The Robert Allerton Park is a 1,517 acre (6.0 km²) park, nature center, and conference center located near Monticello, Illinois on the upper Sangamon River. The park and manor house, The Farms, were laid out and built by industrialist heir, artist, art collector, and garden designer Robert Allerton and his adopted son John Gregg Allerton, who gave the complex to the University of Illinois in 1946. The Allerton Natural Area within the park is a National Natural Landmark. As of 2007, the park was used by approximately 100,000 visitors per year. It has been described as "a vast prairie turned into a personal fantasy land of neoclassical statues, Far Eastern art, and huge European-syle gardens surrounding a Georgian-Revival mansion" .[1]
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The section of the park north of the winding Sangamon River includes Allerton's 40-room (30,000 sq. ft.) stately home, The Farms (1900), a 1/4-mile-long (0.4 km) formal garden, and a 11⁄4-mile-long (2 km) sculpture walk extending westward from the end of the formal garden. The sculpture walk concludes with The Sun Singer, an Art Moderne bronze sculpted by Carl Milles in 1929, one of more than 100 sculptures in the gardens on the grounds.[2] The Sun Singer underwent a $39,000 restoration in June–July 2007 to remove vandal graffiti and restore the patina of the 16 feet (5 m), 2,300 lb (1,000 kg; 160 st) sculpture.[3][4]
The section of the park south of the Sangamon River was left almost entirely natural open space preserve during the Allerton's era. It now contains a network of nature trails sloping down from parking areas toward the Sangamon River. Several of the trails have signs describing the floodplain river ecology of central Illinois. The southern section also contains a 55 acre (0.2 km²) restored prairie, one of the oldest prairie restorations in Illinois, begun in 1955 and now approaching maturity. The southern section of the park and adjacent Sangamon River bottomland, a parcel of 1,000 acres (4.0 km²), was designated as the Allerton Natural Area, a U.S. National Natural Landmark, in 1971.
Robert Allerton (1873–1964) was heir to a Chicago banking and stockyard fortune created by his father, Samuel Allerton (1828–1914), one of the founders of Chicago's Union Stock Yards. Robert Allerton and his adopted son, John Gregg Allerton (1899–1986), transformed their country house, The Farms, into a central Illinois showplace estate, with activity climaxing in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Allerton also pursued ties with the University of Illinois. In 1919 while Allerton lived at "The Farms", he was asked by the University to serve on the Campus Plan Commission. This association continued until the completion of the 1923 Master Plan of the area south of the Auditorium. In 1926, Allerton established the Allerton Scholarships in American architecture. Annually, he invited graduating students in architecture and landscape architecture to "The Farms."
After the Great Depression, World War II, and U.S. federal income taxes made it more difficult to staff and operate stately homes like The Farms, the Allertons moved to Allerton Garden, Kaua'i, Hawaii, in 1946.
Allerton was a philanthropist for most of his life. Today, both Robert Allerton Park and Allerton Garden are open to the public. Allerton also made significant gifts and bequests to the Honolulu Academy of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.
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