In 1984, an advertisement in the Chicago Tribune, heralding the new townhouse development at this location, had this to say about the history of the area. "More than 100 years ago, John George Spoerlein bought a poultry farm that bore his name through four generations. A sense of tradition and history prompted the developers to retain the old family name as the name of the community of 176 townhouses."
My family and I pass this glacial erratic when we visit nearby establishments to refuel ourselves and our vehicles on the way to or from our church across the street. I often imagine that this big ol' rock has been here for at least as long as the old Spoerlein Farm was here, and many thousands of years before that. I imagine generations of children sitting on this rock, pondering life, hiding treasures in its cleft. I imagine the developers deciding to work around it as they laid out the streets leading to the townhouses and the shopping center.
There is a limit on earthcaches focused on erratics so I decided to place this traditional cache to highlight this ancient rock.
A glacial erratic is a piece of rock that differs from the size and type of rock native to the area in which it rests. "Erratics" take their name from the Latin word errare, and are carried by glacial ice, often over distances of hundreds of kilometres. Erratics can range in size from pebbles to large boulders. (Wikipedia)
Here and there in Illinois are boulders lying alone or with companions in the corner of a field or someone's yard, on a courthouse lawn or a schoolyard. Many of them—colorful and glittering granites, banded gneisses, and other intricately veined and streaked igneous and metamorphic rocks—seem out of place in the stoneless, grassy knolls and prairies of our state. Their "erratic" occurrence is the reason for their interesting name.
These exotic rocks came from Canada and the states north of us. The continental glaciers of the Great Ice Age scoured and scraped the land surface as they advanced, pushing up chunks of bedrock and grinding them against each other or along the ground surface as the rock-laden ice sheets pushed southward. Sometimes you can tell where the erratic originally came from by determining the kind of rock it is. A large boulder of granite, gneiss, or other igneous or metamorphic rock may have come from Canada. Some erratics containing flecks of copper were probably transported here from the "Copper Range" of the upper peninsula of Michigan. Large pieces of copper have been found in glacial deposits of central and northern Illinois. Light gray to white quartzite boulders with beautiful, rounded pebbles of red jasper came from Ontario, Canada. Purplish pieces of quartzite, some of them banded, probably originated in Wisconsin. Most interesting are the few large boulders of Canadian tillite. Glacial till is an unsorted and unlayered mixture of clay, sand, gravel, and boulders that vary widely in size and shape. Tillite is glacial till that was deposited by a glacier many millions of years older than the ones that invaded our state during the Great Ice Age. This glacial till has been around so long that it has hardened into a gray to greenish gray rock containing a mixture of grains of different sizes and scattered pebbles of various types and sizes.
Many boulders were probably dropped directly from the melting front of the glacier. Others may have been rafted to their present resting places by icebergs in ancient lakes or on floodwaters of some long-vanished stream as it poured from a glacier. Still others, buried in the glacial deposits, could have worked their way up to the land surface as the surrounding loose soil repeatedly froze and thawed. When the freezing ground expands, pieces of rock tend to be pushed upward, where they are more easily reached by the farmer's plow and also more likely to be exposed by erosion.
Map showing spread of glaciers southward into the Midwest from CanadaMany erratics are of notable size and beauty. Some are used as monuments in courthouse squares and parks, or along highways. Many are marked with metal plaques to indicate an interesting historical spot or event.
Keep an eye out for erratics. You may find some of these glacial strangers in your neighborhood! (Illinois State Geological Survey)
