Home of Jacob Earnest

Home of Jacob Earnest

Image Credit:
Jacob Earnest and Grandnieces, c. 1909/1910, Courtesy of Betty Nesbitt Rowell, Urbana, IL.

208 S. East Street, Homer, IL

Jacob Earnest arrived in Vermilion County, Illinois, in 1871 from Greene County, Tennessee, where he and his family had been enslaved. By 1880, he was working 404 acres of farm, pasture, and forest land around Carroll in Vermilion County and Homer in Champaign County, adding 80 acres in 1885. In 1897, he bought his Homer home and the adjacent lot. (The house presently at this location is not the original.) A respected farmer, blacksmith, teamster, and harvester, he was known for creating a steam powered horse drawn thresher machine and established his own threshing ring to harvest farms in the area.

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Jacob Earnest’s Grave:  Lost Grove Cemetery, County Road 2500 E just west off County Road 800 N, 13 miles from Urbana, IL.  Jacob Earnest’s grave is unmarked.

Decade:

1890-1899

People:

  • Jacob Earnest

Location(s):

  • Homer, Illinois

Additional Homer Trail Sites

Military

Homer G.A.R. Cemetery

The Homer Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.) Cemetery was established in the 1860s and is the final resting place for some early African American families and local African Americans who fought in the Civil War.

Wiley & Frances Jones

Wiley Jones came to Homer from Decatur, Georgia, after the Civil War with William C. Custer. Jones would run a barber shop for years in Homer, was a trustee of the Homer Savings and Loan Association, and was nominated to serve on the Village Board several times. In 1877, Wiley Jones and Mrs. Frances Roberson Morgan were married at the home of Rev. Whitlock. Frances died in 1914 and Wiley Jones died in 1919 in a fire while lighting his stove. Wiley and Frances are buried in the Homer G.A.R. Cemetery.

Homer High School

The Homer High School building where Mary Mack (née Morgan, step-daughter of Wiley Jones) became the first African American to graduate in Homer, where William Walter Smith became the first African American to graduate from University of Illinois, and where Robert Earnest and others attended, no longer exists. William Frank Earnest, Class of 1915, who was the first African American to die in combat during World War I in France, graduated from the Homer Opera House. His signatures are still found on the stage.

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