page_title: Isaac Newton Walker
section_title: Death and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Isaac Newton Walker / Death and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: View of the house built by Major Newton Walker in Lewistown, Illinois, in 1851. The image is extracted from "The Spoon River Country" by Josephine Craven Chandler.
context_page_description: Isaac Newton Walker was a pioneer farmer and merchant in Illinois, designer of the third Fulton County courthouse, member of the Illinois House of Representatives, and a close personal friend of Abraham Lincoln.
context_section_description: Major Walker died in Lewistown on September 14, 1899. He had been seriously ill with pneumonia earlier that year, and at the time of his death was nearly blind and deaf. Following his death, a number of newspapers throughout the country published his obituary, including The Denver Evening Post and the New York Tribune. Walker was interred in Lewistown's Oak Hill Cemetery, which is slightly southwest of Walker's house. Oak Hill Cemetery is also the location of the "Lincoln pillars:" two sandstone columns that were retrieved from the burnt remains of the old Fulton County courthouse that Major Walker had designed.
  Walker is mentioned by name in Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology:<
  And Major Walker who had talked
  
  With venerable men of the revolution ...
  This verse is from "The Hill," the introductory section of the work, and it likely refers to Walker having known such men as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Henry Clay when he lived in Virginia. 
  The burning of the courthouse that Walker designed is also immortalized in Masters' Spoon River Anthology, in the section "Silas Dement:"
  And the Spoon River ladder company
  
  Came with a dozen buckets and began to pour water
  
  On the glorious bonfire, growing hotter,
  
  Higher and brighter, till the walls fell in,
  
  And the limestone columns where Lincoln stood
  
  Crashed like trees when the woodman fells them ...
  As has been noted, Masters engaged in poetic license regarding the effects of the fire. The columns were made of sandstone, not limestone, and they remained upright after the fire.
  Major Walker's house, built in 1851, is still standing at 1127 N. Main Street in Lewistown. This ​1 ¹⁄₂-story brick building with hard maple flooring and cherry wood trim was built on property that Walker had bought from Ossian Ross. The house is distinguished by corbie gables at the north and south ends. Blueprints of the house plan and floor plan are available from the Library of Congress as part of the Historic American Buildings Survey collection. The Walker house is slated for restoration to its original condition by the group Willing to Invest in Lewistown's Dream (WILD) in a project named "Restoration 1127."
caption: View of the house built by Major Walker with its distinctive corbie gables.
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