ARTSCULTURE · HISTORICAL MARKER
City of Collinstown Uptown Tour
Arts & Culture
Collinsville’s Uptown area includes notable homes, buildings, and attractions spanning the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Oatman House at 501 East Main Street is a Carpenter Gothic Revival home with pointed arch windows, gingerbread trim, square nails, and doors patented in 1863; it was built for the family of Dr. Charles Oatman, the fourth mayor of Collinsville, who had also been a drummer boy for Sherman during the Civil War. The Kennedy Home at 401 East Church Street, a two-story hydraulic press brick house built by architect William Kennedy in 1906, later had a sunroom added because his daughter, Gladys Peers Kennedy, was said to have had consumption or tuberculosis; she died in 1934 at age 31. The Keller-McClaskey Home at 429 Vandalia first housed the Cottage Sanitarium Association, a private hospital with surgeons, doctors, and a resident nurse, before Ferd Keller and his family purchased it in 1919; the house remains in the fourth generation of the Keller family. The Kohler-Herr Home at 410 North Morrison, built by Fred Kohler in 1887, is a Federal Style house with Italianate influence and is specially recognized in the Illinois Historic Structures Survey. The East Central Historic District is a 28.1-acre, wishbone-shaped residential area around Uptown, bordered generally by Clinton, Aurora, Johnson, and Church, with buildings dating mainly from the 1860s to the 1950s. Nearby are such landmarks as the Brooks Catsup Bottle Water Tower, built in 1949 after a 1947 agreement to support industrial water needs and later placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002, as well as longtime commercial buildings including the former State Bank, the former Riggins-Hightower Grocery Store, the Bull Durham Tobacco ghost sign on 111 East Main, and the former First National Bank, renovated in 1916 and occupied by Butterfield Jewelers since 1954.
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Collinsville, Illinois
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