Family proudly displays flag on old corn crib

ODELL, Ill. — A corn crib, which carries a bit of history itself, was given a fresh coat of paint in 2017 when Mike Fogarty decided to add a special touch.

“Jeff Telford was painting the crib. So, I said to him when it was about done that I wanted a flag on it, and Jeff painted the flag,” Fogarty said.

He initially got the idea when seeing a flag on a barn near Ocoya, south of Pontiac.

The corn crib was built in 1963, shortly before farmers began shifting toward using combines that shelled corn in the field and replacing cribs with on-farm grain bins and dryers.

The farmstead and adjacent farmland was owned by the Gebhardt family at the time and farmed by Mike’s dad, Don, who purchased the property a few years later.

“It was one of the last cribs built. There were one or two built after this one, but they’re gone. There’s not too many cribs left,” Fogarty said.

Mike and Barb Fogarty’s homestead is located along a busy county road that runs from Odell to Fairbury in central Illinois.

“It’s on a good location on the county road and people see it going by,” he said.

During the Christmas season, they have a Nativity scene spotlighted so it casts a large shadow onto their barn.

Patriotism runs deep in the Fogarty family, and they proudly display the flag that fills the crib’s west wall.

Mike’s dad, Don, was in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945, serving with the 3rd Armored Division in the European Theatre during World War II and earning a Purple Heart. Don died in October 2010.

Generations

The Fogarty family’s farming roots also run deep in this piece of Livingston County.

“I was either the fifth or sixth generation of the Fogartys who farmed around here and I’m the last. My dad moved down there when he was 2 weeks old in March of 1920,” Fogarty said as he pointed to the original farmstead less than a mile southeast.

Mike’s last crop was in 2020.

“I didn’t retire, I gave up,” he grinned.

“I miss certain things about farming, some things I don’t miss. I wasn’t good with technology and I just decided that these young guys can do it, and it’s time for me to get out of their way. I sit here and I watch them. Sometimes I don’t know exactly what they’re doing.”

There’s also a historic tidbit for this family.

Mike’s dad was the first area farmer to unload grain at Odell Grain’s then-new bin in the early 1930s and the first to unload soybeans in another new bin at the same elevator in 2001.