This inviting country home also gives visitors a pleasant and painless history lesson, a look at a prominent rural family whose accomplishments are interwoven with the story of our state and nation.

And if that isn’t enough, part of this gem of a museum includes a museum of gems, room after room of cut and uncut gems and minerals from all over the world. Another section of the museum, still a work in progress, tells the story of the Funk Brothers Seed Company, which became a major producer of hybrid corn in the United States and abroad.

Perhaps the most important feature of the Funk Prairie Home is that it still keeps the feeling of the comfortable, welcoming place it was in the days when the man who built it, Lafayette Funk, entertained important political and business leaders there. This impression is helped along by the tour given by guide and caretaker Bill Case, who somehow makes you feel you are one of those honored guests who were entertained by LaFayette and his wife Elizabeth.

"The Funks knew what hospitality was and how to make you feel at home," Case says. "Our mission, different from that in the grand showplace homes like the David Davis mansion in Bloomington, is to educate people about the Funk family and life back when they were living here.

"We want people to feel like they’ve been in a home, not in a museum. We want them to feel they’ve been a part of what they are seeing. The tour is about the people who lived here, not just about the stuff you see here. History isn’t just stuff."

The "stuff" in the 13-room house, however, reflects the interesting lives of the Funk family, as does the house itself. Built in 1863-64, it was a wedding present for Elizabeth Paullin of Ohio, whom LaFayette met and fell in love with while in college.

Although LaFayette insisted upon bringing his bride to a comfortable and spacious home, he himself was born and spent his early years in a log cabin. His father, Isaac Funk, a man of German descent who come to Illinois from Ohio, and his mother, Cassandra Sharp of the Fort Clark area (now Peoria), homesteaded on the McLean County prairie in a one-room cabin located at what is now the Funk’s Grove rest stop along Interstate 55.

Isaac and Cassandra had 10 children, nine of whom lived to the age of 50 or more, unusual at that time. LaFayette, the fifth child, was born in 1834 and died in 1919, when he was 85, two years after he broke a hip cutting ice on a pond. In those times, a broken hip was usually a death sentence, but LaFayette didn’t think he could die right away because he still had important work to do.

LaFayette had incredible energy, Case says. He was 6 feet 3 inches tall, built like a linebacker, and he would leap out of bed at 4 a.m. because he couldn’t wait to get to work on his farm.

Still, he probably wasn’t a match for his father, "iron man" Isaac Funk, described as "tornadic and dynamic, 6 feet 2 inches of solid muscle." Isaac broke the prairie sod to plant corn, raised cattle and hogs and drove them to market, sometimes for hundreds of miles. He was able to sit in the saddle for as long as three days without sleep while driving livestock to market.

A Methodist, Isaac was an ardent abolitionist who strongly supported Abraham Lincoln for president. Lincoln is said to have called him the most honest and forthright man he ever knew. Isaac, himself a good hand with an ax, coined the name "railsplitter" for Lincoln’s campaign.

Before he died, Isaac accumulated 25,000 acres of fine Illinois land. He became known as the "cattle king" because of the number of animals he raised and took to market and his advanced methods of breeding and raising quality livestock.

He also found time to serve for a number of years in the Illinois House of Representatives and in 1862 was appointed to the Illinois Senate to complete the unexpired term of Richard Oglesby. He was re-elected in 1864 and attended a session of the Senate on Jan. 14, 1865, just 16 days before his death. (He died on Jan. 30, and Cassandra followed him three hours later.)

Isaac was a firm friend of the Union and an enemy of the "Copperheads," Northerners who sympathized with the South during the Civil War. His famous Copperhead speech, given in 1863, was widely reported in the national press and read to Union soldiers all over the country. Isaac pulled no punches, calling them traitors and secessionists who deserved hanging, and offering to fight with any one of them in any manner they chose. He was 65 years old at the time, but still so strong that when he spoke people could hear him a block away, and when he pounded his fist on the table, the inkstand bounded half a dozen inches into the air.

Like his father, LaFayette was a man of many accomplishments. His full name was Marquis De LaFayette Funk, in honor of the French general who helped George Washington in the Revolutionary War.

He was the first of Isaac’s sons to go to college, and he went to Ohio Wesleyan because it had a program for scientific farming. (Isaac was one of the founders of Illinois Wesleyan College in Bloomington.) There LaFayette met Elizabeth, a gifted musician who lived in a house that had been a station on the underground railroad.

They became engaged, and he promised to come for her as soon as he built a home for her to live in. She agreed to wait, though she probably didn’t think it would take as long as 2½ years. But when she did get to Illinois, she found a gracious, comfortable 13-room home, surrounded by rich farmland, where she spent the rest of her life.

(To be continued)

(For a tour of the Funk Prairie Home and Gem and Mineral Museums, call (309) 827-6792. Tours are available Tuesdays through Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. March through December. Tours range from individuals to groups of 50 and are free of charge.)

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