VOORHIES, Ill. – Steven Seitz’s spring cleaning was a bit more daunting than most homeowners’.

The 60-year-old University of Illinois political science professor’s passion is collecting. So when he moved from his Urbana home to a veritable castle near Bement, it started as a method of housing his overflowing antique collection. But it ended up with the restoration of a local historical treasure.

Nels Larson, a Swedish immigrant, came to the area in the 1860s and found prosperity in the agricultural center of Voorhies, and he sent for his sweetheart, Hannah Nilson, to join him, Seitz said. The two were married and had two children, George and Ellen.

Over time, Larson gradually bought up the town of Voorhies. And deciding he needed a house fit to overlook his expansive property, Larson commissioned a Chicago architect to design him a house patterned after a Swedish summer palace.

Construction on the Larson home was finished in 1902, and it was dubbed later by the neighbors “The Voorhies Castle.”

But Larson’s dreams of a happy life fell apart in 1914, when his wife suffered a stroke while preparing breakfast. She died on a bench in the dining room.

Distraught over his wife’s death, Larson fled the house to stay with one of his children, leaving his wife’s shoes on the floor, her apron neatly folded over a chair and everything untouched. A picture of her shoes taken decades later, still resting where they were laid, now hangs in her turret sewing room, Seitz said.

The house stayed empty for more than 50 years, until it was deeded to the Illinois Pioneer Heritage Center with the hopes of creating a Swedish museum and memorial. In the late 60s, the house was open for a brief time for tours, Seitz said. After that, it was taken over by a bank.

Since that time, it has had five private owners, all of whom bought the house with the intention of restoring it to its original splendor. When Seitz acquired the property in 1999, the turret windows were boarded up, the ceilings were falling, the basement was filled with trash, the architecture had been changed, and the once-majestic fireplaces were strewn about the house like puzzle pieces.

Seitz found an example of the original kitchen cabinets and had replicas recut by Amish workers. He restored the curved glass windows in the Larsons’ turret sitting rooms. He replaced the geometric stained-glass window to its original spot. Once again its brilliant oranges and greens filter into the dining room.

With some of the renovations came surprising revelations, such as the confirmation of the rumored secret room.

“The legend was that they had a child that was disabled in some way and that they hid it,” Seitz said of the Larsons. “And the argument was that they hid it in a room next to the master bedroom.”

The room they described was actually there, he explained. It was dead area between the roof and where the wall squares.

“I couldn’t have been here a week before the family wrote me and told me that was not a true story,” he added.

One interesting find came while repairing the mechanism of a sliding wooden door.

“On the oak runner inside this wall sat that unicorn,” he said, gesturing to a small toy unicorn in a glass case. “It was quite dirty, etc., but it appears to have been a child’s Christmas ornament that was just laid inside the wall, and then they sealed it up, so we’re pretty sure it was there 100 years ago.”