Garfield Farm and Inn Museum
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Garfield Farm and Tavern
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| Location | Campton Hills, Kane County, Illinois, United States |
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| Coordinates | 41°54′36″N 88°24′1″W / 41.91000°N 88.40028°WCoordinates: 41°54′36″N 88°24′1″W / 41.91000°N 88.40028°W |
| Area | 237 acres (96 ha) |
| Architect | Timothy P. Garfield |
| NRHP reference # | 78001156 |
| Added to NRHP | June 23, 1978 |
The Garfield Farm and Inn Museum is a Registered Historic Place in Kane County, Illinois, United States. The property is a 375-acre (1.52 km2) farmstead, centered on an inn that served teamsters and the nearby community during the 1840s. It is currently a museum offering a variety of educational and entertainment events. The buildings that remain are three original 1840s structures, including the 1842 hay and grain barn, the 1849 horse barn, and the 1846 inn. Various other barns and outbuildings also stand, the last dated to 1906.
Garfield Farm & Tavern Museum is the only historically intact Illinois prairie farmstead and former teamsters' inn being restored by donors and volunteers from over 3000 households in 37 states as an 1840s living history farm and inn museum.
Timothy Powers Garfield was a farmer, school teacher, brick maker and surveyor from Belmont, Vermont that purchased Pennsylvanian settler Sam Culbertson's 440 acres (180 ha) 1835 claim west of the Fox River in 1841. He farmed wheat (the cash crop of the 1840s), corn, hay, oats, livestock, and dairy. He and his wife Harriet (Frost) remodeled Culbertson's log house into a log tavern or inn. In 1846, they built a brick house serving as their home and tavern to serve guests traveling between Chicago and the Rock River Valley. A westbound stagecoach and mail coach routinely passed the tavern at 4PM, and the tavern provided an overnight resting spot for travelers and teamsters driving wheat to the Chicago port. The Garfield family charged each traveler 37 and a half cents to stay the night. As many as 54 guests joined the family of 9 one night in the 5 room log tavern before moving into the brick inn several months later. The Garfield Inn also became a popular local meeting place, holding monthly dances on Saturdays on the second floor of the tavern. Live music was hired for these events, which attracted as many as 100 couples at once.
Coming of the railroad in December 1849 was the death knell for tavern keeping. The farm shifted from wheat to dairy operations by the 1860s. A granddaughter, Elva Ruth Garfield, donated 163 acres and farm buildings in 1977 to the founding 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations, Garfield Heritage Society, Inc. and Campton Historic Agricultural Lands, Inc. to become a museum. Artifacts, furnishings, and family letters and documents survive because Miss Garfield's mother, Hannah Mighell Garfield, first voiced her idea for a making the house a museum in the 1890s. The Garfield Farm and Tavern received recognition by the United States Department of the Interior as a Historic Place on June 23, 1978.
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