For sale: Illinois house where George Harrison visited his sister before Beatlemania

For the skinny British musician, it was an unassuming trip to visit his sister’s family in September 1963 in Benton, Illinois.

He went camping. He played with local musicians. He drank root beer delivered on roller skates. He bought records. He bought a guitar. Then he returned home.

The next time Benton residents saw George Harrison, it was with 73 million others who watched his band, the Beatles, make their U.S. debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show” about four months later. The British Invasion, which changed popular music and American culture, was underway.

Today, the house where Harrison and his brother Peter stayed in Benton, 100 miles southeast of St. Louis, is for sale.

You’ll forgive Beatles fans if they worry about its future. In 1995, the house at 113 McCann Street had a date with the wrecking ball. Activists, including Harrison’s sister, Louise Harrison Caldwell, who had moved away in the late 1960s, stepped in to save him.

Once known for hosting the state’s last public hanging in 1928, Benton, population 6,700, was built on the rich coal seams of southern Illinois. Louise Caldwell moved to town when her husband, a mining engineer, found a job in what was then a thriving industry.

The house they chose is a five-bedroom bungalow built in 1935 with a brick facade on its wide front porch.

In the mid-1990s, a state agency purchased the house from a subsequent owner with the intention of flattening it for parking. Big fan Robert Bartel of Springfield, author and documentarian of the Beatles, alerted the media and the Fab Four faithful.

Local investors bought it back from the state and opened Hard Day’s Nite Bed and Breakfast, with the couch on which Harrison traded guitar licks and piles of other Beatles memorabilia on loan, including a host of Bartels.

The bed and breakfast closed in 2010. Benton resident Grady Adams has since operated it as a regular bed-and-breakfast apartment, but now wants to sell it, listing it for $105,000. Brian Calcaterra, Benton’s economic development director, suggested the city draft an ordinance to protect the house from demolition by a new owner, but Benton Mayor Lee Messersmith said the City Council has not discussed the issue.

“Of course, if there is no demo, I would prefer that,” Adams said.

Whether there is interest – or energy – in restoring the McCann Street house to its Beatles glory is a matter of debate.

Jim Kirkpatrick of Creal Springs, author of “Before He Was Fab,” a memento of Harrison’s visit that was optioned for a film, has had at least one encouraging conversation with someone considering buying.

Benton business owner Robert Rea, a historian who helped save the Beatles’ home three decades ago, said that obsession has faded.

“When we did that (in 1995), the world went crazy because they were thinking, ‘George is going to come, he’s going to save the house,'” Rea said. “And I’m just being honest with you, maybe I miss it or something, but that momentum isn’t there.”

Harrison’s trip was perhaps the last time the musician was able to enjoy the darkness. He camped in the Shawnee National Forest. He sat in with a popular local band when they played at a nearby Veterans of Foreign Wars hall. The group’s leader took him to a restaurant with car drivers on skates, where he drank root beer for the first time.

At a record store on the square in downtown Benton, Harrison bought a stack of vinyl. Included was the R of James Ray&The B single, “I’ve Got My Mind Set on You”, Harrison’s 1987 cover of which went to #1.

He also purchased a Rickenbacker 425 guitar like the one John Lennon owned. Harrison played guitar a month later when the Beatles recorded “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” It was sold at auction in 2014 for $675,000.

One day, while Harrison was visiting, he and Caldwell stopped by WFRX radio, where Marcia Schafer Raubach, then 17, had a Saturday afternoon teen show. Harrison gave him a copy of “She Loves You”, which he said had just reached the top of the British charts.

Raubach interviewed Harrison on air, the first for a Beatle in America, and played the 45, which she still owns. She said it sounded different from the songs American teenagers then listened to on jukeboxes. But this did not impress his audience.

Despite his fairly long hair in the land of crew cuts, Raubach found Harrison, dressed in a crisp white shirt, jeans and sandals, “very clean cut, he was personable and polite and they call him the ‘Silent Beatle’ – well, he was.”

“If I had known what would become of them, I would have reacted differently,” said Raubach, now 79. “It’s still amazing that he came here and that I met him. I think he really loved southern Illinois.”

Harrison never returned to Benton, however, dying in 2001 at age 58. Caldwell was 91 when she died in 2023.