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 Well, try to imagine a snowy landscape and the roar
of snowmobiles streaking across the empty fields. Yes, snowmobiles!
Russell Willis of Hopedale, the small rural community along
Interstate 155 on the way to Peoria, has created a unique museum
dedicated to his passion for collecting antique snowmobiles.
The Willis Snowmobile Museum had its grand opening last Saturday,
and additionally hosted the annual convention of the Antique
Snowmobile Club of America to help him celebrate.
But why collect snowmobiles? “My son bought a sled (snowmobile
speak) in the 1980’s that needed a lot of work to get it running, we
restored it, and my collection started from there,” Huck said.
And it grew and grew and grew. One antique snowmobile was not
enough. Ten were not enough. One-hundred were not enough. His
collecting continued to grow. He built a pole barn on his property
near Hopedale, and eventually filled it with over 450 antique sleds!
They go back to the 1920’s. When he saw an old building in downtown
Hopedale, it sparked the idea of building a museum to house the best
of his collection.
The Willis Snowmobile Museum holds 150 of the best sleds in Huck’s
collection. Oh, Russell is known as Huck to everyone, a nickname
from childhood.
Huck finds antique snowmobiles and restores them.
That’s to be expected. But those are not the only historic objects
he restores. “ I had the idea for a museum, saw the old brick
general store building in Hopedale coming up for a tax auction, so I
bought it,” he said with a laugh. “It was in terrible condition,
ready to cave into the street. It was sure to be demolished if
anyone else had bought it,” he said.
With the help of his three sons, Darrin, Danny, and Don, Huck began
the task of turning the old decrepit building dating from 1900 into
his dream of a museum. The restoration of the building turned into a
family affair.
The Willis family had the skills to turn the old
general store into the Huck’s vision of what he wanted. He has been
a mason for fifty years.
The exterior has been refinished to the original look of an early
twentieth century brick structure common in small town America, but
the interior will take a visitor by surprise. All of the walls are
finished in glowing hard wood paneling.
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Huck did not just run down to the local big box
lumber store and buy wood paneling. He selected trees from the area
around Hopedale, cut them, and had the paneling made from them. He
then built a dehumidifier and treated the paneling himself to remove
the moisture. The paneling in the museum is made from different
varieties of trees, and a sign on each wall identifies the type of
wood.
A visitor walks into the restored building, and every square inch of
the three floors is filled with the cream of Huck Willis’s
collection of antique snowmobiles. The oldest is a Model T
snowmobile from 1923 that was invented by a New Englander named
Virgil White. He designed it as a kit to help doctors and mail
delivery persons get around the countryside in the harsh winters
with deep snow.
The collection has the first front engine snowmobile. It has a
toboggan that was fitted with a motor to make a crude snowmobile.
People are ingenious when confronted with a problem.
“There have been over three-hundred snowmobile companies worldwide
over the years, and I have over one-hundred represented in my
collection,” Huck said.
A snowmobile collection in Hopedale, Illinois? “We are a bit south
of the most popular areas for snowmobiles. Wisconsin, Minnesota,
Michigan and New England are the most popular areas, but the members
of the Antique Snowmobile Club of America come from all over,” said
Huck.
The Willis Snowmobile museum is much more than one man’s seeming
obsession with a machine from modern times. Look through the
collection and it is easy to see the progression of designs as the
decades of the twentieth century passed.
Call it a quirky museum in a tiny dot of a town in central Illinois,
but it is a history lesson of human ingenuity when faced with the
harsh conditions that Mother Nature can throw at us. Huck Willis can
give a visitor a history lesson on each of the restored snowmobiles
in his collection.
Now that Huck Willis has created his dream museum, he is around most
of the time to show interested visitors through it. Call Huck at
309-241-6530 to arrange a visit. It is well worth the trip off the
beaten path to Hopedale, Illinois.
[Curtis Fox] |
