Great Illinois history and science trip all in one. Bill gave us a tour and tons of info about the Funk prairie home & then the gem and rock museum. There are Underground Railroad artifacts, a chamber pot collection, horse drawn carriages, and the largest private rock collection in the world. We all learned a lot. Bill likes to teach kids! The Funk family really helped the world in many ways.

I wasn’t expecting to go to a home on a prairie and learn more than I ever bargained for about an amazingly impressive family, about their work ethic, their values, and their wealth of knowledge. Bill gave such a wonderful and informative tour and we SO enjoyed ourselves! The gem museum was really incredible too and I definitely want to go back one day and would love to spend more time just looking at all the gems and fossils there. Highly recommend visiting!

Not your run of the mill tour. We did the house & mineral museum tour & it was fantastic! Our guide, I think his name is Bill, was so informative & entertaining that the time flew by. So many great insights into life there long ago. The gem museum was amazing; both the house & gem museum were better than expected. Would love to go again.

Scheduled a Saturday morning tour of both the Funk Prairie Home as well as the Mineral Museum for my teenage daughter and myself. The museums are located nearby to each other, but you do need to drive out into the countryside near Shirley, IL to get there. Tours must be scheduled in advance, but there's no charge to do them.Erin was our tour guide for the Funk Prairie Home Museum, and she did a spectacular job walking us through the house and the surrounding grounds. Erin’s knowledge of the house and the family’s history is truly impressive. It’s also impressive to learn about the Funk family’s history and how each of the members brought their own special accomplishments to the home and broader community. House is wonderfully preserved and maintained, and there’s plenty of the original furniture to help show just what things were like back then.After the home tour, we went had a tour of the Mineral Museum with Bill, who was also very knowledgeable. Where the house was very clean and organized, the mineral museum was packed full and a little cluttered (since the collection had grown so much over the years). Despite being a little overwhelmingly full, the mineral collection was extremely impressive. There was such a wide variety of rocks, minerals, fossils, and more. Bill even mentioned that not only was this one of the largest mineral museums in the world, but other locations (e.g., the Smithsonian Institute) don’t have some of the things that this museum was able to obtain).

I have been visiting my husbands family in Illinois for many years, and this is the first year I knew about the Funk Prairie Home Museum. It was so interesting - and amazing! The Tour Guide, Bill Case, was a wealth of information - and so entertaining! So glad we decided to do the tour this year!