In the mid-1850s, the Joseph Walker family established a farm on the northern edge of Normal. Frank Albert Walker (d. 1939) was about six-months old when his family arrived in McLean County. He was born near Cincinnati, Ohio, though available records differ as to his date of birth. According to his March 8, 1939 Pantagraph obituary, he was born in 1854. However, the 1924 History of McLean County states he was born in 1856.
After his father’s death, Frank Albert remained on the family farm, becoming a successful farmer and stockman in his own right. He retired in the late 1910s, and moved into the Town of Normal. From 1920 until his death in 1939, he lived at 402 North Linden Street with his sister Anna Walker. Both siblings never married.
Most likely, he attended Little Red School, located at the intersection of Raab Road and Linden Street. This collection includes Walker’s sixteen-page typed manuscript “The Story of ‘The Little Red School.’”
Frank Albert Walker was an amateur poet, and this collection includes more than seventy of his poems. He assembled the vast majority into the self-titled collection Some Neglected Flowers of Posey. The earliest poems from this collection date to 1911 and the latest to 1929.
These poems arrived by way of the West Allis (Wisconsin) Historical Society, though the staff could not recall how or why Walker’s papers ended up at their institution.