Jane Minton Home Mirror's Family's Historic Integrity
</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[ Jane Minton's gorgeous home at 223 East North Street--begun in 1905 and completed in 1910 by her grandfather Dr. Julius Boeheim--mirrors the integrity of her intrepid life.
Her very birth sent shockwaves through her native Pinckneyville because her father Dr. James Templeton was 75 years old and her mother only 38. After eight childless years of marriage they had told no one of the impending birth.
On her sixth birthday, Jane was stricken with polio, paralyzed from the waist down. She recovered from the disease, wearing a brace to her hip until her ninth birthday when numerous surgeries and a diligent therapy under her mother's supervision returned to her the ability to walk again, unassisted.
The integrity of her life, her collegiate career, her service to the Du Quoin Board of Education, the community and her work as academic adviser and mentor to hundreds of John A Logan College students is mirrored by her 17-room surroundings.
On Tuesday, Du Quoin Historic Preservation Commission president Deborah Chastain presented Mrs. Minton with the commission's historic preservation award, which recognizes extraordinary attention given by homeowners to the preservation of their great homes.
The Minton home and its furnishings are unapproachable in terms of historic value anywhere else in Du Quoin. But, she discounts what you see. "This house has no storage, so what you're looking at everywhere is my life," she laughs. A computer sits squarely in the middle of a field of beautiful antiques--including her grandfather's wooden medical cabinet and barrister bookcases with leaded glass doors. Contrary to belief, the Boeheim home was not constructed as a turn of the century Sears packaged home. It was built by the famed George Barber of Barber & Barber of Knoxville, Tenn., constructors of some of the Midwest's most beautiful homes. It's transitional in design, borrowing from turn-of the-century Victorian and craftsman lines. It doesn't have the trademark turrets of a Victorian home. The lines of the home speak for themselves. As you walk from the front door to the back, you pass through three great halls with period living rooms, dining rooms and studies on either side.
The home empties into a lush shaded lawn at the rear, and leaves you standing in front of Dr. Boeheim's carriage house, the feature that sets the home apart from all others.
Inside, her favorite keepsake isn't a piece of the architecture or the furniture--all breathtaking--but instead an ancestral needlepoint sampler made by a 13-year-old dated "1827" bearing the handcrafted initials of all of the family members up until that time.
Jane's grandfather, Dr. J.J. Boeheim was born in 1865 in Germany. Jane's birth to Dr. James Scott and Isabella Jane Boeheim Templeton keeps this gifted gene pool intact. Like her grandfather's career, Dr. Templeton's medical career of 56 years was long and illustrious. He delivered 3000 children in their homes, another 300 in hospitals--approximating the town's population. He served as a delegate to the Illinois State Medical Society from 1926 to 1939 and served as president from 1941-42. He served as Pinckneyville's mayor and a bank board member.. Like the family, the home qualifies for national recognition, but has escaped the national registry of historic sites only because, Jane laughs, "I'd have to take pictures of all the rooms."