about his family is a history lesson. His great-great-grandfather, William, brought his family to Illinois from Virginia in the fall of 1830, traveling with a group led by one of the men who made the original survey of the territory for President Thomas Jefferson. But 1830-31 was the winter of the "big snow," which began on Dec. 12 and continued for weeks. Some reports said snow was as much as eight feet high. Many people starved before the winter was over, but William Randolph somehow made his way to Waynesville and acquired enough corn to keep his family alive.

By 1864, his great-grandfather, Willoughby, owned several thousand acres of land, most of it bought from the government, which wanted settlers and sold land for $1 an acre.

A land deal that went bad sent Randolph’s grandfather, James; an uncle, Guy; and his father, Roy; to Arkansas. Guy was involved in a project to buy Thompson Lake, across the Illinois River from Havana, drain it and raise wheat. Fraudulent land deals were common in those times, and somehow money raised for the project disappeared. To keep his innocent son from being prosecuted, James turned over his property to authorities and took his sons to Arkansas to make a fresh start. James later moved to Oklahoma where he bought a farm near the home of Will Rogers.

Randolph was born in 1909 in Arkansas, "in the middle" of a family of six boys and a girl. When Harry was a year old, his father decided to return to his roots in Central Illinois, and he has been a Logan County resident ever since.

Roy began working as a farm hand and later was able to buy back some of the land on the "old place," 150 acres in Logan County and 76 acres in DeWitt County.

Young Harry grew up attending Beason schools and helping his father run the steam engine that operated the family sawmill and, later, the threshing machine which they took from farm to farm at harvest time. He remembers "putting up ice" in the winter time, preserving it in the sawdust from the mill to be sold in the summer.

In 1934 he married Millie, whose ancestors came from Ireland. "It’s the best thing I ever did," he says proudly.

He farmed and raised hogs and cattle. In the 1950s he experienced the same problems farmers faced in the 1990s: drastic drops in the price of grain and hogs.

In the 1960s he and son David started the Randolph Christmas Tree Farm. David still comes back to tend the trees, and Randolph still sells them "on the honor system," no longer sitting out at the lot to collect fees from people who come to cut a fresh tree.

Although he thinks he "always looks grim" in photographs, Randolph has a keen sense of humor. When told, "You’re looking good," he quotes one of his father’s favorite sayings: "I wish the doctors could give me some kind of medicine that would make me look as bad as I feel and feel as good as I look."

Randolph’s country home is located between the towns of Beason, Chestnut and Kenney. "They all fight over me," he reports. "Each one says I belong in one of the other places."