William Franklin and Rebecca Durell House

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.

From the record

“The William Franklin and Rebecca Durell House is a historic house located at 408 West 5th Street in Vermont, Illinois. Local businessman William Franklin Durell and his wife Rebecca had the house built in 1872; at the time, West 5th Street was a desirable neighborhood for prominent Vermont residents known as "The Lane".”
Wikipedia article William Franklin and Rebecca Durell House, CC BY-SA 4.0.

One of 38 National Register listings published here for Fulton County · listed in 1996 · category: Building.

Sources: the Wikipedia article · the case file at the National Archives · the National Register database, National Park Service

The listing

What is counted as historic. The nomination lists 2 buildingss as contributing to the listing.
Listed as. Durell, William Franklin and Rebecca, House - the National Register files a house under its owner's surname.
Address. 408 W. 5th St., Vermont, 61484
When was it listed? November 1996
Category. building
Also known as. Vermont, Illinois MPS
Township. Vermont township
National Register reference number. 96001292 - the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.

What happened here

An account from the chapter on Vermont township. The inset identifies its exact source book and publication year.

From History of Fulton County, Illinois;, published 1879 - Vermont Township

The Cholera Of 1851

It will be remembered that this scourge appeared in New Orleans in the fiill of 1848, and raged there during the following winter. It made its appearance in St. Louis in February, 1849. The first case was attended by Prof. Barber, of McDowell's Medical College. The faculty laughed at him for pronouncing it cholera; but in a few days after Dr.

Read the rest of this passage

The ground it stands on

19,696 words

The chapter on Vermont Township in History of Fulton County, Illinois;, published 1879 names Vermont. This is what it says, exactly as the scans read.

One of the best improved townships in Fulton county is the one the history of which we now write; yet to attempt a history of the township separate and distinct from that of the town woukl be to recapituhite or repeat in a great measure what is to be said of the town of Vermont. Hence witli a few references to some of the leading historical items of the township, we will pass to the history of the town.

Passage source: History of Fulton County, Illinois;, published 1879.

It is probable that Moses Davis was the first settler to locate in the township, who came as early as 1832 and erected his cabin onehalf mile southwest of where the town of Vermont is located. The first Church was that of the Protestant Methodist denomination, and was organized in 1843. The society erected a building the same year. The first school-house was built in 183G on the Public Square in Vermont. It was constructed of hewn logs. James Spicer taught the first school in the same year. The first saw-mill in the township was built by Job Bogue in 1838 or '39. The first grist-mill was built by Rhodes Dilwortii in Vermont in 1840. The first tannery was erected by James Boyle in 1843. On the farm of Jonathan Bogue stands the first barn that was ever erected in the township. It was built by Jesse Cox about the time of Job Bogue's settlement in this township.

Passage source: History of Fulton County, Illinois;, published 1879.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

Read the whole chapter on Vermont Township - 19,696 words on its settlement, mills, schools and churches.

Storms near this property

15 since 1998

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The National Weather Service names Vermont, the town this property stands in, in 15 storm reports between 1998 and 2024: 7 hail, 5 thunderstorm wind, 2 tornado, 1 flash flood. The reports record 1 injury. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date opens the federal record of that event.

When	Event	Place named	Harm	What the report says
August 2009	Thunderstorm Wind	Vermont	1 hurt, $100,000	Approximately 3/4 of the town of Vermont had tree damage, with numerous trees snapped off at the base or uprooted. One person was injured when a tree was blown down onto them.
August 2017	Thunderstorm Wind	Vermont	$5,000	A tree was blown down, taking out a power line.
May 2024	Hail	Vermont	-	Hail ranged between a half inch and half dollar, with most being around one inch.
July 2024	Thunderstorm Wind	Vermont	-	Several 3 to 6-inch diameter tree branches were blown down.
April 2023	Thunderstorm Wind	Vermont	-	Several power lines were blown down in Vermont.
April 2023	Hail	Vermont	-	Multiple storm-chasers experienced baseball-sized hail which shattered their car windshields near Vermont.
July 2010	Flash Flood	Vermont	-	Clusters of training thunderstorms produced excessive amounts of rainfall in southern Fulton County during the late evening hours of July 19th. Rainfall rates of 2.00 per hour for more than 3 hours produced widespread flash flooding, which closed nearly every rural road and stranded motorists in southern parts of the county. Total rainfall accumulations reached nearly 6.00 around Astoria.
May 1998	Thunderstorm Wind	Vermont	-	Thunderstorm winds blew down a large tree limb onto a car in Vermont. No one was in the car at the time and damage was minor.
April 1998	Tornado (F0)	Vermont	-	A tornado briefly touched down in a field on the outskirts of Vermont. No injuries or damage were reported.
May 1998	Tornado (F0)	Vermont	-	A tornado briefly touched down in a field one mile south of Vermont. No injuries or damage were reported.
April 2023	Hail	Vermont	-	no account filed
May 2023	Hail	Vermont	-	no account filed
May 2019	Hail	Vermont	-	no account filed
May 2015	Hail	Vermont	-	no account filed
June 2014	Hail	Vermont	-	no account filed

Every storm recorded in Fulton County

Map coverage status

No historic map-sheet match is published for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary. Browse the county's mapped places while that work is pending.

Listed places nearby

6 within 8 miles

Other National Register properties close enough to walk or drive between, ordered by distance from this one. Both positions come from the same geocoding pass that matched these properties to their map sheets.

Property	Distance	Listed
Patterson Hamer House	under 500 feet	1996
Joab Mershon House	under 500 feet	1996
Elsworth Snowden House	0.1 miles	1996
Edith Chipman House	0.2 miles	1996
Charles Emmor McCormick House	0.2 miles	1996
William Hoopes House	0.2 miles	1996

Sources for this property

National Archives record	The nomination case file for reference 96001292 in Record Group 79.
Wikipedia article	Community-written account of this property, licensed CC BY-SA.
Fulton County	All 38 listed properties in this county.

Provenance

Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.