100 year-old 'Aunt Aggie', who raised 40 foster children, facing foreclosure

[Subdivisions]

Let the bankers come with their foreclosure notices. Invite the building inspectors, too. At 100 years old, Agnes Albinger has lived on her 70-acre patch of farmland longer than most of those people have been alive.

She has seen two world wars come and go, survived the Depression — in part by subsisting on minnow stew — and raised 40 foster children. Now, she has become a rallying point in this rural community as she fights to keep her Monee farm.

"I'll never leave," she said one recent morning, as she stood with a walker on her sagging front porch, looking out over the fields she tended for most of her life. "I'd like to stay here until I die. This is my home. This was my land. I owned everything once. I worked awful hard on this place to make it what it was."

As Albinger faces foreclosure on the property where she has lived since 1949, a coalition of friends and strangers has mobilized to help the woman everyone calls "Aunt Aggie." They have set up a , Web site, saveagnesfarm.com, and volunteered to help with cleaning and repairs. On a recent Saturday, nearly 100 people showed up to clear brush and haul away rusting farm equipment.

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