The childhood home of Edgar Lee Masters was originally located at 323 West Monroe Street in Petersburg. In 1960, the house was moved to the present location at the corner of 8th and Jackson Streets to preserve its history and serve as a monument to the author’s work and connection with Petersburg.
The house is owned by the City of Petersburg. In 2018, a 501c3 non-for-profit, Edgar Less Master Museum, Inc., was formed to manage and operate the home under the terms of a 20 year lease with the City. The organization, run by a board of directors, relies solely on donations for the upkeep of the premises.
The following is from This is Menard County, Illinois, by John Drury, published 1955 by the Loree Co., Chicago, Illinois.
Edgar Lee Masters
When a young Menard County lawyer named Hardin Wallace Masters was elected state’s attorney of the county in 1872, he moved with his family into a modest white cottage in Petersburg, the county seat town. For a year or two previously, he had attempted farming near the village of Atterbury, in the western part of the county.
Now that Hardin Wallace Masters was state’s attorney of the county, he received from his father, Squire Masters, a well-to-do farmer of the region, the gift of a cottage in Petersburg. And when Hardin Masters moved into this cottage, with him came his three-year- old son, Edgar Lee Masters. Thus began the Menard County career late Edgar Lee Masters, renowned American poet and author. He is best known for his classic Spoon River Anthology, a volume of epitaphs of the Spoon River country in nearby Fulton County.
It was in Petersburg that Edgar Lee Masters spent his boyhood and here are located many episodes and scenes in his autobiography, Across Spoon River. Describing his boyhood home in Petersburg, Masters wrote: “This was a small house and common enough; but there was a large yard and trees and a barn. Later, my father built an addition to the house; but it had neither water save from a well nor heat save from stoves. And in winter it was cold as the arctic.” Young Edgar lived in this cottage until he was eleven years old, when his family moved to Lewistown, in Fulton County. After becoming a leading American poet, Masters wrote almost as many booi:s of prose as poetry, and one of these was Lincoln the Man, a biography. Masters died in Philadelphia in 1950 at the age of eighty-one. Since then, his boy- hood home in Petersburg, located at 523 Monroe Street, has become something of a literary landmark.