This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
High on the limestone bluffs of Calhoun County, Illinois, near where the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers meet sits a grand ancient stone house. No one has lived in the house for generations. It is slowly falling to ruin, not so much from time and the elements as from a young lady's overactive imagination.
The Stone House was built in 1848 by Azariah Sweetin, a mason from England. He hewed limestone blocks from the bluff behind the house and slacked lime in his own kiln for plaster. With walls three feet thick, standing four stories tall, with five fireplaces, a grand ballroom, a dining room seating 30 at a single table, and with walnut trim throughout, the Sweetin house was impressive.
Azariah Sweetin died in 1871, and the property was bought by Cyrus Hartwell, who lived there until 1894, and so the story of the stone house might have gone on to the present, had it not been for Cyrus Hartwell's niece, Mary Hartwell Catherwood, a writer of historical romance novels. When she discovered that there had been a murder near the house in Sweetin's time—two men got into an argument during a military muster—Mary's imagination shifted into full gear.
By the time she was through, the murder had been moved inside to the grand ballroom, where two rival suitors fought for the hand of a young woman until one killed the other before her horrified eyes. Now, at exactly midnight on the anniversary of the murder, a brown blood stain appears on the stone hearth of the fireplace.
A story like that is all a stone house needs to get other stories going. Before long, there were stories of other murders in the house—one at a drunken housewarming party when the house was first built, another between two quarreling brothers. Then came the story that Sweetin had buried a fortune in gold beneath one of the floors during the Civil War.
Even a stone house can't stand up to stories like that. Over the years, vandals have torn up most of the flooring looking for the gold. Souvenir stones are missing, taken by thrill seekers at midnight. The staircase is half gone.
If you have any thought of rescuing the Stone House before it's too late, you'd better come up with a good story.
Rock Island Lines is underwritten by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and Augustana College, Rock Island.
