The property also includes a simple two-story, side gabled residence built in 1898, with a rear 1+1⁄2-story addition.

In September, 1861, a Confederate detachment encamped on the crest of Allegheny Mountain, just ten miles to the southeast.

On December 13, the Rebels repulsed a Union advance at this new position, thus ensuring that control of the turnpike would not be lost.

But that advantage was secured at a significant cost: An unmarked grave on the property is said to contain the remains of more than 80 Confederate soldiers who died of their wounds, disease and exposure that winter.

In 1869, Peter Dilly Yeager (1829-1906), Andrew's son, who had spent a portion of the war in a Union prison, rebuilt Travelers’ Repose on the foundations of the earlier establishment.

His daughter, Jessie Beard Powell (1915-2013), a great-great-granddaughter of John Yeager, Sr, resided at the Repose for all of her 97 years and long kept alive stories of the old days.

(One of them: that the 1,200 Rebel soldiers who invaded her family's farm exacted a cost of 500 of their sugar maples which were cut down for military purposes.)

Longstanding local lore asserts that Abraham Lincoln stayed here during his early journeys between Illinois and Washington, DC.