The Vrooman Mansion: Lincoln's Friends and a War Garden Crusade

On high ground in Bloomington-Normal, a three-story Italianate mansion has been watching Illinois history unfold since eighteen sixty-nine. The house was built in eighteen sixty-nine by Eli Barber, then sold to Matthew T. and Julia Green Scott, who moved in around eighteen seventy-two, and it sat at the intersection of law, agriculture, and national politics for the better part of a century.

The Scotts were prominent Bloomington figures, and their home became a gathering place for the legal and political community of central Illinois. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas both gave speeches on the property , a reminder that before Lincoln became president, he was a traveling circuit lawyer who knew the Scots and their circle well.

When the house was built it was purely Italianate, a style fashionable in the eighteen sixties with its low-pitched roof and decorative bracketing. A major remodeling between nineteen hundred and nineteen oh one enlarged the house by about sixty percent and added Romanesque features , arched porches in brick and terra cotta , designed by architect Arthur Pillsbury. The result was an unusual but harmonious hybrid, an Italianate core wrapped in Romanesque additions.

The house passed to the Scotts' daughter Julia, who lived there from eighteen seventy-six until her death in nineteen eighty-one at the extraordinary age of one hundred four. Her husband was Carl Vrooman, who served as Assistant Secretary of Agriculture under President Woodrow Wilson. During the First World War, Carl launched a national campaign for Victory Gardens and War Gardens, urging American families to grow their own food to free up commercial supplies for troops overseas. He organized the shipment of a million bushels of corn to starving people in Europe after the armistice , humanitarian work carried out from a federal office but rooted in a lifetime spent in the farm country of McLean County.

The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-three and operates today as the Vrooman Mansion Bed and Breakfast , one of the more storied overnight addresses along Route Fifty-One.