Since I was in the area birding, I searched the Internet for other adventures in the area. I found Amboy. Here’s what’s there:
The Amboy Pharmacy with wood floors, a soda fountain and an old-fashioned candy rack full of hard-to-find candy bars. The specialty is the green river phosphate, but when I told the lady behind the counter that I’d come all the way from Crystal Lake to get one, she told me they were out. She recommended a chocolate soda instead. It took her a long time to make, and she complained that the stirring hurt her wrist. It was tasty, but I would have rather had the phosphate.
From the pharmacy, I went to Amboy City Park. In May, 1999, a storm knocked down a bunch of trees in the park. An Amboy couple has taken on the project of turning the stumps into carvings of famous people, animals, whatever they can think of. I parked and wandered around and, I think, took photos of them all — there are at least 21 of them. I won’t post them all. They were scattered around an area of about 15 acres and blended in with the trees. Somehow it managed to be goofy and cool at the same time.
After leaving the park, I saw everything else there was to see in Amboy (except the Depot Museum, which was closed). First was the Mormon Cemetery where one of the wives of Brigham Young is buried. It took me a while to find it — it’s unmarked except for the fact that it’s on Mormon Road. There were a few broken and unreadable tombstones in a small clearing, and I couldn’t find the one that marked the grave of that unfortunate woman.
There were also two historical markers. I finally tracked them down on the exterior walls of a couple of taverns. The second building on the left is the site of the first Carson Pirie Scott store, opened by John L. Pirie and Samuel Carson in 1854. it’s now the Long Branch Saloon. The building on the right is Wayne’s Trackside East Tavern. Ironically, it has a plaque on the wall that say Joseph Smith’s son was ordained in a building on this site in 1860.