Owner Finds Link to O’Sheas in Home

Kathy Keefe has been a history buff for a long time, so when she moved into her older Craftsman bungalow at 2109 North Seventh in Springfield, she tried to learn about its construction. Through trips to the Lincoln Library’s Sangamon Valley Collection -- which contains local history information, she learned the house was probably built in 1926, since that’s when it first appeared in the city’s annual directory. The directories also told her the names of the bungalow’s owners, but not the builder.

She learned that in 2020, by accident.

Keefe wanted to expand her small kitchen, so she had a wall between it and the dining room taken out. “When we removed it, we saw the frame to the former door to the kitchen, and inside of it was stenciled ‘John O’Shea, Springfield, ILL.’” She called O’Shea Builders to confirm the find and Bridget Ingebrigtsen mailed her Born to Build, O’Shea’s book about the company’s history.

In it, Keefe was delighted to find a photo of her home’s builder. “(John) is standing and has on a vest, a white shirt, and a tie. It looks like Sunday clothes, I imagine that’s what businessmen wore at that time,” Keefe says. She has placed the O’Shea stamped wood above her refrigerator and wants to copy John’s photo to place next to it.      

Her home’s interesting history didn’t end there. Keefe discovered that her home’s bricks were made by Springfield’s Poston Brick Company, a popular brickmaker when her home was constructed. Keefe learned that Poston bricks were among those used to cover the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1909, although those were bricks from the Poston brickmaker in Indiana, the father of the Springfield brickmaker.

Originally, the Indy raceway was made of crushed rock and tar, according to the speedway’s website. But that proved too dangerous for the course, which was created as a testing ground for automakers in the state. So, Indy’s owners bought 3.2 million bricks to cover the original track. Today, asphalt covers the bricks.

“It feels really special to have a house that is a part of history,” Keefe says.

It turns out that her house isn’t the only thing with a tie to the O’Sheas. Keefe grew up in Wood River, Illinois, near Alton, and worked at Wood River’s Catholic church, St. Bernard, for a while. “I worked in the rectory in the office. At the time, one of the priests was Father James O’Shea (Bud O’Shea’s brother). It’s a small world.”