Welcome to Prairie Fire.

I'm your host, Sarah Edwards.

Thanks for being with us.

Well, there is a nip of fall in the air and my kids are getting really excited about decorating our front yard with skeletons.

Now, speaking of skeletons, the Prairie Fire crew and I had the opportunity recently to meet up with historian and librarian John Kokoris, who is an expert at Illinois' most fascinating cemeteries.

We had the opportunity to visit just a few in central Illinois, but it was a really fascinating day.

Check it out.

Cemeteries are a wonderful place to dive into local, state, and national history, but most of us are likely only familiar with the cemeteries where we live.

That's where librarian and historian John Kokoris comes in.

He spent much of his career compiling the famous and not so famous stories in the graveyards where Illinois history comes alive.

I think a lot of our state's great graves, I call them, and best cemeteries, are kind of along the Illinois river between Peoria and then out to Springfield.

But there's also so much local history, state history, national history present at these sites.

There's nature, there's art.

Something about time kind of stands still here.

And we're standing in front of these graves right here the same way that 150 years ago somebody was standing and paying their respects and thinking about the meaning of life and the nature of the universe.

It all kind of hits home in a cemetery.

Our first stop was the largest cemetery of the tour, Springdale Cemetery outside Peoria with more than 80,000 graves on 254 acres of land.

Peoria was one of those cities that really boomed during the industrial revolution.

And at that time we had maybe a dozen scattered cemeteries down by the riverfront.

Springdale is actually the first chartered cemetery in the state of Illinois where they intentionally set it two miles out of the city limits in a beautiful secluded wooded area with creeks and wildlife.

It was an escape from the busy downtown life where people would come on a Sunday afternoon, have a picnic, take in the sites and pay their respects to their loved ones.

Over the course of the 20th century, it kept expanding and unfortunately there was a decline in the 1990s under private ownership where they simply just ran out of money to operate it.

The fortunate thing is the community stepped up and said, "This is an important cultural institution and asset to our city and the local municipality now supports us through public subsidy to make sure that this place is always protected, preserved, and respected for all generations.".

Springdale Cemetery has also become an unlikely nature preserve with state importance.

We are in the heart of the Springdale Savannah, which is the state of Illinois's largest native prairie Savannah.

It's 14 acres right in the heart of the cemetery.

There are no graves in this area except for what we're looking at here, which was a monument built by the Cole family.

A.S.

Cole was the first successful distiller in Peoria.

At one time, Peoria was the whiskey capital of the world and his wealth entitled him to purchase this lovely family lot in the middle of the Savannah and this very spooky tree, it's a sassafast.

If you notice, Mr.

Cole's headstone is to the left and his footstone is to the right.

So this sassafas is planted right on top of his casket.

A lot of people report seeing or experiencing supernatural activity.

I've never seen anything supernatural, but I have heard my name called before when I'm just walking alone.

And I don't know if that's just my imagination or if it's my ancestors who are buried here just saying, keep up the good work.

One of Springdale's most famous residents is the namesake of one of Illinois' major universities.

This is Lydia Moss Bradley.

She was the daughter of an American revolution patriot.

Her first husband died and left her quite a fortune.

Rather than save that for herself, she created and established a local school for clock making.

And over time that became the Bradley Polytechnic Institute, which continued growing over the years and is now Bradley University.

She had, I think, six kids, none of whom made it to adulthood.

No fortune was going to protect her from death.

Think about the suffering a mother must have to lose all of these children and continue pressing forward and continue trying to make the world a better place.

I think that speaks to the character and grit of not just her, but so many people of that era that we can learn a lot from today.

Our next stop was a stark reminder that so many graves are unmarked and right under our feet, but they're no less important.

So we are not too far from Springdale Cemetery, but we're on a very busy, just right off of a very busy road here.

And this really is a gravel parking lot of sorts.

Tell me about this area.

Moffitt Cemetery was a smaller cemetery here, few thousand people buried here.

This was one of those smaller cemeteries that kind of dwindled over time as Springdale took off.

And eventually it was more or less forgotten, paved over as you can see here.

And that's a real shame because there's some really, really moving, important stories that were almost lost here and really a credit to the people in Peoria who realized this amazing history that was fading away just in the last few years kind of cleaned up this site, put up a flagpole and some plaques and are trying to bring the place back to life a little bit.

One person in particular has a huge place in American history.

Tell me about her.

Yeah, so Nance Leggins Costley, she was born down in Southern Illinois into, and it's a little bit legally murky, either some form of indentured servitude or outright slavery in what was supposed to be a free state.

And eventually she was auctioned off.

When the man who purported to be her owner died, she was interested in suing for her freedom.

And the country lawyer that she hired to represent her was none other than Abraham Lincoln before he was president.

So she's kind of given credit as the first enslaved person that old Abe Lincoln helped free.

If you drive 40 minutes south of Peoria, you'll find Oak Hill Cemetery in Lewistown.

Literary fans from all over the world used to flock to this cemetery to see the graves of characters straight out of a wildly popular poetry anthology.

In 1915, this collection of poems was published, Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, and it was a bestseller.

It's a collection of over a hundred poems and each poem is an epitaph about a person who's buried at a fictional cemetery called The Hill in the town of Spoon River, which is coincidentally a real river not far from Lewistown.

So the book was a big sensation.

It was a really creative way of telling the history of a small town.

Masters, the author, he fictionalized it just barely, but he was for the most part telling real stories that he heard growing up.

At the time in literature and in pop culture, there was this idea that the city was the place to be and small town, back roads America.

It was full of boring, simple hicks.

Masters grew up in this area.

These were his friends and family that were being derided, and he wanted to write this kind of messy, scandalous history of his neck of the woods that showed that small town life was every bit as complicated and interesting and messy as life in the big cities.

And so many of the people in it are buried right here.

Our fourth stop, old Concord cemetery in the middle of the cornfields.

So we are about five minutes from the tiny town of Petersburg and Menard County, but this is really remote.

I mean, we had to go down some dirt roads to get here.

I'm glad we did because we're on the top of a hill and this is an extremely important grave.

This is the original resting place of a young woman named Anne Rutledge who was, depending on who you believe, in some way very important to the future president, Abraham Lincoln.

They were living about five miles away in the little frontier hamlet of New Salem, and by some accounts, they were in love.

Abe was a rookie lawmaker and he was away at the Capitol, which was not Springfield at the time, a little bit further south in Vandalia.

He received word that his friend, we'll call her, was gravely ill with typhoid fever and he raced back, but he was too late to say goodbye.

She was pretty far gone by the time he reached her.

She passed away at the age of 22, and by all accounts, this was a devastating moment for the young Abraham Lincoln.

He entered what seems to be a suicidal depression where his friends were worried about him and kept a watch over him.

And every day he'd make the five mile walk out here to be by her side.

There's a great quote on the other side of this monument here, which is a quote attributed to Lincoln.

I cannot bear to think of her out there alone in the storm.

Picture this young man, no clue that he would someday be president of the United States, just a grieving young man.

So this is the place, as they put it, where Lincoln wept.

Well, we have made it to the last stop of the day.

The sun is almost down, but we made it.

And this would not be a cemetery tour without stopping at arguably the most famous grave in Illinois, Lincoln's tomb here in Springfield.

Yeah, it's certainly our state's most famous grave.

You could say perhaps it is the most famous grave of them all, depending on how you measure.

Oak Ridge Cemetery where we are is actually the second most visited cemetery in the country, only after Arlington National Cemetery.

In fact, local legend, we don't have documentation of this, but in Peoria is that Lincoln who visited Peoria often is said to have wandered Springdale Cemetery and liked it so much that he was actually part of the movement to establish this cemetery.

And he told his wife that he wanted to be buried here.

And there was a movement among the national elite to lay Lincoln to rest in Washington DC, but Mary fought very hard to honor Lincoln's wishes and bring him home to Springfield.

John Kokoris, thank you so much.

This has been such a great day.

We've learned a lot.

We've done a lot of traveling in the car, but it's been so much fun.

Thank you very much for hosting.

Thanks for having me out.

It's always great to talk to another buff.

And if you or any of your audience wants to learn more about any of this stuff, go to your local library.

We've got the info you need.

When actors get into physical fights or sword fights on stage, those moments are very well rehearsed and creating the choreography and the safety of those moments really is an art in itself.

Enter Paul Dennhardt.

He spends his career teaching actors how to hit, parry, fall, and well, fight.

A successful fight can't just be a fight.

I mean, spectacle's an element of it, sure, but it's got to be more than that.

I mean, I've seen lots of fights.

Very, very flashy and I'm like, "What in the world just happened?"

More than flashy moved, I'm interested in, did I tell the story?

Did I advance the plot?

Did I move the play forward?

The fight happens because words fail.

The characters have gotten to a place where they're not able to resolve the conflict through conversation, so it turns into physical violence.

I had no idea that this position was even a possibility.

I was a late bloomer.

I graduated high school and I wanted to go into theater, but the whole family said, "Don't do it.

It's too hard.

You'll never succeed."

I wound up selling life insurance and I was driving to work one day and I had these calluses on my knuckles and I didn't know how I got them.

And I went, "Oh my God, I'm so miserable.

I'm chewing on myself."

And so I though, when was I last happy?

And it was when I though I was going into theater.

So I got my MFA in directing at Western Illinois University.

While I was there, this guy named Robin McFarker, who taught at University of Illinois, came in for a couple of weekends and did some workshops on stage combat.

And I remember picking up a sword and just going, "Oh my God, how do I learn more about this?

This is so cool."

Fights do have to be convincing.

People wouldn't believe how long we spend once the fights are choreographed doing it in almost Tai Chi-like slow motion.

And you do that so that it gets so into the actor's bodies that they don't have to think about it when they're performing it on stage, right?

They can focus on what's my character trying to do, not what in the world am I doing with this prop?

Okay, so let's have a go.

How slow can you go?

Slow.

Eventually, you have to get it at a speed that is safe to perform eight times a week and is convincing for the audience.

If it's too slow, it's not going to look exciting.

It's not going to seem real.

On the other hand, if it's too fast and the audience starts to get concerned about the safety of the actors, they're not watching the play anymore either.

So it's got to have the appearance of reckless abandon yet be meticulously choreographed and so into the actors' bodies that they can do it eight times a week and no one actually gets hurt.

If I've done my job and we've gone slow enough long enough, that'll be a piece of cake.

I mean, ultimately, safety first, and then we can work on aesthetics.

Good.

Let's try it again.

Connect if you can.

Hi, Elias, could I attack you?

I've been waiting for so long.

Hi friend.

How are you?

All Montagues and B, really slow because I'm old.

It's so important in terms of safety that you create material for the actors that they're not every night going, "Oh God, I've got to do this thing that Paul Dennhardt makes me do."

And if they're feeling uncomfortable with it, unsafe with it, they're not going to be able to approach it with a sense of reckless abandon.

So I've got to make sure that whatever that material is, it's something the actor feels they can execute safely because I don't have to do it.

He has to do it.

Now I'll turn.

You have to learn to not attach to any of that because it's not my job to showcase myself.

It's my job to tell the story and help the actors tell the story along with the design team so these people are leaning forward and not sitting back.

In Romeo and Juliet, when the fight happens, all Shakespeare tells us is they fight, Tibbalt falls.

Okay, that's not very helpful.

So I read the play very carefully looking for clues in the text.

Mercutio specifically describes his impression of how Tibbalt fights.

He says he fights by the book of arithmetic, one, two, and the third in your bosom.

So he fights very technically with Benvolio.

He's kind of the Pacific person of the group.

I do, but keep the peace.

Put up my sword or manage it to part these men with me.

I'm not here to fight.

I'm trying to stop the fighting.

And so that tells me that Tibbalt is attacking first.

So I look for clues like that in the text to help me develop the storyline of the fight.

We understand why is this person attacking?

Are they fighting aggressively?

Are they fighting defensively?

Do they want to shame the other person?

Do they want to injure them?

Do they want to kill them?

Do they want to escape?

I think when I started, it felt very militaristic.

My teachers would scream at me, sit in your stance, get lower, do this.

I just don't do that anymore, right?

I mean, that's insane because what you're doing is you're triggering people's startle reflex.

Oh, okay.

And then you're training them to try hard.

And I try to teach people, I don't want you to try hard.

I want you to embrace the means whereby, embrace the process.

It's okay not to be good at it right away.

You're not going to be good at anything right away, but that doesn't mean you're bad at it.

It just means you just need the time and the repetition to develop.

In terms of what I've left behind, I have students who have done so well, who are making their own work, who are going to go farther than I have.

And so that's, I think, the best legacy I've left behind is kind of giving back to them what David Boucher and Drew Frazier and David Leon gave to me.

Which how do I do this, Perry?

Beautifully.

And teaching them the most important thing, I guess, is to be the kind of person that people want to work with.

It's a difficult career and it's not a lot of money, and so you want to be the kind of person that people enjoy working with.

As I think about it, more than storytelling, more than anything, having people be that kind of artist is what's important to me.

And finally, the University of Illinois is celebrating the 150th birthday, so to speak, of a small patch of land that is so important to the university that they built their undergraduate library underground so it wouldn't throw shade on the corn.

Here's a look at why the Morrow plots is so important.

Amidst the bustling campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign stands a remarkable piece of history that has endured for 150 years and still going strong.

One is oftentimes lucky in research to have a 20-year duration study, but how rare it is to have a study that goes over 50 years, let alone 150 years.

That is remarkable.

The Morrow plots are the US's longest continuous experiment in agriculture and the second oldest in the world.

This is a living monument to the land grant mission at Illinois.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Illinois was established as a premier land grant university giving access to higher education to working class people.

It emphasized the technical sciences, like how to grow better crops.

The Morrow plots were started by a professor named Manley Miles.

In 1875, Miles went to visit the Rothamstead plots located in England.

These are the oldest continuous agricultural experiments in the world.

He was so impressed by the scientific approach to agriculture.

Farming is location specific, so we can't use all of England's data and apply it to Illinois.

We need that data to come from Illinois, so they decided to start their own version here.

At the time, there was actually a lot of resistance to the experiment.

People really thought that prairie soils in the Midwest could just support crops forever and you would never have to treat them or add any nutrients back into the soil.

We proved that wrong.

Miles got to work, creating plots to test whether rotating crops could benefit yields.

They would quickly expand into 10 testing plots under agriculture professor and eventual namesake, George Morrow.

The university would eventually split up the experiments and implement subplots, applying treatments such as no fertilizer in one subplot and other nutrients in another.

But as Illinois' campus grew, they were slowly reduced to make room for new buildings.

Now we have what we have today, three rotation treatments, which is a combination of how we rotate crops and whether or not, and if we do, how, adding fertility.

The morrow plots have three primary blocks.

The first block is one crop and it's corn, so it's corn after corn after corn, and it's been that way since the beginning, 150 years.

The second block is two crops.

So it's corn, soybeans, corn, soybeans.

And the third block has three crops.

The first year is corn, the second year is oats, and then all of that third year we're harvesting alfalfa.

It is tight quarters around the plots and the plots themselves are fairly small.

We have roughly an acre, so we have to use equipment that matches that.

We have miniature combines that go out there.

We're continuously collecting data that is new and relevant and novel to the world around.

Today we are doing greenhouse gas emissions here in the moral plots.

The main gases that we are looking for are methane, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and then nitrous oxide.

We do it weekly to know how this can have an effect in our culture.

This former patch of prairie has helped confirm many of the agricultural principles we now take for granted.

Its long-term studies of synthetic fertilizers, hybrid seeds, and soil organic matter have shaped modern farming, boosting yields and improving soil health for communities around the world.

Throughout it all, the plot's data has been carefully gathered, rigorously analyzed, and made available for scientists around the globe.

The Morrow Plots data set is really valuable because it can show you what happens to land over really long timescales, longer than even someone who's farmed their entire life will be able to notice.

I typically receive requests on a monthly basis from researchers all over the world who have interest in accessing the data.

There's many parts of the world that share a similar environment as the Corn Belt of Illinois, and these regions stand to benefit from our communication.

I'd argue that that goes both ways.

In the last five years, we've worked hard to make the Morrow Plots potential fully realized.

We're trying to maximize their value for science research.

As an example of this, we began a multi-year project funded in part by the Department of Energy to understand the metabolism and the structure of the soil.

Basically, we can do an MRI like you do of a human body, but of soil.

What you see behind me is quite unique.

This is the first time that the Mora Plots have been studied for soil structure.

They have pores, they have holes from earthworms, from roots, but we don't understand that connectivity, that network that lies beneath our feet.

Knowing what it's like helps us better understand the way that we produce crops.

So we're pulling cores from the mora plots and from three different rotation treatments.

And then we're transporting them to the cold room and we'll be sectioning those samples into different depths.

We are shipping them to national labs to where they will do a lot of more intense analysis.

Yeah, there's a warm rain there.

We now have the capability to fly through this piece of soil and see all this pore space and the structure of it.

It's very unique.

The insights of these analyses being cutting edge are phenomenal.

We can understand soil health after 149 years of cropping management treatments.

The long-term success of the Morrow Plots inspired researchers to break new ground, launching a modern research plot to address the challenges of today's farmers called the Alma Matter Plots.

The Alma matter plots are a research field where we are standing right now, and this is what is going to become the longest and largest field experiment with subsurface tiles in the country.

In Illinois, we have flat landscape and the soil is able to hold a lot of water.

Having these type of systems helps to keep the soil drier and consequently reduce the soil erosion and the loss of nutrients by runoff.

We are measuring in real time temperature, moisture and greenhouses gas release from the soil, but we are also taking water and gases samples to bring to our lab for further analysis.

The moral plots keeps giving us important information, but now we have new questions that we need new infrastructure and modern tools to test.

I think the appropriate time to think of establishing new plots, we have the right next generation of scientists that will take that forward.

We have to have a connection to the impact that we have as a college to society.

That's what is really important right now.

How are we going to grow food for the next 150 years?

The moral plots on this campus, they symbolize long-term thinking, innovation in food and agriculture.

We began and we still are committed to leading on ag research to benefit farmers in the state and in the greater US.

It's still interesting to have this living history of Illinois agriculture, and I hope that they continue to adapt and evolve like they have over this first 150 years.