Built in 1874 (yes, you read that correctly), the McDowell House in nearby Sidell is a farmstead home that has undergone a variety of changes since it was built nearly 150 years ago. The fifth generation owners of the house recently wrote a book, Coming Home: The McDowell Family and Old Brick, about the heritage and restoration. The worker-owned company New Prairie Construction, based in Urbana, worked “closely with the architect and the homeowners to restore both exterior and interior portions of the house.” One would expect to see this with a house surviving the elements for a century and a half. I’d recommend looking through this page if you want to see some of the other interior photos, and as you might’ve noticed, we’ve been checking out cool architectural gems around C-U and some stories that go along with them.
Here’s the short summary from the book’s page on GoodReads:
The author’s McDowell ancestors built their brick Italianate farmhouse (“Old Brick”) in 1874 on ground land-granted to the family in the mid-19th century. Since its construction, Old Brick has sheltered a continual and unbroken line of family descendants, the author now being the fifth generation to occupy the home. For the author, meticulously restoring this beloved home has been the pivotal chapter of a larger narrative—one in which he is but a single character whose fate is viscerally intertwined with this place, its past, and its people. Old Brick has been a lodestone, drawing him back to this farmland near Sidell, a small village in Central Illinois, where the McDowells first put down roots some two centuries ago.
This Victorian Italianate build has had two separate additions and a garage since it was built, in addition to solar panels by New Prairie Solar, which you can see below.
