The History of An 1850s Abandoned Mansion — and The Failed Attempt to Revive It

Gatton Mansion is an 1850s haunted abandoned mansion and possible Underground Railroad safehouse that deeply connected to its tiny town’s rich history. There have been multiple plans to revive it since the 1990s, and a large following of people still want to get it fixed.

Known to the locals as “the 1850 house”, it is perhaps the oldest standing building in Bath, Illinois, a tiny river town about an hour’s drive south-west from Illinois Central College.

One does not need to know its age or history to see Gatton Mansion is special. For a town with merely 200 people living in the town, the house is quite large and ornate. It has two stories, a basement, 16 rooms, two center halls, and six fireplaces. In its heyday, it even had a massive heart-shaped drive in the driveway and a pool.

Perhaps the most strikingly unique feature of the building is its hand-carved top tower, called a cupola. 

The town founder and rich businessman, Major Benjamin Gatton, supposedly used it as a watchtower. Legend says he held his rifle up there and kept a close eye on his farmworkers to make sure they kept up their work.

 It also provides a great view of the town and the nearby river, prompting the other theory that it served as a “widow’s walk” that his wife used to watch for her husband to come home.

Major Gatton might have met future president Abraham Lincoln, who visited the town several times. 

When Gatton bought the very first land in Bath, the maps he would have used would have been produced by Lincoln, who surveyed the town in 1836. 

One possible artifact of Lincoln’s survey of the town was found just last year when a stone pin survey marker was found dating “Nov. 1, 1836”, according to the Mason County Democrat newspaper.

However, this was not the last time Lincoln was in the town. On August 16, 1858, he visited the town to deliver one of his famous “A house divided against itself cannot stand” speeches.

It was at this time, around 1856, when construction began on Gatton Mansion. The mansion might have been completed when Lincoln came through, so it is a real possibility Lincoln gazed upon it and saw how beautiful it was back then in the building’s prime.

Besides the style of the house, Lincoln might have liked another possible aspect of the house: its alleged status as a former Underground Railroad safehouse.

While there is not that much solid evidence this is true, there are a few clues that make it seem possible.

First of all, there is a sealed-up tunnel in the basement. This might have been an entrance and exit for fugitive slaves. However, according to Joann Lynn, a local genealogist who works in the library of the nearby town of Havana, Illinois,  it could just as easily have been used to store crops or coal in the basement, as it was a farmhouse.

Second of all, there are multiple confirmed safehouses in the Illinois region that Bath could connect. 

For example, Peoria had a safe house where the Peoria Civic Center now stands. Alton, situated where the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers connect, also had one. These could have been easily connected by the Illinois River, and Bath could have served as an excellent midpoint.

More of these locations may become known soon, as a state initiative Illinois Underground Railroad Task Force was just formed this year, which aims to “Connect existing local projects and new projects to create a cohesive statewide history of the Underground Railroad in Illinois,” says the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

Their first meeting was in January of this year, and the project will be wrapping up fairly swiftly. “The Task Force shall submit a report of its findings and recommendations to the governor and General Assembly by July 1, 2024.”

This project could shed light on Bath’s possible connection to the Underground Railroad by finding more places like those on the map above.

For now, however, it is still entirely unknown whether Gatton Mansion was part of the Underground Railroad.

“We’ve never had any substantiating proof from anyone that it was in the Underground Railroad. It very well could have been given the location of it, given where it was by the river, given literally that railroads and a road are going through there, it could have been. It would have been a good location for that,” says Ellen Mibbs, assistant director of the Havana library 

Mibbs is the great-grandchild of Verla Meegge-Connelly, who lived in the mansion.

During Mibbs’ interview for this article, her mother, Nancy Blakely came into the library. Blakely is an expert on Gatton Mansion. She has many newspaper clippings, family photos, and even an original copy of her grandmother’s book about the mansion. And most importantly, memories of discussions with her grandmother. 

According to Blakely, her grandmother got sent to live in the mansion after a freak cattle accident that happened to Meegge-Connelly’s pregnant mother, which caused a fatal miscarriage.

Blakely’s grandmother’s father remarried, and the new stepmother didn’t like her. As a result, she was sent off to live at Gatton Mansion with her grandmother, Katherine Kramer, and step-grandfather, George Kramer. 

According to local legend, Kramer won the mansion from Major Gatton in a poker game. However, Blakely does not believe this is the case. She says her grandmother said that “Major Gatton went bankrupt and owed a lot of people money”, which probably had nothing to do with poker. 

Whatever the reason for Gatton’s debts, it is not surprising, as he was a very eccentric and risk-prone individual. He visited California twice during the Gold Rush.

Sometime after Kramer had moved in, Blakely’s grandmother arrived as a newborn in the mansion.

Blakely’s grandmother wrote a booklet about her time in Gatton Mansion, called “Eighteen Years of Growing Up With Katherine”. It has since been transcribed with Blakely via typewriter.

There are many stories and anecdotes in the booklet, such as seeing Hailey’s Comet. However, one story stands out in particular.

“One of the stories that my grandma tells about growing up in that house is that they had some electricity in the house and every time it stormed somebody had to go up into the attic and pull the breaker because otherwise it would pop off the electricity. They had a hired girl and sent her up to shut it off. She got shocked and died,” says Blakely.

Hence why the word “haunted” could be used to describe the house, even if it is not commonly described as such.

After George Kramer died in 1913, the house fell out of the hands of anyone related to Blakely’s grandmother’s family. However, it did briefly fall back into her family’s possession in 1974, when the mansion was sold to Blakely’s cousin, Ronnie Meegge.

By this time, there were many problems with the house. Meegge wanted to fix it up but waited. Due to a rule at the time that an old owner could reclaim a sold house for a certain duration of time for a “back tax” and not pay for repairs and improvements on a house, he wanted to wait to start repairing the house.

However, Ronnie Meegge died before he could begin work on the house and his wife and son gained ownership of the property. They never ended up repairing it.

At one point, a couple of tornadoes even went through Bath and damaged the roof and chimney and even ended up leaking water into the basement, further bringing the house into disrepair.

After some more deaths in the family, in the 1990s, the house became fully abandoned. It has since fallen further and further into ruin.

However, this may be not the end of the life of this house. There was recently an attempt to resuscitate it. In 2017, the current owners of the house began to rebuild the house, to make it into a distillery. 

They created a Facebook group where they showed updates on the construction. With 2.3 thousand followers as of the time of writing, it was a very popular project for being in such a small town.

They cleared up the foliage and brush around the house, removed some abandoned vehicles from the property, and did some work on the inside.

However, they underestimated the cost of repairs on the interior. The project was ultimately abandoned in 2018. 

Rumors on Reddit say this was due to a bad barley season, although this could not be confirmed by Blakely. According to the same Reddit source, there might have been an attempt by at least one group to buy the building afterward, but it seems to not have worked.

While it is hard to know if this can be believed, Reddit can tell us one thing for sure: there is high public interest in the building. A post from 2 years ago that the above comment was taken from achieved 512 upvotes as of the time of writing, with comments mostly talking about how gorgeous the building is. A Flickr post from Oct. 6, 2018, has 102 likes, and another has more than a thousand views from Jan. 19, 2016.

A YouTube creator who visited the mansion and recorded a video with 27 thousand views called it “the coolest abandoned house I have been to ever”.

Universally the comments on posts like these express a love for the building’s design and a desire for the building to be fixed up. Some people have mentioned they would be willing to donate to a GoFundMe to help fix the building if one was ever set up.

There may still be hope of fixing up this historical mansion if someone has the means and motivation. However, it is unknown whether the current owners will ever begin work on the project again, sell it, or let it sit.

If it is to be repaired, however, it needs to happen soon. It has been abandoned for at least 25 years, and the cost of fixing it is only going to get higher. Right now, one can only wonder whether someone will fix this piece of history before it becomes unrepairable.

Gatton Mansion’s owners have requested that no one enter the building without permission. It is considered trespassing and violators can be prosecuted.

Tags: abandoned mansion, bath, gatton mansion