Two pictures of Beatrice Gurler, popularly known as Bea, grace the walls of the home she lived in for nearly all of her long life. One, hung above the mantle of the fireplace, is a painting of a young girl standing ramrod straight with arms folded and a serious, if not stern, look on her face. The artist evidently saw a child with a good deal of self-respect. She looks as if she is thinking about something more important than what she was wearing or what was planned for dinner and expects no less from you.

In the second picture, a photograph of a very old woman sitting in a straight-backed chair fixes the photographer with the same look. This is Bea at ninety, not long before she died, in 1977.

From the time she was nine years old until she was past ninety, Beatrice Gurler was DeKalb's "Bea" pursuing with vigor the best that life had to offer. As a child she was photographed wearing riding pants and seated side-saddle on her horse. Another picture shows her standing on the steps of her house with a baseball bat in her hands, challenging you to beat her at the game. As a young woman she joined the ranks of daughters of the prosperous middle-class whose families sent them to college, where one of the things she learned was the new game of basketball. She brought her love and skill in that game back home, to the girl's school in Sycamore called Waterman Hall as coach of its basketball team. Bea well represented the tradition of forward-looking progressivism in her home town.

Progress wasn't all fun and games, of course. Like her brother Charles, Bea went to work, in the banking business locally. After her mother died at the age of 73, she cared for her father who lived to be 83. She also seriously pursued ideas through reading and discussion, priding herself on her up-to-date knowledge. She made her home a sort of community intellectual center, a place full of books and people interested in them.

Bea's early physical and intellectual vigor persisted into her later years. She was just as good a host when wintering in Mexico in her old age as she had been during winters spent in DeKalb. Her strong mind was housed in a body she kept strong also. A friend remembers seeing Bea raking up all the maple leaves on her wide lawn in her final autumn--a chore regarded as a community project, now that Bea is gone.

Bea wasn't indiscriminately enthusiastic about every change that progress wrought. After her father's death in 1940, she took steps to make Gurler House more like the home the young girl had loved. She removed the long front porch and a room at the back of the house where George Gurler had displayed his collection of stuffed birds. In so doing she restored the simplicity of the original design.

Her additions to the house were the kind that encouraged her own style of sociability. The sitting-room fireplace with which she replaced the standard stove warmed and cheered her guests and encouraged purposeful conversation among them on long cold evenings. Bea is also the one who divided the house into two homes: an apartment for herself on the west side, and one on the east for her friends Clara Sperling and Louise Nelson. This arrangement turned out to be ideal also for the use to which the house would be put in the 1980's and 90's. The east side today accomodates Gurler House's on-site program directors, while in Bea's old apartment, people regularly come together to talk about what needs to be done and to enjoy each other's company with good music and good talk and the occasional potluck supper. What would the irrepressible "Bea" appreciate about Gurler House today? Surely, the shelves still full of old bound volumes; the many straight-backed wooden chairs; the old-fashioned furnishings in the upstairs bedrooms; the candles in the windows at Christmastime that invite those outside to enter; and perhaps most of all, that it still serves as a place where the ties that bind people together in community are regularly, deliberately and joyfully strengthened.

The Gurler House Association hopes and intends that Bea's house shall reflect her life and spirit for many years to come.

The Gurler Family

Bea Gurler was nine years old when her father George moved his family into the house that had stood at 205 Pine since 1857. The year was 1893. Her cousins, the children of her father's brother Henry, had been living since 1888 in a house at 304 South Fourth Street--the Ellwood Mansion. Everyone said it was magnificent; and one of her cousins growing up there would become Mrs. Perry Ellwood and hold forth at the town's most magnificent home of all. Bea's parents George and Zillah (Newett) Gurler, on the other hand, evidently shared a taste in homes that favored the elegance of simplicity. The citizens of DeKalb generally must have appreciated both. It was the unimposing yet dignified structure on Pine Street--where the back door was always open--that became the home still fondly known in DeKalb as "The Gurler House."

Bea's father and uncle were both prominent businessmen, joint owners of a number of dairies. So clean were the Gurler Brother's creameries, so pure the milk that came from them, that a raw sample sent to the Paris Exposition of 1900 was still fresh and sweet after a trip of ten days on the ocean and for four days beyond!

Uncle Henry had perfected his sanitation techniques over decades of hard work and experimentation. A progressive dairyman with the quality of his product and the well-being of its consumers uppermost in his mind, Henry Gurler recognized the need for absolutely pure milk. In the burgeoning metropolis of Chicago just 70 miles due east were thousands of infants whose health, if not their lives, might depend upon a steady supply of milk that hadn't picked up any harmful bacteria on its way to market. Other raw milk might be treated with chemicals to keep it pure while it was hauled from the farms to the city, but Henry determined to keep his milk untainted by bad bacteria or chemicals. Eventually, pasteurization would become the method of choice for keeping milk pure: but before that still-controversial innovation, Henry Gurler's work set standards for hygiene in the production of milk for human consumption that are the model for progressive dairies today.

After 1896, when the Gurler brothers dissolved their partnership, Henry set up departments for research and instruction in dairying in several universities and wrote two books on the subject. He became nationally known. George meanwhile became President of the State Dairy Association and Vice President of the Board of Trade in Elgin. He initiated the historic meeting which organized the DeKalb County Farmer's Institute, from which the American Farm Bureau Federation was born.

George Gurler was known for other pursuits as well. A lifelong sportsman and hunter, he was deeply interested in the preservation of the prairie's legacy of wild game. His collection of stuffed prairie fowl and other native animals enlightened local college biology students for years after his death. Having enlisted at the age of 17 in the 15th Illinois Infantry of the Grand Army of the Republic to fight in the Civil War, George had the earned the right to ride his white horse in town parades. In the years just before the United State's entrance into the Second World War, George was the last survivor of the Civil War in DeKalb County and held the title of Grand Marshall of the Memorial Day Parade.

George and Henry Gurler had come to Illinois in 1856 as boys of twelve and sixteen, with their parents and two sisters. This family was part of the second wave of settlers in the area, who brought new energies to the effort to plant farms and trees in the untamed prairie soil. The elders, Harriet Fisk Hopkins Gurler and Benjamin Gurler, remained on the farm for thirty years and died just a year apart, within several years of moving to DeKalb. Like many of their generation, they lived to see their sons become prosperous, prominent, and progressive leaders who served not only the people among whom they lived, but who also worked to improve the quality of life far beyond the borders of DeKalb.

Did Bea's distinguished family take pride too in its free-spirited daughter? Did they welcome to the likely effect of her personality and pursuits on the family reputation? It seems today that her warmth and sociability, independence, intellectual pursuits, and good care for the landmark that was her home is the family legacy that may longest survive the ravages of time.