Charles C. Patton Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

sure.
But, anyhow that hotel was there during the Civil War, when
Camp Butler occupied the East side of Clear Lake, and I suspect
that the officers all lived at the hotel while the men camped out
in the barracks. But, it was in the fall of 1860, 1 guess, when
Lincoln called for the troops that they all began to gather out
there and they decided that Camp Butler was the place to have
this camp where the soldiers were going to gather and train and
to get ready for the war, and the camp was named after Mr. Butler
who was the State Treasurer. I think that the time, that the
property was owned by Strother Jones, and maybe some of it by
Jacob Bunn. But at any rate, they would let the soldier% camp
out there, and, and after the first winter, as I say, it got so
muddy, they moved up onto the hill where Camp Butler Cemetery is
now, to get out of the mud, and to be able to get back and forth
to Springfield. The railroad track went right by there, and they
could go back and forth on the railroad. Just to the west of
that Camp Butler site, stood a farmhouse. It was owned by one
Uriah Mann. And Uriwh Mann was an old settler here and had been
in the Black Hawk War with Abe Lincoln, and the property, after
he died, I guess was handed down to one af his descendants by the
name of Black, and it still stood up untiJ maybe five, six, seven
years ago when it burned down. Some kids. . . it was empty, and
some kids got in there and built a fire, the place caught firs
and burned down which is a terrible shame cause it was a
beautiful old farm house, Back about 19. . . oh I guess abaut
1960'~~ maybe, I'd gotten interested in metal detecting and I had
bought a metal detector and was, and had a lot af fun with it
going around to various places trying to uncover artifacts of one
kind or another, and ran into a fellow who was also interested in
doing things with a metal detector, and a friend of his had sent
him a copy of a map of Camp Butler in the days of the Civil War,
and it was made for the purpose of reimbursing the peaple who
owned the property for the damage done by the Civil War Soldiers,
but this was the earliest map I'd ever seen of the Camp Butler,
and I suspect it's the only one that exists of Camp Butler that
first year that it was there, and it shows where the barracks
were, and where the cavalry kept their horses, and that sort of
thing. And it also shows where the Uriah Mann House also was,
and where the current Camp Butler is in respect to the first Camp
Butler. And at the Uriah Mann House, one day, a friend of mine
and I went out there to look through the Uriah Mann House. This
must have been 19. . . oh I don't know. . . 19701s, and we took
our metal detectors out, we thoroughly searched the yard, we
found all kinds af things.
One of the most interesting things I found was under the
front porch. I found a half dime, which obviously had been
there for quite some time. And one of the other things we did
was to dig up the old privies where the house. . . you could tell
where the privies had been. You know, they had to move the
privies every so often, maybe every five or six years, and they
got filled in with all kinds of junk that the people didn't want,