Chicago History | Spring–Summer 1973

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Chicago Historical Society

"Where Congress Street intersects Halsted Street," wrote Daniel Burnham in 1909, "a civic center should be established .... It would be what the Acropolis was to Athens, or the Forum to Rome, and what St. Mark's Square is to Venice,- the very embodiment of civic life." Jules Guerin's painting shows the proposed plaza at dusk, with the city administration building's dome silhouetted against a darkening sky. In this issue, Ira Bach tells why it never came to pass. From Plan of Chicago.

Chicago History

THE MAGAZINE 0 F THE CHICAGO HIS T ORICAL SOCIETY

A. Montgomery Ward's first price list, dated 1872, was only one page long, and he had a hard time convincing potential customers that he was a real person selling real goods. Nevertheless, Ward's mail-order business soon became an American institution.

Farmers kept their Bibles in the living room, but they kept their catalogues in the kitchen-where they really lived.

Why did Ward succeed? According to Daniel

J.

Boorstin, whose history of the

company appears in this issue, it was because he combined "a Methodist minister's feeling for old-time, old-fashioned morality with a go-getting businessman's feeling for new methods and new markets."

•

-

Courtesy T he National Cash Register Company

A. Montgomery Ward ' s mail-order catalogue was in competition with businesses like this. The country store offered certain advantages: the warmth of a pot-bellied stove, the chance to exchange the latest news with distant neighbors, ready credit when times were bad . This store, photographed in 1904, even sold fancy Cuban cigars .

Chicago History The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society SPRING-SUMMER 1973 Volume 11, Number 3

CONTENTS Cover: Wards' "busy bee-hive" in 1889: "A force of from 300 to 500 young ladies do nothing but open the mail and enter the orders."

The open -air observatory at the top of the tower was the highest point in Chicago.

Chicag o Historical Society

A RECONSIDERATION OF THE 1909 PLAN OF CHICAGO / 132

by Ira J. Bach A. MONTGOMERY WARD'S MAIL-ORDER BUSINESS / 142

by Daniel J. Boorstin THE MYSTERIOUS GREAT CHAIN / 153

by Isabel S. Grossner

Isabel S. Grossner, Editor Nancy Banks, Editorial Assistant

CHICAGO'S AGE OF SAIL / 156

by A. A. Dornfeld THE LOST ILLINOIS PRAIRIE / 166

by W. J. Beecher

Editorial Advisory Committee

HEINRICH SCHLIEMANN'S CHICAGO JOURNAL / 173

by Donald ,?,ochert

Paul M. Angle, Chairman Emmett Dedmon

FIFTY YEARS AGO / 182

James R. Getz

BOOK REVIEWS:

Oliver Jensen

MARY TODD LINCOLN: HER LIFE AND LETTERS, Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner / 188

by E. B. Long

Robert W. Johannsen Herman Kogan Will Leonard Clement M. Silvestro Robert M. Sutton

Printed by R. R. Donnelley and Sons Company Chicago, Illinois Designed by Doug Lang Copyright, 1973 by the Chicago Historical Society North Avenue and Clark Street Chicago, Illinois 60614 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and/ or America: History and Life

A COMMUNITY IN SEARCH OF ITSELF, Herman R. Lantz / 188

by Digby B. Whitman ILLINOIS, Robert P. Howard / 189

by Donald J. Berthrong BRIEF REPORTS / 190 by the staff

A Reconsideration of the 1909 "Plan of Chicago"

BY IRA J. BACH

Boulevards, monumental museums, and a scenic lakefront that would set a standard for the City Beautifulsuch was Daniel Burnham' s dream for Chicago.

r 895. In his offices in downtown Chicago, Daniel Burnham is beginning to plan a beautiful new lakefront for Chicagoa continuous scenic and recreational area festooned with islands, peninsulas, and lagoons.

Successful dreams were not new to the 49year-old architect. For 22 years the firm of Burnham and Root had designed fine commercial buildings for Chicago. They gave the city its first "skyscraper"-it was ten stories highand set a trend. Chicago's Monadnock Building, its Rookery, its Western Union Building, and its Rand McNally Building, among others, even now testify to the style and quality of the firm's work. Besides their Chicago work, the partners had erected structures in many places-Bar Harbor, San Francisco, Marquette, and others -even Mexico City.

The two men had been close friends as well as partners for almost 20 years, from their first, difficult years to their recent, highly successful ones. Root, the "inside man," was the chief designer; Burnham was the "outside man," handling the business contacts. Together they were a strong team . Root's love for sculpture, painting, and music also helped shapeBurnham's career. It was no accident that Burnham became a great admirer of sculptors Augustus St. Gaudens and Lorado Taft, and of Theodore Thomas, the symphony conductor.

THE SCENE IS SET IN

Ira J. Bach, president of the Urban Associates of Chicago, served as Chicago's commissioner of city planning from 1957 to 1965. He is the author of Chicago on Foot (Follett, 1969).

132 Chicago History

The greatest challenge previously laid before the firm, indeed one of the most important architectural challenges of the century, was the design and construction of the buildings for the Columbian Exposition, held on the shore of Lake Michigan on Chicago's South Side in 1893 to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America. But in I 89 r, while the great fair was still being planned, gifted John W. Root died, only 42 years old.

The following year, Burnham recruited Charles B. Atwood of New York to fill Root's place as chief designer. Atwood had the same sensitivity in design and planning as Root, and he also loved sculpture, painting, and music.

He turned out to be an excellent successor.

To lay out the grounds and the large plan for the Exposition, Frederick L. Olmsted, famed landscape architect, was brought to Chicago.

Olmsted belonged to a new breed of city planners. He was a conservationist and an ecologist, a lover of cities when cities were despised. He is responsible for the creation of the large urban park, which he designed with incomparable art and skill for America's large cities, and his work for Chicago can be seen in the shoreline of Jackson Park, once part of the Exposition grounds. His thinking had an enormous influence on Daniel Burnham and on the Plan of Chicago which appeared in 1909.

The general scheme of land and water for the Exposition was devised by Olmsted. The arrangement of the terraces, bridges, and landings was planned by Olmsted and his partner, Harry Codman. The size and number of buildings were determined by Olmsted, Codman, and Burnham.

Chicago Hi storical Society

Frederick Law Olmsted, the creator of America's great city parks, as he looked when he was planning the landscaping of the Columbian Exposition.

In the general design of the structures and their placement around a great enclosed body of water, the Columbian Exposition resembled the French Universal Exposition, held in Paris in r 889. The truly exciting aspect of the Chicago design was that it called for filling in seven hundred acres of Lake Michigan. Later, these great fair grounds became an open, green recreational space on the shore of the lake.

Although Burnham, at a testimonial dinner given in his honor in New York on March 25, 1893, gave credit to Olmsted for the design of the Exposition grounds and the new Lake Michigan shoreline, there was still another person who needs mention. James W . Ellsworth, a successful Chicago businessman, was the one who had urged Olmsted to prepare the master plan for the Exposition. And it was this same Ellsworth who later urged Burnham to become interested in planning the city 's entire lakefront in the same manner as Jackson Park had been planned.

The idea of creating a vast open and green shoreline by filling in Lake Michigan fired Burnham's imagination and passion. He was determined to make Chicago a "City Beautiful."

He soon began to show schematic drawings to almost any civic-minded group in Chicago that would listen to him. This went on for several years-until r 902 , to be exact.

In the m eantime, Burnham's architectural firm, now D. H. Burnham and Company, had become a large organization with a staff numbered in the hundreds, not unlike some of today's large architectural firms. The firm brought not only prestige to Burnham, but large financial rewards as well.

In spite of his successes, Burnham still had a tremendous urge to undertake large-scale developments and even to remake entire cities.

One proj ect of this kind was the 1902 competition to design a new plan for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Burnham did not win the competition-the commission went to Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson- but in looking for someone to help him prepare the plan he found a young man named Edward A. Bennett. Bennett had been educated at L'Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris and was at the time employed in a New York architectural office, but a day spent tramping over the site at West Point with Burnham began a new professional relationship and a lasting friendship.

Burnham had already been commissioned to develop a plan for Washington, D.C., working within the structure of the plan by L'Enfant a century earlier. His plan, completed in 1902, was followed by one for Cleveland in 1903, for San Francisco in r 904, and for the Philippine Island cities of Manila and Bagnio in 1905.

Burnham, as we know, had begun to draw up a plan for a new lakefront for Chicago as early as 1895. But in what Charles W. Norton of the Merchants Club of Chicago described as "those dark years of panic and reaction that followed the World's Fair" nobody would provide financial support for the idea. By 1902, things were Chicago History

133

The 1909 Plan

looking up and Norton had become very interested in city planning. He and Frederick A. Delano (uncle of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States) invited Burnham to talk to the Merchants Club about his plan for Washington, D.C. Their ulterior motive was to convince Burnham to make a plan for Chicago. In this they were successful.

Burnham accepted the offer, money was raised, and the work began.

The Merchants Club, which had a life of only ten years, was merged into the Commercial Club in 1907, and the Commercial Club then assumed the sponsorship of a plan for Chicago.

The agreement was that Burnham and Bennett would be given a free hand in every respect.

By 1908, they were ready. Burnham prepared the report; Bennett directed the preparation of the drawings, which were beautifully executed in color by Jules Guerin; and Charles Moore, who later became Burnham's biographer, did the final writing and editing. The whole was bound in a handsome volume and presented to the city of Chicago by the Commercial Club.

The plan had a grand sweep-the entire metropolitan area for a radius of sixty miles. It called for the development of a system of lakefront parks, beaches, yacht harbors, and pleasure-boat piers. The idea, evolved from Olmsted's lagoons, was for a string of green, recreational, offshore islands to bring the city into the lake and vice versa. The islands were to be made of Chicago's abundant supply of waste and fill. A number of interior parks, in scattered locations, were also envisioned, these to be connected by a system of spacious, tree-lined boulevards.

Grant Park was to be the site of three monumental museums, in the Parisian manner. The plan included seven downtown railway passenger terminals, to be connected by subways, and called for the straightening of a portion of the Chicago River for more efficient riverside transportation. Two commercial harbors-one downtown at the mouth of the Chicago River, one 134 Chicago History

at the mouth of the Calumet River-were to be developed. A complete system of street circulation was set forth: boulevard circuits, radial arteries, and a main east-west axis. A new civic center would serve as Chicago's equivalent of the Etoile (star) of Haussman's plan of Paris.

As a matter of fact, Burnham and Bennett were greatly influenced by the enormous civic improvements that had been recently completed in Paris, especially by the broad boulevards and diagonal thoroughfares that Haussman had created there.

A boulevard to connect the north and south sides of the river was planned for what is now Michigan Avenue. The double-decking of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive was envisioned, as was the double-decking of the Michigan Avenue bridge. Wacker Drive was to be a free-flowing east-west arterial system that would not interfere with the major north-south traffic on Michigan Avenue.

The park system and traffic arteries were envisioned as extending far beyond the city itself. Large forest preserves were to be acquired, and a system of regional highways formed.

As for political considerations, the roughspoken, practical-minded mayor of Chicago, Fred Busse, had already been won over to the idealistic adventure begun by the young merchants of the city. In November 1909, he asked the City Council to approve the appointment of a commission to study the Chicago Plan and put it into execution, telling them: This plan is not to be considered as the embodiment of an artist's dream or the project of theoretical city beautifiers who have lost sight of everyday affairs and who have forgotten the needs and interests of the mass of people. On the contrary, the men who produced the Chicago Plan are all hard-boiled business men. Making Chicago attractive to visitors from all parts of the world will add to Chicago's resources a very great asset, the value of which will be reflected in every piece of real estate within our limit.

And so a Chicago Plan Commission was appointed, headed by Charles H. Wacker,

Chicago Historical Society

The Exposition, looking down the length of the lagoon to the south canal. This wedding of water, land fill, landscapin g , and arch itecture character ized the collaboration of Burnham and Olmsted.

Chicago History 135

The 1909 Plan

chairman of the Merchants Club's original planning committee. In cooperation with city officials and commercial, transportation, and other interests, it was to work out, step by step, the projects of the great plan, primarily within the corporate limits of the city.

Walter Moody, the Commission's executive director, and Charles Wacker, its chairman, were fervent propagandists. Moody prepared a digest of the Plan and entitled it Wacker's Manual. It was one of the first paperback publications of its kind, and it was widely distributed.

All the civics classes of the city's school system received it. By the 1920s, the young people who had studied the Plan in their civics classes were voters, and they did not forget what they learned about the advantages of the Plan.

Publication of the Plan of Chicago so stimulated the city planning movement that within a few years a hundred American cities had appointed their own planning commissions. By 1920, city plans were the hallmark of almost every large city in the United States.

In 1922, Charles D. Norton and Frederick A. Delano, who had moved to New York, started the movement for a New York Regional Plan, financed by the Russell Sage Foundation. Norton became president and upon his death was succeeded by Delano, who later became one of the moving forces in the establishment of the American Planning and Civic Association and chairman of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission in Washington, D.C. Thus, the spirit of the Chicago Plan permeated city planning throughout the country.

But very few of these plans found even partial fulfill ment. This was not to be the case in Chicago, where much that was planned was carried out. Even here, some of Burnham's Plan was never achieved, and much of it took many years.

The attempt to create three huge museums in Grant Park, for example, immediately fell afoul of A. Montgomery Ward. Ward's reputation as an environmentalist began in 1890 when the City Council erected scaffolding in Grant Park 136

Chicago History

to load garbage and street sweepings into railroad cars. The Ward Tower at Michigan and Madison was directly opposite the park, and Ward filed suit to prevent this or any other building project from encroaching on the right of Chicagoans to an unobstructed lakefront.

Ward's suit went to the Illinois Supreme Court before it was finally decided in his favor.

Three more legal battles were to follow, each generated by proposals for buildings in the park.

One of these involved the Field Museum, for which the will of the late Marshall Field (who died in 1 906) would furnish $8 million, provided the City Council could find a suitable site. It was for this reason that Burnham decided to locate the Field Museum in Grant Park.

Despite being labeled "an obstructionist, stubborn and eccentric," and "a public nuisance," Ward persisted in a battle which lasted 20 years and cost him a fortune. He based his suits on the original maps of the area, which showed that the land had been acquired from the federal government and which carried such notations as "Public Ground. Forever to remain vacant of buildings." Ward won every battle he waged for Grant Park.

Only one island was ever built in Lake Michigan-Northerly Island, now the site of Meigs Field. It was hardly a use that Burnham foresaw. However, several peninsulas, such as those at Belmont and Montrose Harbors, have been successfully completed. They, too, were part of the plan.

Freight stations were built instead of the four passenger stations planned west of Twelfth Street. However, the Dearborn and Grand Central stations were built just south of the Loop, and they functioned until 1970. The LaSalle Street Station, which was already in existence at the time of the Plan, is scheduled for removal in 1973. These three and the LC. terminal have been merged into Union Station. Today there are only two railway terminals in Chicago.

A civic center, planned for what is now the Eisenhower Expressway at Halsted Street, never

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Two diagram s showing th the sher south e of Lake Mich . e proposed d miles t~ Wilmette on t~gan from The ~7delopment of . rem the Plan of eChnorth, a distancewafy on the 1cago. o 21½

Chicago HI storical Society

Chicago History 137

The 1909 Plan

came about. Obviously, with the enormous property investment in the Loop proper, it was next to impossible to move the City Hall, the courts, the county offices and the state offices one mile west and one mile south. A similar plan in 1954, to move the Civic Center to the north bank of the Chicago River and call it the Fort Dearborn Center, also failed-for the same reason. Every Loop property owner fought it tooth and nail.

So much of the 1909 Plan lay outside the city's boundaries that another body besides the city commission, designated by Burnham as the "Metropolitan Commission," was required. But it did not come into being until 1924, when the Chicago Regional Planning Association, a voluntary citizens' organization, was organized. It is interesting that Daniel Burnham, Jr., was one of its leading spirits and its principal backer.

This voluntary association was succeeded by the official Nor th eastern Illinois Planning Commission in 1958-a great lapse of time.

On the positive side, the great sweep of the Lake Michigan shoreline, which evolved from the experience of the Columbian Exposition, is the most stunning success of the Plan. There was also the extension of the Forest Preserve System of Cook County. This system was actually conceived by Dwight H. Perkins, who served his apprenticeship in Burnham's office during the Columbian Exposition. Burnham imaginatively espoused it and made it a major part of his Plan.

The development of a double-decked ring road such as Wacker Drive was an excellent reason for removing the South Water Produce Market from the downtown area. When this congested and dirty marketplace was replaced

by Wacker Drive, the central business district benefited enormously. A whole new area for expansion was realized, along with an efficient traffic artery to give it a new advantage. The South Water Market no longer received shipments on the waterfront and could operate more

138 Chicago History

efficiently where it is now, alongside a railroad and an expressway.

Wacker Drive became a reality in the 1920s and was linked to the new Michigan Avenue.

The land fill for Northerly Island and Burnham Park also became realities about the same time.

They were to be the site of the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition. The plan also created a Congress Street axis on which the alignment of the Eisenhower Expressway followed, necessitating a pass-through portal when the central post office was constructed.

Momentum carried the Chicago Plan Commission along for nearly twenty years. But the Great Depression found Chicago with much left to do, and it was not until the federal government initiated work-relief projects that the Plan could near completion.

The lakefront improvement was one of the largest of these projects. The completion of the Outer Drive Bridge was another. But much remained unfinished. Subsequent plans in 1946 and 1966 updated the Plan of Chicago.

How good a plan was it? Lewis Mumford once referred to it as so much "municipal cosmetic," and reading it today, one can see its shortcomings. First, Burnham relied entirely on railroads for intercity movement but, strangely, did not provide for a consolidated railway passenger terminal. Instead, seven downtown stations were planned, two west of the Loop, one on the lakefront at Twelfth Street, and four more, as I have already noted, on Twelfth Street, south of the central business district.

No part of the plan provided for automobile parking. The planning of the railway passenger terminals, recreation areas, civic center, and central business district show no hint of the automobile age which was soon to come. Nevertheless, there was every indication by 1909 that automobiles would soon be a problem to city officials.

Chicago was and is the transportation center of the nation. The railway network was already established. The highway network was to

Chicago Historical Soc iety

The Planning Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago. On the rig ht side of the table : Edward B. Butler, c hairman ; Daniel H. Burnham; Charles D. Norton; Clyde M . Carr; Edward F. Carry; Edward H. Bennett ; John DelaMater; Charles G. Dawes. On the left : John G. Shedd; Ch arles H. Thorne; Theodore W. Robinson; Emerson B. Tuttle ; John W. Scott; John V. Farwell; Charles H. Wacker.

Chicago History 139

The 1909 Plan

become a nightmare shortly. It is a pity that Burnham did not foresee this problem.

Already in existence and badly in need of study and consideration by city planners were the slums and blighted areas of Chicago. Burnham and Bennett almost ignored the subject and apparently did not grasp the necessity to plan for their elimination and redevelopment.

Burnham devoted only two paragraphs to the subject and his solution was only to recommend a "remorseless enforcement of sanitary regulations." It was Jane Addams, of famed Hull House, who started in 1890 to call attention to the city's slums. Her voice was finally heard, and playgrounds proposed in Burnham's Plan were built in the slums. Still, no effort or plan existed for slum eradication. Jane Addams and other social workers continued their effort for some time-and eventually, with the Great Depression, federal housing funds became available.

Some problems could not have been foreseen, resulting as they did from the enormous changes in technology and science. Although in 1909 the airplane was already a reality, we could not have expected Burnham to anticipate its future impact on cities and their metropolitan areas. Moreover, while voters continued to approve many of the necessary bond issues for implementing the Plan, some popular opposition developed to the widening of commercial streets and boulevards, which was denounced as favoring rich merchants.

In spite of some of the shortcomings to which I have referred, the city was opened up; more areas became accessible; recreational facilities were made available; the lakefront was saved.

Burnham inspired Chicagoans to action on a great scale. This was the essence of his contribution.

What was Bennett's contribution to the Chicago Plan, which is almost always referred to as the "Burnham Plan"? Bennett seems to be the forgotten man. How did this come about and why?

140

Chicago History

For one thing, Daniel Burnham was an outgoing, strong, persuasive, gregarious, pragmatic leader. He was the one who made the contacts, who interested connections, who sold the plan; and he was the senior man, old enough to be Bennett's father. Still, was this sufficient reason?

In my search for answers, I went to see Edward Bennett, Jr., his son, who is also an architect. He suggested I might find some answers in his father's diaries, and generously offered to let me borrow them. I chose those volumes which I felt might be most relevant-the years 1906 through 1909. These were the years during which the plan was being prepared. Bennett's diaries reveal him to be a quiet, unassuming, highly disciplined, technically competent person. One can only guess that he took second place out of respect for his elder partner. Perhaps he had no need for self-aggrandizement; his technical work on the plan might have been satisfaction enough.

On the other hand, Bennett's capacity for leadership cannot be denied. After Burnham's death in 191 2 and the dissolution of the firm, Bennett established an office of his own. He took in two partners and called the firm Bennett, Farsons & Frost. As the years passed, Bennett grew in stature and had a very successful career.

He died in 1 954.

What is most important is that together this pair made a rare team. Each complemented the other.

Acknowledgements: Of considerable value were Thomas Hines' unpublished dissertation, "Daniel Burnham, A Study in Cultural Leadership" (University of Wisconsin, 1970), which I was permitted to read at the Burnham Library of the Art Institute of Chicago; Plan of Chicago, with an Introduction by Wilbert Hasbrouch, and Charles Moore's Daniel Burnham (both, De Capo Press); and Planning the Region of Chicago, by Daniel H. Burnham, Jr., and Robert Kingery (Chicago Regional Planning Association).

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Chicaoo Historical Society

Make no Little Plans; They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with evergrowing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon, beauty.

Daniel Burnham

A map of the 1909 Chicago Plan, showing the civic center on Lake Michigan, the improved waterways and lake shore, the complete system of streets and arteries, and the forest preserve system. From Plan of Chicago.

Chicago History 141

/

A. Montgomery Ward's Mail-Order Business*

BY DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

Small-town merchants railed againstÂŤ monopolists and city swindlers," but Ward's customers trusted him enough to write for advice in handling personal problems-and even for help in finding wives.

IN 1872, when A. Montgomery Ward started his first mail-order house, the youthful republic of the United States of America was approaching its first centennial as a nation. Its population was some forty-two million, still heavily concentrated in the eastern half of the continent. There were only 37 states in the Union and about onethird of the nation's contiguous land was still organized only in Territories. This was a burgeoning nation, with lots of new people and lots of empty land.

This was also a rural nation. The census of 1870 showed that about three-quarters of the people lived on farms or in settlements of under 2,500. And in the new West, in the areas where people were still homesteading, where many of the newcomers from rural Europe were settling, it was a country of isolated families. This isolation was the result not merely of the vastness of the American West, but of the way the West had been surveyed and packaged for sale, and of the terms of the Homestead Act itself. In much of Europe, the farmer had led the life of a rural villager, who every day went out to the nearby fields that he cultivated. The village was a sociable place, where you could lean on neighbors when you needed them and enjoy their company on holidays and at odd moments. But in Amer-

Daniel J. Boorstin, formerly professor of American History at the University of Chicago, is now director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of History and Technology. His latest book, The Americans: The Democratic Experience, will be published

by Random House in the fall. •Copyright 1972 by Daniel J. Boors tin.

142 Chicago History

ica, the Homestead Law itself tended to keep the farmer's family isolated by requiring a homesteader to live on his claim for five years in order to perfect his title. This stipulation outlawed the farm village in the early days when people felt most alone. Even if every homesteader had no more than a quarter-section ( r 60 acres), and every quarter-section was actually homesteaded, the average distance between farmhouses would still be at least half a mile.

The isolation varied from place to place, with the climate and the terrain. The lonely prairies of the great Northwest-in the Dakotas or Nebraska-taxed the endurance of sociable men and women. The observant editor of the Northwest Illustrated Monthly Magazine, who moved out there in 1893, described what he saw: Neighborly calls are infrequent, because of the long distances which separate the farmhouses and because, too, of the lack of homogeneity of the people. They have no common past to talk about. They were strangers to one another when they arrived in this new land, and their work and ways have not thrown them much together. Often the strangeness is intensified by differences of national origin. There are Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, French Canadians, and perhaps even such peculiar people as Finns and Icelanders, among the settlers, and the Americans come from many different states. It is hard to establish any social bond in such a mixed population, yet one and all need social intercourse. . . . An alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new prairie States among farmers and their wives .... The reason is not far to see. These people came from cheery little farm villages. Life in the fatherland was hard and toilsome, but it was not lonesome.

What these people needed, above all else, was contact with the outside world, a reminder that there were others like them, who shared their interests and concerns.

Courtesy New York Public Library

There was another oddity of life in the American West, which also was destined to make the American farmer's life different from that of his European forebears. This was the peculiar growth of the American railroads. These connecting ligaments of the great West had appeared in a singular way. In I 9th-century England, for example, railroads were built to connect one city with another, to carry an already heavy traffic for people who were already there. But in the American West, as Europeans scoffingly observed, the railroads often ran "from Nowhere-in-Particular to Nowhere-at-All." American railroads were built in the hope that they would call into being the population that they would serve.

The railroads did, of course, succeed in attracting people. The people needed things and produced things. Both what they produced and what they consumed were shaped by the railroads and by the circumstances which had given the railroads this strangely American character.

In the early years of the 20th century, the English economist Alfred Marshall described American merchandising as an opportunity for "massive multiform standardization." The

A stock farm in Des Moines, Iowa. If the prosperity of the farm has been idealized, the isolation portrayed is rea I enough. Note that the barn was raised in 1872, the year Ward started his mail-order business.

American situation offered an unprecedented opportunity to make and sell large numbers of similar items. Marshall noted "the inevitable preference given by great railways to large consignments traveling long distances, by which a giant business, even if far off, is at an advantage in competition with a smaller business near at hand." In this vast and miscellaneous nation, there was a striking "homogeneity of demand for manufactured goods."

In the years before the Civil War, American know-how built on ideas from Europe's Industrial Revolution to develop a new kind of manufacturing. Lots of new things were produced in vast new quantities. The new American System of Manufacture, which Eli Whitney and Samuel Colt had organized to make guns and revolvers, also turned out clocks and locks, and countless other items-both better and cheaper. Now farmers could afford to buy them.

Only the creation of vast new communities of consumers could fully exploit these peculiarly Chicago History 143

The Mail-Order Business

American opportunities. Americans who had never seen one another would be tenuously held together not by their past or by their religion, but by what they consumed. These "consumption communities"-more numerous, more varied and more potent than any before-would be a hallmark of American civilization in the 20th century. They were another name for an American Standard of Living. And they were the creation of imaginative and consumer-oriented entrepreneurs, such as a young, 28-year-old Chicagoan by the name of Aaron Montgomery Ward.

Soon after the Civil War, young Ward, an

A candid shot of A. Montgomery Ward on the golf course, 1906.

Chicago Hi storical Soc iety, Dally News Coll ection

energetic salesman who had covered the Midwest selling goods to the owners of general stores, began to think of a new plan. He had done all sorts of things, from working in a barrel factory and in a brickyard to selling dry goods.

Often in his travels he had heard farmers complain about the small choice of goods and the high prices.

In r 866, he clerked for the leading Chicago dry goods house, Field, Palmer and Leiter, a firm that had pioneered in retailing when it announced a money-back guarantee on any goods "that prove unsatisfactory in price, quality or style." Later, in St. Louis, he took a job with a dry goods wholesaler who sent him to market their goods to country stores. This experience shaped his life and influenced the quality of life of millions of other Americans.

Traveling for a city-wholesaler meant riding the train to some little town, then hiring a horse and buggy to the crossroads general store. Waiting his turn while the proprietor took care of customers, the young peddler could look around and see what the local people were being given a chance to buy. The general store in those days was also often the village post office, and it deserved its reputation as a friendly place. The destination of the farmer's infrequent trips to town, it was the place to get news and exchange jokes and gossip; but the assortment of goods was meager and many items were out of date and shopworn. While the owner was generous with credit, his prices were high compared to those in the city. The price the farmer received for his own products was being set by big-city jobbers who dealt in large quantities, but for the goods he himself bought the farmer had none of the benefits of large-scale merchandising. And if he did not like the goods or the prices at the general store, he had nowhere else to go.

Young Ward returned to Chicago with an idea that would soon touch the daily lives of millions of farmers. He would sell goods in an entirely new way. Instead of the old general store which stocked only a few of each item, Ward

Frank Leslie 's Illustrated Newspaper

imagined a mail-order store. The storekeeper would stay in the big city, where it was easier to collect a large stock of all sorts of goods. He would send out to farmers lists of his goods with descriptions and pictures. The farmer would not need to come to the store because the store-in the form of a catalogue-would go to the farmer.

And the farmer would order by mail, picking out whatever he wanted from the catalogue.

Then the storekeeper would mail the farmer his goods.

If this new scheme worked, the storekeeper would be selling not only to a few customers in one village; he could sell to farmers all over America-to anyone within reach of a mailbox.

The possible customers of this new kind of store would not be just a few hundred, they might be millions! And then Ward could buy his goods from the manufacturer by the hundreds and thousands. The manufacturer could afford to give him a lower price.

For the customer, too, there would be advantages. He would have a much wider selection of goods. And he would pay a lower price since the mail-order storekeeper, with so many more cus-

The Grangers, an organization of farmers interested In cooperative manufacture and marketing, were quickly attracted to the idea of buying cooperatively from a central supplier of their own choosing. They were Wards' first customers. Note the seating arrangements in the schoolhouse meeting shown above: in all their meetings, the men and women Grangers sat separately.

tomers, could take a smaller profit on each item and yet would make more money in the long run.

Ward's idea of selling unseen goods to unseen customers-which his friends said was a surefire dud-was launched the following year, as he recorded in his diary: "Having had experience in all classes of merchandise, and traveling salesman, and a fair judge of human nature, saw a great opening for a house to sell direct to the consumer and save them the profit of the middle man."

The customers were not only waiting, they were eager. And they were already organized.

The Patrons of Husbandry, founded in 1 867 by a Minnesota farmer named Oliver H. Kelley who had become a clerk in the Bureau of Agriculture in Washington, was a fraternal organization Chicago History

145

The Mail-Order Business

(with a secret ritual modeled on that of the Masons) to bring farmers together for sociability and to make their needs known. Each lodge was called a "Grange," from the English word for the buildings of a gentleman farmer; the members, both men and women, were called "Grangers." By 1870, there were Granges in nine states, and by 1874 there were over twenty thousand Granges with over eight hundred thousand members. The Grangers succeeded in securing laws to limit railroad and warehousing charges, they set up cooperative creameries, elevators, and warehouses, and for a while they even established cooperative factories turning out farm machinery at reduced prices.

When Kelley was building the Patrons of Husbandry and attacking the exorbitant profits of "monopolists," Ward secured appointment as the official Grange Supply House. At the time, there were a few mail-order magazines which carried advertising for different firms which sold individual items by mail. But no one firm offered a full line of goods and sold exclusively by mail.

Young Ward began saving his money and by October 1871 had bought his own stock of merchandise and was ready to mail out his price list. Then came the Great Chicago Fire which burned out downtown Chicago and destroyed some two hundred million dollars in property, including Ward's small stock. The very next year he managed to scrape together enough to make another start. He with two partners put in $1,600, rented a small room, and began modestly.

The idea became a business in August 18t2, in a small upstairs room on Clark Street with a mailing list of Grange members. One of the first catalogues was a single-sheet price list of 1 63 items, ranging from "No. 1-12 yards best quality Prints .... $1.00," to "No. 163-1 Stereoscope and 6 views, with walnut frame, good glass .... $1.00." There was no further description of the items, but customers were told that everything was shipped "subject to examination.

In this way you can see just what you pay for."

146 Chicago History

An 1873 advertisement in the Prairie Farmer explained what made Wards "The Cheapest Cash House in America":

GRANGERS SUPPLIED BY

The CheaDest Cash House in America.'

to furnishing Farmers and Mechanics, D EVOTED throughout the Northwest, with all kinds of

DRY GOODS, NOTIONS, BOOTS and SHOES, HATS, CA.PS and CLOTHING. WP .end any quantity of goods you may wisR to orctPr .

Reason• why we can send ldouds to Grangers at wholesale prires: We don't pay forty thournnd dollars a

yenr ,·ent.

We don ' t employ high priced salesmen to sell our Goods.

We don't sell Goods to country retailers on four months time .

Vve buy all our Goods for CE.eh.

Our Goode are b ought directf•om manufacturers.

We make no display and keep no men t o Rhow Goods By purchaemg of us you save from 40 to llJO per ce'lt., wh ,ch are the profits of 1rnddle men.

We are slsn prepared to mak e purchas es of all kinds of merchHndize which we do not kee p f0r our custom• ere, <'hanging th em only live per cent 011 th e n e t c os r.

We do this as an accommodatton.

All Goods will be se nt by express, (collec t on delivery) subject to examination. In this way you ca11 be e• ,iuot what you pay for.

Send Etamp for printed Catalogue of Pri ce~ .

Write your names and make your li1rnres pl 1t•n.

The whole idea was so new, and the prices so low, that it was hard to believe the scheme was honest. The Chicago Tribune (November 8, 1873), suspicious of the "Utopian figures" in early price lists, headlined its warning against "this swindling firm": "GRANGERS, BEWARE! Don't Patronize ... They are Dead-Beats."

After investigation, the paper printed a full retraction. The Prairie Farmer, on the other hand, found the new company run by "young men of considerable business tact, and bearing a reputation for honesty and promptness."

Grangers, and soon others, sent in their orders and received their goods. The new-fangled business was quickly catching on with the farmers, though they were proverbially the nation's most conservative and hard-to-convince customers.

Ward combined a Methodist minister's feeling for old-time, old-fashioned morality with a go-

getting busine;sman's feeling for new methods and new markets. Ward's public statements resounded with time-worn truths. "Remember, all is not gold that glitters." They rang true when uttered by Ward because he believed them. An advertisement in The Farmers' Review (June 19, 1895):

r.-. _ .TTERLf~,

qlLAASSEN

¢,o.,

l'"UU.• nh·••• .~ ,\L11uul"h(•t1u•••1•,; r.r

PRINTINC PRESSES. O:a:.:i:CAG-C>.

Binder Twine

THREE COLORS, from one form, and at One Impression, may be 1•1:1:,;•rtm Ol\ Tm•: (.'lllh)ltATIC l'l{K~ l'J>:IU-t.l"l"l.Y ,\!\ll .,~ lt.\l'JOI.)' , .. o:,; (..'OJ.OH L\S 1n: •:xi,;,rnm o:,, "''" JOU l'l!J,'.:---.

•.:

That's an important purchase.

There's a kind that's stout and a kind that's snappy.

OURS JS STOUT.

It must be right for wo sell over 100 car

loads a yeo.r and haven't yet heard the first complaint.

:,; ... 1\ l·'.ii,:li1l,\l, ,li11n,,I ,, 11, \", ~-n.iu~,,..

I 11),11 .. ) J;;,111~

,,1,-,.til,

'(.,_ ~{lhll

In the 1870s, Ward's way of orgamzmg his business, his use of the railroad to deliver his goods, and his new technique of selling, as it happened were wonderfully suited to seize other new opportunities.

The later 19th century saw unprecedented progress in techniques of typesetting and printing, in new ways of making, reproducing, and disseminating images of all kinds. Relatively little progress in printing methods had been made since the days of Gutenberg in the I 5th century. Then, in mid-19th century, came a host of revolutionary changes. A machine was invented for casting type, Hoe developed the rotary press, and by the r 88os Mergenthaler's linotype was perfected and in general use. Both sides of the paper, now being produced in long rolls instead of single sheets, could be printed on the rotary presses at once. The New York Tribune's high-speed press, installed in the r 870s, could turn out 18,000 newspapers an hour. At the same time, the printing of photographs was developing. The first reproduction of a photograph in a newspaper appeared on March 4, r 880, when a picture entitled "Shanty-Town" was printed in the New York Daily Graphic. Color printing was also improved and made less costly; by the fall of 1896, a Hearst newspaper offered a comic supplement all in color, which they described as "eight pages of iridescent polychro-

\ ,,.

(

\l,·,huu,.

I I ~,c:-

; ""

":.IJIJ

,.,.,.,,.,

:'lP"'T"'" 1: ..11"" \f, ,,1.,,, ............ rt:. lo, "1 I. tb,,, lha,., \\"1._._..1,,u,·. M•·il><I l,~1 ... ,h,~,hl'"-.

1-·..,.,.ui, ~1. ~-,1,.,. • ",I 1:,,~11 -~ r,1no.. .\ll J•,..·~• "' l 1 :h1_, • •I• 1 ,,1. an,I I, r,•li1i'J \I ,u1 ..,- .,~( ,.,, ,,-,'""1, .. 11. J .,,.J, Deeor:ip't1on. o,r

~hromatic ;frinting

Chicago Historical Society

The creative ferment in the printing industry is conveyed in this 1870 poster advertising a three-color press. More practical innovations caused printingand with it, mail-order sales-to boom.

mous effulgence that makes the rainbow look like a lead pipe." Printed messages-more vivid, less costly, and more speedily produced-were given their great new opportunity.

His catalogue was Ward's salesman. But what others did not realize was that the catalogue was not just a paper stand-in for the folksy proprietor of the crossroads country store. In crucial ways, the catalogue was far superior. What it said about the goods was not just a friendly sales pitch. On the contrary, it could give the most precise and detailed description of what Chicago History 147

The Mail-Order Business

had gone into the product-facts gathered from those who knew best, the manufacturers themselves. No country-store proprietor could possibly have all that information, even if he had wanted to take the trouble. And the catalogue showroom (uncluttered by leftovers from the year before last) was always up-to-date.

The catalogue was also a laboratory of salesmanship. By keeping careful sales records, year after year, Wards made it possible to find out what products and what features were most sought after by the customers. Here was an automatic market-research device such as there had never been before.

Trust was the most important thing for a mail-order store. If you bought in a general store you were buying from a storekeeper you knew. You could see the goods and handle them to satisfy yourself. But when you bought from a mail-order store you had to trust somebody you had never seen. You had to believe that the storekeeper would really send you the exact thing described in the catalogue.

Ward was a spectacular success. The first secret of his success was not a secret at all, but simply to be honest, give good value, and always let the customer be the judge. On everything, Wards gave an ironclad guarantee: "Satisfaction or your money back!" If a customer did not like the goods when they arrived, he could always return them; if something arrived damaged, he could send it back to be replaced. The company paid the postage both ways.

Of course there had to be trust on the company's side, too. The company had to be willing to cash the customer's checks, to believe his complaints, and to replace damaged goods without a lot of investigating. Wards was willing to take the risks.

The catalogue showed pictures of Ward himself, of the other executives, and of the men in charge of the different departments. This was to convince the customer that he was dealing with real people. Some customers wrote in to say how pleased they were to deal with such "fine looking 148 Chicago History

men." Some even named their babies after Ward and said he would be an inspiration to their children.

Ward saw that letters were promptly answered even if they did not contain orders. One customer asked how to find a baby to adopt.

Others tried to sell Ward their secondhand furniture or their livestock. Parents asked help in finding boys who had run away from home, or advice about handling disobedient children.

Some wrote simply because they were lonely and had nobody else to write to.

One farmer proposed marriage to the "girl wearing hat number--on page 153 of your catalogue." A blacksmith needing a wife boasted that he was a total abstainer from tobacco, cards, and whiskey. To a farmer asking Ward to select a wife for him, Wards answered that it was not a good idea to choose a wife by mail, but "after you get the wife and you find that she needs some wearing apparel or household goods, we feel sure we could serve both you and her to good advantage." Others suspected that Mr. Ward might be worried by not hearing from them: I suppose you wonder why we haven't ordered anything from you since the fall. Well , the cow kicked my arm and broke it, and besides my wife was sick, and there was the doctor bill. But now, thank God, that is paid, and we are all well again, and we have a fine new baby boy, and please send plush bonnet number 29d8077.

This customer received a letter back from Wards saying they were sorry about the arm, glad that his wife was better, conveying congratulations on the son and hopes he would grow up to be a fine man, acknowledging the order for the bonnet and finally asking whether the customer had noticed that there was an anti-cow-kicker listed in the catalogue.

The times were with Ward, and the fastdeveloping technology of communications was his ally. An 1889 advertisement in The Farmer's Voice explained:

to show goods, and therefore make it a point to describe articles as fairly as possible, knowing well that the only way to hold your trade is to send you an article which answers the description given.

WE ARE UNABLE

REMEMBER YOUR SECOND ORDER IS THE ONE WE WANT.

As the price list became the Big Book, its descriptions of goods became increasingly detailed and vivid. By the spring of 1874 the catalogue had grown to 25 pages; by winter, it included illustrations-14, including one of Wards' building. Catalogue No. 59 (Spring and Summer, 1896) included four pages of illustrations printed by the recently developed half-tone processtwo pages of baby bonnets and two pages of corsets, the latter "taken from a live model."

In 1889, Catalogue No. 65 added four pages of colored photographs of carpets, portieres, and curtains. The number of pages increased from 535 in 1890 to 1076 in 1899; the circulation also increased-from 252 ,000 to 729,000. In 1896, records showed there were about two and a half orders per catalogue.

Even after Ward had succeeded in reaching farmers by the millions, he stuck by his homespun rules of honest dealing. "If any of your goods are not satisfactory after due inspection," Catalogue No. 13 (Spring and Summer, 1875) promised, "we will take them back, pay all expenses, and refund the money paid for them."

Catalogue No. 22 added the phrase "in all instances."

While Wards made every effort to compete with the country storekeepers in folksiness and in the personal touch, the country storekeepers themselves were increasingly aware that they could not possibly compete with Wards. Bewildered by this new colossus from the Big City, country-store proprietors, who were accustomed to controlling their customers' credit and who were among the most influential citizens in the countryside, took up the cry against "monopolists" and city swindlers. But they were scattered and poorly organized, and Wards was actually giving the farmers what they wanted.

RYE WHISKEY.

p,.,

c;,,11011

6 gnl. k e~ po per <'.CUL. Hye . .. ti g•l. k eg 95 ~ -r,ce11 1. Ry e, . .. . . . . . .... ti gnl. i.e.; 100 pe r cen t. Ry e.. . . ti gol. ke!( Lowe', Sllv.,i· '!'!de Hye 6 gal ." ke,r Lowe's Silk Ftlli s h l{y.,. S o. 2. .• ij 1:al. keg Lowe', Silk Fmi,h Hye. No 1..

6 g•l. ke~ 4 year old Uyc . . . . . . .

6 gal. keg 5 ycur old Rye .. .. . . . : . . . . . . . . .. . . .. . •.

6 i;al. kei: 6 year old'ltye. (chc111>).. ... . . .. . . . . . . . . . . .

t I .~ I 2 2 2

'IO Ill :i:, r,!1

00 4 00 :, oo 5 !~I

BRANDY Per G• !lon 95 per CeHL. Hrandy... .. . .... .. ..... . .•.•.•. 51 111 100 per cent . Brandy..... .... .... . . . . .

2 10 Blended Bruud'y ... ·.: . . : . . .......... .. .. . . . ........ ... . 2 :)!, Pure Cull,lornl11 Ornp'~ Bnincly .

• . • . .. . .. . .. . . . . :; 1111 Pure Grape Braudy, V.lntll!(C 186'1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 00 Imported Brandy, extra .. ..- .. .., . . . ..

• r,o Courtesy Montgomery Ward & Co.

Not all Wards' price lists were successful. One 1875 advertisement was prefaced by the statement that although it "may be objectionable to some," it was included "at the request of many of our customers."

Apparently it generated more ill-will than orders, and it was shortly removed from the catalogue.

As the mail-order catalogue reached more and more people on remote farms, it became more and more important in their daily lives. The farmer kept his Bible in the living room, but he kept his catalogue in the kitchen-where he really lived.

Just as Puritan boys and girls in colonial times had studied the New England Primer with its stories about God and the Devil, Americans on farms studied the catalogue. In country schoolhouses, where there were few textbooks, teachers used the catalogue to teach reading and spelling. For arithmetic, pupils filled out orders and added up items. And they learned geography from the catalogue's postal-zone maps.

In a school that had no other encyclopedia, pupils used the mail-order catalogue. It had a good index, it was illustrated, it told you what things were good for, what they were made of, how long they would last, and even what they would cost. Mothers gave the catalogues to children to keep them occupied. When a new catalogue arrived, the old one would be given to the girls, who cut it up for paper dolls.

Nothing did more than the new mail-order stores to change life on the farm-and to make Chicago History

149

The Ma il-Order Business

NO MORE MAIL ORDER GOO Fo S WEVE BEEN

STUNG

¡ftL EruY"Jcr"liOME ANI> SEEWHAl' 1 GET

What's the use of sending money east when we can buy just as cheap at THE POPULAR STORE.

Men's, Women's and Children's Ready-to-Wear Agents for W. L. Douglas Shoes

The Popular Store

Aaron Llp sker, Proprietor Second door East Corner 27th street and l'llontana avenue "One Prloo to AIL" Courtesy Montgomery Ward & Co.

Th e own ers of genera l stores fo ught back with flyer s, po ste r s, an d advert isem en ts c h arging that m ail-order cu stom er s got " st un g." Of t en a bee was sh own, and u sually t h e d estruct ion of t he catalogue was graph ically d epicted.

150 Ch icago History

life in America something new. Before the 20th century, most Americans still lived on the farm. Now that the American farmer could order from a mail-order catalogue, his life became increasingly different from that of a European peasant. His view of the good things in the world was no longer confined to the shelves of the little village store. The up-to-date catalogue brought news about new machines, new gadgets, and new fashions. Soon American farmers could buy big-city goods at prices they could afford and from someone they could trust.

The country storekeepers did, however, have one force on their side. That was the rudimentary state of the U.S. Mail. The federal Constitution had given Congress the power "to establish Post Offices and Post Roads." But it was only in 1847-just 25 years before Wards began-that the U.S. Post Office had adopted the idea of a postage stamp, with standardized rates regardless of distance. Before 1863, the postage stamp carried the mail only to the post office, where the addressee had to pick it up himself.

Home-delivery, such as it was, was made by self-employed carriers who received an additional fee from the addressee when they found him at home. When the U.S. Post Office began including free home-delivery in the price of the postage stamp, such delivery was still confined to cities, and as late as 1887 a place had to have 10,000 people to be eligible. In 1890, less than a third of the seventy-five million American people had their mail delivered free to their doors.

The inadequacy of the mail service was obviously good for the country-store owner. When farmers came to his mail window to pickup their mail they were tempted to buy his merchandise.

I n 1889, when the energetic Philadelphia merchant, John Wanamaker, became postmaster general, he led a movement for a nationwide system of Rural Free Delivery. With strong support from the Grange, congressmen from rural areas began to jump on the bandwagon, risking the opposition of local storekeepers. There

Chicago Historical Society

Ward's fight against any buildings in Grant Park, even museums, earned him the enmity of the city planners of his day (for more information, see Ira Bach's article in this issue). The caricature above was printed in the Chicago Tribune in 1907.

was also, of course, the attractive prospect of patronage, a chance to incidentally help friends out with jobs on the new mail routes.

Only after a shattering farm depression when "more midland farmers' wives died of mortgage ... than of tuberculosis and cancer combined," did Congress give the farmers their daily mail.

RFD, begun in r 896, became one of the unsung American organizing triumphs of the century, serving 185,000 Americans by 1900. The postmaster general approved the design for the mailbox which remains the familiar symbol of rural life. By 1906 the essential routes were in operation, and by r 92 4 the Americans served by RFD numbered over six and a half million. RFD provided the greatest revolution in farm life before the coming of radio. The farmer could get a daily newspaper from the city-and, incidentally, could have Wards' catalogue delivered to his door.

But the delivery problems of the mail-order business were still far from solved . There was still no system of parcel post. You could mail a parcel to anyplace in the country if it weighed no more than four pounds, but it cost you 16¢ a pound. If you wanted to mail goods weighing 20 pounds, you would have to send five separate packages and the total cost would be $3.20, even if it was to be delivered only a few miles away. Yet, you could mail oner r-pound parcel to a foreign country, and at a lower rate-12¢ a pound. Every other civilized nation in the world had a parcel-post system.

The effective lobbies against parcel post in the United States were the two groups who profited from its absence: the private express companies, which had a monopoly over the shipment of parcels, and the country-store owners who, as long as there was no cheap way of shipping parcels, could hope to keep their customers' loyalty. Even rural mail deliverers themselves profited by operating private parcel delivery services. The "Parcel Post Question" remained for some decades one of 'the hottest issues in national politics. "Should the Government go Chicago History 151

The Mail-Order Business

into business?" The spectres of "class legislation, socialism, and paternalism" were raised against the parcel post. Its advocates were denounced as "Minions" of the "Mail Order Trust."

Actually, it is remarkable that Ward's mailorder business had managed to succeed at all. It had survived partly by using freight to ship large parcels to groups of customers, and partly by using ingenuity. For example, if a customer ordered an overcoat that exceeded the 4-pound limit, Wards would ship the overcoat in halves in two separate parcels, enclosing directions and a need le and thread for putting it back together. " I n point of fact," Postmaster General Wanamaker explained, "there are but four strong objections to the parcel post, and they are the four great express companies." Then the Grange marshaled its support. As a result, the wave of reform sentiment which swept the country after rgr r and which elected Woodrow Wilson to the presidency in r gr 2 also carried a parcel-post law through Congress. Now any American in the nation could take what Wards advertised as A 1972 postage sta mp co mm emorat in g th e hundredth anniver sa ry of Ward ' s m a il -ord er bu s ines s, a f itt in g t r ibute consid er in g t he tremend ous volum e of parcel post gen erat ed by th e ca talog ues, whic h wer e t h em selves m a i_led out by the m i ll ions.

152

Chicago History

"the smooth road to shopping, that leads direct to us ... Catalogue Boulevard."

The early years of the century were the heyday of mail order. Wards used the new printing techniques in its big, attractive catalogue, and the company was organized to fill the orders quickly and give customers the service they wanted. With the government itself helping to provide an improved system of delivery, Wards was hardly exaggerating when it claimed to offer "most every article required by the civilized world ." By World War I, Wards had become an American tradition. The new catalogue cover designed by Charles Dana G ibson showed his stylish Gibson G irl looking through old Wards catalogues and saying, "My father loved that book."

World War I brought problems to all retailers: wartime inflation, a scarcity of consumers' goods, and a loss of personnel to war service. It was also at this time that Aaron Montgomery Ward d ied, and by rgrg the corporate structure was reorganized, stock was offered to the public and the firm ceased to be a family enterprise.

The Mysterious Great Chain BY !SABEL S. GROSSNER

The great links that lie on the ground outside the Chicago Historical Society are a challenge to every child who tries to lift them.

They are also a challenge to historians. entitled "The Candy Man's Mixed Bag," the Society's director, Clement Silvestro, discussed the sacrifice and agony attendant upon the purchase of the great Charles F. Gunther Collection. Some of the sacrifice involved the sale of desirable items to raise the money to retain objects even more desirable, such as Lincoln's furniture; some of the agony sprang from the subsequent realization that certain prized items were not genuine, after all. Washington's clock, for example, had been made a century too late. And now there is the weighty matter of our great chain, a chain well advertised as having been stretched across the Hudson River during the Revolutionary War to prevent the British fleet from ascending the river and thus splitting the New England colonies off from the rest of the continent. We know now that our chain never performed such a function. It is merely another Gunther fraud -the latest and, we profoundly hope, the last.

But even now the Society is not in full possession of the facts.

There is no question that a chain was stretched across the Hudson River at the time and for the purpose described. In fact, the Revolutionary Army made several attempts to blockade the river. The first blockade was a duplication of a feat first performed on the Delaware, below Philadelphia: six old sloops were loaded with tar, pitch, and other combustibles and floated down the Hudson in August 1776. At Yonkers these "fire ships" encountered a British flotilla, made fast to them, and applied the match. Two British ships escaped. The rest were doomed, but so were the men on the fire ships, and the tactic was not repeated. A barrier of sunken ships was tried next, but the British bypassed it.

IN AN ARTICLE IN OUR LAST ISSUE

Then a chain was stretched across the Hudson at a place called St. Anthony's Nose, five miles sou th of West Point. Part of this r 800-foot chain had been used for a similar purpose on the Sorel River, at the outlet of Lake Champlain; the other part was fabricated at Ringwood Furnace in New Jersey. The links were made of iron 1.½ inches square, each link weighing about 41 pounds. But the chain could not withstand the pressure of its own weight, and it broke within hours. It was eventually seized by the British, who are said to have carried it to Gibraltar.

It seemed reasonable to expect that a stronger chain might succeed; at any rate, the problem was one of paramount military importance. In December r 777, General Washington wrote to General Putnam, in New York, "that the possession of [the Hudson River] is indispensably essential to preserve the communication between the eastern, middle and southern states" and exhorting him to "exert every nerve ... in constructing and forwarding the proper works and means of defense." A committee thereupon surveyed the terrain and decided upon West Point as a suitable narrow at which to close the river to the British. The Sterling Iron Works, in New York, undertook to fabricate a chain 1500 feet long, composed of links 2 feet long, weighing 1oo pounds each, and made of iron 2 ¼ inches square, together with anchors, swivels, and clevises; the army proceeded to fortify the heights above West Point and station 2,000 men there to protect the chain. The manufacture of the chain was a heroic undertaking, for it had to be forged by hand with trip hammers and hauled to the river in dead of winter. Nevertheless, it was installed within ·six weeks. It must be remembered that iron was one of the colonial Chicago History

153

Chicago H/storlcal Societ y

manufactures banned by the British and that the ironworkers were consequently among the most zealous of the revolutionaries.

So far as is known, the Putnam Chain held.

There is a story that Benedict Arnold, when he took command of West Point, arranged for a link to be loosened so as to let the British navy through-but that story was not heard until well after the Revolution and is not credited by modern historians. In r 783 the chain was raised and stored at West Point.

In 1864, the Putnam Chain was sent by boat to New York City, where it became one of the attractions of the Great Sanitary Fair of the Civil War. It was not returned to West Point, as promised, but sent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for storage; and there it rested until 1887, when the navy began to consolidate its stores. Not knowing its history, or perhaps even not caring -after all, coastal defenses were the army's 154

Chicago History

The women's fund-raising committee of the Chicago Historical Society worked hard to inform the public about prized items in the Gunther Collection.

Here is the "Putnam Chain" in the Memorial Day p~rade of 1921, on a float designed by the committee . The sign overestimates both the weight of the links and their historical significance, however.

affair-the navy proceeded to sell it at auction along with lots of other old iron. A firm named W. J. Bannerman & Co. bought it and , in turn, sold some to a forge to be worked into new iron.

Aside from some links that had remained at West Point-and are still there-this set of transactions would have appeared to spell the end of the great chain that had been stretched across the Hudson River at West Point during the Revolutionary War. But was it? Some seven years later, in 1893, an odds-and-ends dealer with the picturesque name of Westminister Abby also bought some iron links at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. These

The Mysterious Chain

links, as described in the New York Sun, were indeed huge: they were about 3¼ feet long, made of iron 3 inches square, and weighed 300 pounds each. Abby sold a section of it to Charles Gunther, the Chicago collector, who proclaimed it the Putnam Chain and exhibited it in his Libby Prison Museum.

The situation was further complicated about ten years later, when Mr. Bannerman also bought some of Mr. Abby's chain and proceeded to resell it as part of the Putnam Chain. Bannerman did a thriving business in the chain: he sold 26 links to Ringwood Manor, New York, and IO to the Museum Village of Smith's Clove at Monroe, New York. There are I 3 links in Methuen, Mass.; 2 at Oyster Bay, New York; 4 in the Smithsonian Institution, given by a benefactor; and 20 which repose just outside the Chicago Historical Society, acquired as part of the Gunther Collection. Bannerman also made part of the chain into desk weights which he sold for $2.75.

Obviously all this chain was larger and heavier than the chain made by the Sterling Foundry for General Putnam, but a ready explanation was found. In the words of one Macgrane Coxe, who discoursed on the matter to the Daughters of the American Revolution when a plaque to the Sterling Foundry was unveiled in 1906: "As the work progressed, it was realized that, since the strain on the chain would be greater at some portions of it than at others, it would be advisable to have some of the links heavier than the contract called for, and accordingly some were made of iron as large as 3¼ inches square and measuring as much as 3¼ feet in length." He offered no evidence, and none was requested.

For decades more, everybody concerned rested happy in the belief that the Putnam Chain was suitably dispersed over the American landscape. Then-it must have been just about twenty years ago, when the Smithsonian Institution was reorganizing its gallery space-a curator examined the great links there and observed

that they were rolled, and not fashioned by a trip hammer. This would have made their use more likely in the Civil War than the Revolutionary War, and the Smithsonian discreetly removed the links to a storeroom and said no more. In 1966, Mr. Gerald C. Stowe, curator of the West Point Museum, made a similar disclosure to the Chicago Historical Society, whose links were unfortunately securely embedded in concrete adjoining its museum. Nevertheless, an authentication once made dies hard. This writer has come across the following appendix to an information card on the Putnam Chain in the Society's library: Note:

THERE IS SOME DISPUTE AS TO WHETHER

THIS CHAIN WAS ACTUALLY USED AT THE POINT ON THE HUDSON RIVER MENTIONED ABOVE. IT IS POSSIBLE THAT IT WAS USED INSTEAD ELSEWHERE, BUT THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT IT IS INDEED A REVOLUTIONARY

WAR

CHAIN

USED

TO

KEEP

BRITISH VESSELS OUT OF A RIVER. ( I 969)

Even so, it is likely that either the Society or the Smithsonian would long ago have exposed its chain as a fraud had not Mr. Stowe been writing a book on the subject. It was hoped that, in the course of his researches, Mr. Stowe would discover for what purpose the huge links were actually made. Alas, he died without completing his book. His successor at West Point, Michael J. McAfee, knows of no new information about the 300-pound links. Annapolis has no further light to shed on the problem. Mr. Craddock Goins, military historian at the Smithsonian, is still hoping that some research can be undertaken, though he describes coastal fortifications as a sadly neglected area of American military history. And we have decided to make full and free confession that our chain was not stretched across the Hudson River during the Revolutionary War. By the way, does anyone know why our chain was made? And if it was ever used? And if so, where?

Chicago History 155

Chicago's Age of Sail

BY A. A. DORNFELD

Brigantines and barkentines, barques, schooners and brigsall unloaded cargo at Chicago's ports. "' of the city of Chicago there appears an Indian, a bow in his hand, a feathered headdress on his head. From his place on the right side of the seal the Indian peers at the left side whence a full-rigged ship is rushing at him with its sails all set and drawing.

Interestingly enough, that full-rigged ship never got here during the long-past age of sail.

Some barques did, lots of brigs, and hundreds and hundreds of schooners. One full rigger-a Norwegian training ship-did visit here in 1933, and another in 1967. Both arrived after the sailing era was over, and many years after the seal was adopted.

In Chicago, as in the rest of the maritime world, the age of sail was followed by an age of steamships. Paradoxically, Chicago's age of sail was also preceded by an age of steam, because Chicago was settled well after the steamship was invented. Steam was the preferred mode of propelling ships until 1840 or 1841.

Steamers brought Chicago's settlers here, and it was their swiftly growing demand for food, building material, and manufactured goods of all sorts that accounts for the vast expansion of sailing ship tonnage by the middle of the 19th century. Steamships continued to carry most of the passengers and the high-value, low-bulk freight. Sailing craft, with no fuel bills to meet or engineering staffs to pay, could handle bulky, heavy materials at much lower rates. An analogous situation exists today in transportation. Airplanes have acquired the biggest part ON THE OFFICIAL SEAL

A. A. Dornfeld, now a free-lance writer, met most of the merchant seamen, tugboatmen, fishermen, and coastguardsmen who frequented the port of Chicago in his earlier days as reporter for Chicago's City News Bureau.

156

Chicago History

of the passenger traffic, leaving the haulage of heavy freight to trains and ships, which are much slower but much cheaper.

Going way back, of course the very earliest craft to ply Lake Michigan were the bark canoes of the Indians. And there were some very early sailing ships also. About the first of these ships-La Salle's Griffon-we know little except that she was less than a hundred tons burden and was built in 1679 near Niagara. George A. Cuthbertson, in his book Freshwater, surmises that the Griffon had two masts, both carrying square sails, stepped in a shallow draft hull of the galliot type. The galliot had evolved in the low countries for use on the Zuyder Zee and other confined waters, where conditions were similar to those here. The Griffon got as far as Green Bay, in Lake Michigan, on her first and only voyage. She departed from there on September 18, 1679, for a port forever unknown, despite the efforts of scuba divers to locate her hull.

Well over a century later, in 1803, the go-ton sloop Tracy arrived in Chicago from Detroit.

Aboard were a contingent of soldiers under Capt. John Whistler, grandfather of the portraitist. These were the soldiers who built Fort Dearborn. But sails did not disappear from Lake Michigan in the decades between the Griffon and the Tracy. Large rowing batteaux laden with furs often hoisted bits of canvas to ease the sweating oarsmen in those years.

In 1831 three ships arrived here, but were obliged to unload by small boat, being blocked from entering the river by a sand bar. Thus Chicago became a port before it was incorporated as a city-or even as a village. The first vessel larger than a rowboat or an Indian canoe to enter the Chicago River was the yacht Westward Ho, in 1833. She was dragged across

the bar by eight yoke of oxen. Later that year the first sizable cargo was loaded here for the East, on the schooner Napoleon. The shipment constituted a sort of nostalgic glance backward at Chicago's past as a frontier trading post, and a presage of its future as hog butcher to the world. The Napoleon's cargo consisted largely of furs, beef, and pork.

That same year the community was organized as a village under the laws of the state of Illinois, and construction of a lighthouse was begun.

By 1839, a heavy flow of migration had developed to "the West." Chicago was host to many newcomers, particularly those who came by steamship. In 1839, on a single day, 5,000 persons are said to have left Buffalo for "the West." The river bar had been removed by then and the river mouth shifted northward to its present location.

Chicago's first shipyard was set up on Goose Island in 1835, and it thrived for some decades.

Its best year was probably 1873, when ten large schooners were built there.

The unusual conditions on Lake Michigan quickly led to the development of special forms of sailing ships. The full-rigged ship with square sails on all three masts (pictured on the city seal) was less than ideal for navigating these waters, with their squally winds and everpresent lee shores. "Lying to" under scanty sail, and drifting slowly and comfortably to leeward

while wa1tmg for a gale to blow itself out, wouldn't work here as it did on the oceans.

Various combinations of the fore-and-aft and the square rig were tried, in a search for a hybrid which would run as swiftly downwind as a full rigger and yet steer as close to the source of the wind as a fore-and-after.

During gales on the narrow, landlocked waters of the Great Lakes, ships were all too often in peril of being hurled against a rocky shore on which the wind was piling enormous, punishing seas. Only rarely was there sea room to leeward. The first care of the lake shipmaster, when "It began to blow strong from the s'uth'ard" or "strong from the nor'east" was to make sure that land wasn't too close to the northward or the southwestward, as the case might be.

When those winds blew on the Great Lakes, land was practically always too close. Then the order was to set all the sail she'll carry, and maybe a little more. Drop the centerboard and try to smash a course against head winds and waves, away from the threatening shoal or shore. Often the vessel made it. Often it did not, as the long lists of strandings and capsizings attest.

The centerboard was a device designed to assist the shallow-draft lake ships to gain a better hold on the water, and thus combat the natural tendency of such hulls to drift rapidly

The Seal of Chicago, adopted in 1837, shows the Indian and the full-rigged schooner mentioned by the author. At the center top is a babe about to rise from a sea shell; he represents the young giant of the heart of the country, who is about to show himself. In the middle hangs an American shield. In front, a sheaf of wheat. The motto urbs in horto means "City in a Garden," and the date is the date of the incorporation of the city.

Chicago Hlstorlcal Society

Chicago History 157

Chi cago Hi storical Society

The first shipment of grain bein g loaded from an elevator on Chicago's first dock. The ship is the Osceola.

downward. Shallow hulls were essential hereabouts, particularly in the early days when few harbors and river passages had been dredged.

The centerboards were massive affairs, constructed of beams measuring up to a foot square, bolted together and lodged in a trunk set over a slot in the keel. They were hinged at the front end, and the after end could be lowered by a tackle. Similar but very much smaller boards are sometimes installed nowadays on shallow draft sailing yachts. Also tried, but never widely adopted, were leeboards, such as are sometimes seen on sailing canoes today, and "drop keels" which were suspended by tackles at both ends.

Drop keels had a distressing way of coming adrift when the lifting tackles chafed through, and then popping up alongside the ship.

The rigs on the sailing ships took many weird and wonderful forms, and they had weird and wonderful names. There were brigs, barkentines, brigantines, hermaphrodite brigs, barques, topsail schooners and scow schooners. Even the uncomplicated, ordinary fore-and-aft rigged schooner commonly carried a yard on the foremast. Above this was set a "raffee," a triangular topsail extending across the ship, when a long run downwind was in prospect.

158 Chicago History

The other hybrid rigs set several square sails on the foremast, along with various arrangements of sails on the other masts. Confusion in nomenclature was common. Thus, the Osceola, which carried the first sizable shipment of grain from Chicago to the east in I 839, was called a ' 'brig." But a contemporary drawing shows her with a boom and gaff mainsail on her mainmast, rather than square sails, and so she would seem to have been a brigantine. The barkentine, which has square sails in front and other kinds of sails on two or more other masts, is said to have originated on the Great Lakes.

An additional reason for the prevalance of fore-and-afters hereabouts lay in the fact that they could be handled with much smaller crews than square riggers of similar size. And the relatively high wages on the Great Lakes, situated as they were in a near-frontier environment where manpower was scarce, emphasized the need for small crews. The famous frigate Constitution was only about 20 feet longer than the lake schooner Our Son, but she had a crew of over 400, while the Our Son had only seven men. True, the square-rigged Constitution, a fighting ship,

The Age of Sail

needed gunne~s, but that wouldn't account for such a large difference in personnel.

In form, the sailing ships which came to Chicago were rather blocky, for large carrying capacity, rather than sharp-lined for speed.

Their stems and sterns approached the vertical, to allow as much length as possible for cargo in the hold. Their spars were lofty; some of the larger schooners had mastheads which rose JOO feet above the water. That's a long way for a sailorman to climb before he can begin to handle sail or repair rigging. Many were designed to pass through the Welland and the Soo canal locks, the earliest of which dictated an over-all length not exceeding r 50 feet.

Still, there were exceptions to the general stubbiness of lake ships. The influence of the ocean-going clipper ships, with their sharp bows and slender after sections, was sometimes felt.

In the decade before the Civil War, a number of "clipper schooners" were built in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Their speed was excellent; one, the Nichols, sailed the r ,o 54 miles from Chicago to Buffalo in 3 days and r8 hours at better than IO knots. Another, according to Howard Chappelle, author of American Sailing Ships, could get up to 13 miles an hour without difficulty. Still another, the Clipper City, lent its name as a nickname to Manitowoc, where she was built.

Most of the early schooners on the Great Lakes, however, were quite small. Many carried less than a hundred tons of cargo, not very much more than the loads which semi-trailer trucks trundle through our streets nowadays on five axles.

The diminutiveness of these ships had one advantage-it enabled thrifty masters and mates to blossom forth as ship-owners either individually or in partnerships after a few good seasons.

Lists of vessels sold after r 87 r reveal that one schooner went for as little as 250 undepreciated dollars; the highest price mentioned was $8,000.

At such figures, even ordinary seamen earning from $1.25 to $1.50 a day could aspire to own a ship some day-or some year-and there was a

short period during and after the Civil War when seamen's wages went even higher, reaching $4.00 a day in some cases. Deepwater sailors, incidentally, earned less. On Norwegian ships the going wage was equivalent to $3.00 to $4.00 a month.

Another advantage of sailing the Lakes was that the food was usually good and plentiful.

The region was becoming one of the best farming areas in the world, and frequent stops at ports made it relatively easy to obtain fresh foods. Herbert Koepke, who served in lake vessels around the very end of the sailing ship period, recalls that "Eating was like in a good restaurant."

On the other hand, working conditions on the ships sailing the Great Lakes were difficult, hours were long, and living quarters for crews were the reverse of luxurious. Koepke, a retired engineer who now lives in Manitowoc, also reminisces about the difficulty of keeping the shallow-draft, flat-floored Lake schooners right side up, particularly when they were sailing without ballast or cargo. Ballast was seldom used on such ships: "Sometimes they'd haul the anchor from the bows to the high side of the ship when it was under way, to counterbalance the capsizing thrust of the sails. People used to say that the cook would carry the galley pots and ashes to the high side if the schooner heeled over bad.

Yes, and they'd move a case of beer up there too, if they had one aboard. One foresighted skipper used to carry several cases of beer for such emergencies."

Norwegian-born seamen provided a large proportion of sailing ship crews throughout the age of sail. In time these northmen and their descendants came to constitute much of the ship-owning class as well. According to Knut Gjerstad's Norwegian Sailors on the Great Lakes, half the lumber freighters on Lake Michigan were owned by Norwegians at one time. The Norwegians, he adds, having been bred to sail in the old country were loath to switch to steam Chicago History 159

The Age of Sail

when the inevitable change began. Some did, however, along with their sons. Even today, many captains on the Lakes have names ending in "son" or "sen." The very last schooner on Lake Michigan was commanded by a Captain Nelson; four of his six men had names which hinted at Scandinavian lineage.

The ascendency of sail in the mid- 18oos is told by comparative figures. In 1846, sailing craft registered on the Great Lakes outnumbered steamers by 407 to 93; in 1855 there were r, r 50 sail and 238 steam vessels; in 1869, at the zenith of the sail era, the wind ships totaled 1,752 as against 636 steamers. And in those times a good many steamers carried masts and sails-just in case.

There were ocean-going sailing ships in Chicago's harbor, also. The brig Scott departed St. Joseph, Michigan, for Europe in 1854 and returned the next year with a full cargo. In 1856, the Dean Richmond loaded 5,000 bushels of wheat here for Liverpool. And a few years later two small ships arrived here from Norway. One, the brig Sleipner, had 1 1o immigrants and 220 barrels of herring aboard. The other was the 50-ton, 60-foot-long sloop Skjoldmoen, also carrying passengers and cargo. Salt water voyages for Lakebuilt ships became fairly common in the years immediately preceding the Civil War. There were 15 such departures in 1858, and 41 in 1859. The Civil War stopped this traffic for a time.

But a little later, in the decade between 1873 and 1883, a change developed of which Professor Gjerstad wrote: "it became clear that the sailing vessel no longer had a future on the lakes. Competition between land and water transportation would continue-but it would be competition between steamships and railroads. Sailing vessels were no longer a factor." At first gradual, the decline of sail progressed for many decades at an always accelerating pace. There were still 500 wind-driven ships on the Lakes in 1900, and the final curtain did not drop until 1930.

A glance at the empty reaches of the Chicago 160 Chicago History

River today makes it difficult to envisage the scene a hundred years ago when its banks were lined by a veritable hedge of masts and rigging.

During the winter of 1873, there were 435 vessels lined up in the main channel and the north and south branches of the river, and some ships had to be "double parked." When the ice cleared off the Lakes the following spring, a favorable wind sped 48 craft from Chicago for northern ports on a single day. What a curdling of street traffic must have occurred at the bridge approaches-with carriages, wagons, buses (horsedrawn, of course), and pedestrians waiting as ship after ship passed through the draws. Sailing ships caused mere delay than steamers, because they were towed behind slow-moving tugs and presented a longer barricade to street traffic.

The feeling expressed by poet John Masefield many years later for "a tall ship and a star to steer her by" would have found little acceptance among the waiting throngs that day.

Sailing on the Great Lakes in the very early days-and steamboating, too-was a very hazardous occupation. Even nowadays, with in-

Chicago Historical Society

An engraving entitled, "Dreadful Collision on Lake

credibly powerful engines and navigational gear which purport to do most of the seaman's thinking for him, ships are lost on the Lakes from time to time. And Lake Michigan, at Chicago's front door, is commonly reputed to be the most dangerous of the five inland seas.

Calamities took various forms. Stranding on shoals or shores, foundering under the weight of a storm, capsizing, and dismastings all took their toll. There were fires also, although these were more common in the steamers, which had to have fierce furnaces inside their wooden hulls.

Surprisingly, dismasting could occur during dead calms as well as in high winds. Periods of no wind at all following a high wind were often marked by a "dead roll" or swell which, acting on masts not steadied by wind pressure, could "jerk the sticks right out of her."

One of the worst years recorded on the Lakes was back in 1856, when 507 marine accidents were recorded. A total of 407 lives were lost that year, and $3 million in property. In another very bad year, 1867, 931 ship accidents caused 211 deaths and the loss of property worth two-thirds

Michigan, between the Mail Steamer Lady Elgin and the Schooner Augusta, Sept. 8, 1860."

of a million dollars. One exceptionally fierce gale, on November 16, 1869, wrecked 35 sailing craft, 2 steamers, and 8 unpowered barges.

Back in 1860, the schooner Augusta figured in the famous sinking of the steamer Lady Elgin, while the Lady Elgin was returning to Milwaukee from Chicago. Almost 200 lives were lost. According to one widely believed account, the schooner sailed on unconcernedly after knocking a hole in the side of the steamer (although another version had it that the master of the Augusta offered to stand by but was snubbed by the steamer captain). When the Augusta, minus her jib boom, entered port the next day, one of her crew is reported to have remarked, "I guess we hit a steamer out near Waukegan."

Feeling ran high against the Augusta, and she was hastily despatched to salt water. She returned many years later with a new name on her stern-Col. Cook. But friends of the people who Chicago History 161

The Age of Sail

had died on the Lady Elgin recognized her when she visited Milwaukee. Mobs began to form on the streets, and mutterings were heard about lynchings and about setting fire to the schooner.

Forewarned, the crew swiftly eased the Col. Cook from her dock and stood out to open water.

When most of Chicago was destroyed in the Great Fire of October, 1871, several ships burned at their wharves. But six schooners and a steamer were towed out of the path of the flames.

A particularly poignant tragedy involving a sailing vessel occurred as late as 1912. In that year, Capt. Herman Schuenemann's schooner, the Rouse Simmons, failed to reach her berth in the Chicago River just before Christmas. She had cleared an upper Michigan port in early December carrying her usual load of evergreen trees. Since 1887, the Rouse Simmons had been known as the "Christmas Ship," and from her deck many Chicagoans picked out their yule trees. Later it was learned that the Simmons had been spotted off Two Rivers, Wisconsin, her canvas ripped away, staggering in a gale. Next spring fishermen reported that their nets were badly clogged with Christmas trees.

Lumber, grain, metal ore, produce, and more moved on the sailing ships of Lake Michigan.

The lumber trade began in a very small way when a single schooner load arrived in 1833 from St. Joseph, Michigan. Seven years later there were 50 wind ships hauling lumber on the lake.

The upward trend continued for decades. Then, following Chicago's Great Fire in 1871, the demand for building material increased lumber shipments to the city from northern ports. Ship movements reported that year reached 12,312, of which the greater part were sailing vessels, and 984 million board feet of lumber reached Chicago by water. The next year, as rebuilding surged, the figure rose to 1,017 million; in 1873, 1,020 million, and in 1875 it reached an all-time high of 1,080 million board feet.

I n 1882, even after the swing toward steamships was well star ted, most lumber was still 162

Ch icago History

being shipped by sail: schooners carried 5,169 loads of lumber, as against 1,994 loads carried by steamers. An idea of the extent of the lumber traffic can be gained from a calculation made by a statistician that all the lumber stored in Chicago in 1885, if laid edge to edge, would cover one square mile to a height of 20 feet.

Grain was another important commodity. In 1839, the first large shipment sailed from here on the brig Osceola-3,678 bushels of wheat. In 1860, a peak year, Chicago exported 30 million bushels of grain. Its nearest rival was Odessa, Russia, which exported 7 million bushels. Even toward the end of the time when sailing vessels had things pretty much their way, larger and larger schooners were built in an effort to retain this trade dominance. The five-masted David Dows was the largest schooner in the world in 1881 when she was launched; she had a capacity of g 1,ooo bushels of grain. Two years later, as the golden age of sail was about to end, an even larger five-master, which could carry 150,000 bushels, was built. With inspired inappropriatness the vessel was named the Golden Age. The discovery of worthwhile copper deposits in Michigan's upper peninsula in the middle of the r 9th century provided another kind of cargo for lake ships, as did the finding of iron ore in Minnesota. Before locks were built around the rapids at Sault Sainte Marie, copper ore was brought there in ships which had to be hauled on rollers from Lake Huron to Lake Superior. The ore was in its turn carted around the rapids and loaded on other ships, which were waiting below to haul it to ports on the other Lakes. Trade in these ores-the real precious metals of our eradeveloped swiftly after a canal was dug around the Sao. Coal was also part of the burden of the early sailing ships, but it never became as important as lumber and grain.

Fruit from the vast orchards of Michigan came here largely by ship, a good deal of it in sailing craft. Frank Carland, who lived in the life-saving station commanded by his father at the mouth of the river almost up to World War

Chicago Historical Society

The Rouse Simmons, Chicago's Christmas Tree Ship, her decks piled high with trees and snow. She foundered about two years later.

I, recalls that fruit schooners in passing the station used to sling bags of apples or pears onto the dock there . "Lots of fruit moved by schooner in those days," he declares.

When twilight set in for sail in the years between r 873 and r 883 the owners, the masters, and the crews of the wind-driven ships were slow to recognize it. Certain aspects of steam engineering even served to prolong the useful life of sailing ships. Steam tugs became common in lake ports; they helped schooners into port under adverse conditions, thus making larger sailing craft practical. Many of the last generation of sailing ships carried small steam engines, to do such heavy labor as hoisting sail, peaking the anchor, and raising the centerboard. Thus the sailing ship's chief weapon against its steamdriven rival-economy of operation-was sharpened. Indeed, some of the large schooners could carry as much cargo as the smaller steamers, with crews roughly half the size, and with no coal bill. But in the end the sailing ship could not prevail against the steamer' s even greater advantages-more trips a season, greater handiness in harbors, and independence in the face of head winds. The ascendency of sail lasted about three decades, from the early 1840s to the middle 1870s. Like other handsome but inefficient

transportation-notably the pony express and the steam locomotive-the picturesque but perilous tall ships were shouldered off history's stage by technology.

To many of the old time seamen-in-sail with their somewhat anthropomorphic attitude toward their vessels, the last days of what steamship men called scornfully "stick-and-string ships" were pathetic to the point of being disgraceful. Around the turn of the century, while many smaller schooners still plodded from port to port carrying unimportant cargos, most of the larger ones were tied up in harbors. Worse, a good many were degraded into tow barges, their lofty rigs cut down to almost nothing or altogether removed. These barges were dragged ignominiously behind steamers like captive barbarian chieftains in a R oman conquerer's triumphal processions. The barges commonly carried two or three men to steer in the steamer's wake and, under favorable conditions, to hoist sail on the stubby masts. The sail was handled at the steamship captain's behest; he transmitted his orders by toots on a steam whistle.

Life on the wind ships could be brutally hard, the old-timers freely admiued. But it had certain compensations. Handling a vessel under sail requires skilled juggling of the forces of stability, Chicago History 163

Chicag o Hl storlcal Society

The Keystone State . Called "the most splendid and quick steamer on the Lakes," she nevertheless carried sails.

Built in Buffalo, 1849; foundered on Lake Huron, 1861.

lateral resistance, and wind pressure. It provides a challenge utterly absent from the tame chore of steering a docile steamer or feeding smoky coal under a boiler. It was, in fact, more fun, even though it was more dangerous. Today scores of small yachts cross and re-cross the oceans under sail, at their owners' expense-for fun. The old timers were paid to sail the old ships. Maybe they had a point.

One schooner, at least, made a comeback.

Launched in r 87 5, the r 82-foot-long, threemaster Our Son was well fitted for the lumbercarrying trade. She had a deep main deck between the after house and the forecastle and a raised steering platform so the helmsman could see over the additional load she carried on deck.

Sometime in the last decades of the r 9th century she became a barge with a "bald head" rig, sans top-masts and topsails. There were long layups.

Well along in the r goos, things looked up for this particular schooner and she was sent out to sail the Lakes again as an independent unit, though still propelled by her cut-down sail plan. And late in the r 920s the Our Son was remasted and appeared once again with something like her original lofty rig as she carried pulpwood from northern ports. There was one other schooner said to be in fair shape in these later years, the 164

Ch icago History

Lucia Simpson. But the Lucia Simpson stayed roped to a deck and was eventually burned as useless in 1933.

During a screaming September gale in r 930, the Our Son, laden with pulpwood in her hold and on her deck, was stumbling unhappily through heavy seas off of Ludington. Despite desperate pumping, she began to fill; it was assumed that oakum was spewing out of her planking under the wrenching strains of the breaking seas. After all, the Our Son was 55 years old . Then the deck load began working loose. Seamen tried to secure it, but a series of high waves swept the logs overboard . By good chance, none of the seven-man crew went with them.

When the crew of the steamer William Nelson sighted the Our Son, her ensign was flying upside down in distress. "Her rail was only two feet above the water," Capt. Charles Mohr of the William Nelson said later. "We could see it wouldn't be long for her. We asked her to come up into the wind so we could come alongside.

There was a terrific sea running at the time."

The schooner crew tried to comply and then cut away the sails, the last commercial sails ever seen on the Great Lakes. Then Captain Mohr eased his vessel alongside the helpless schooner with such consummate skill that Capt. Fred Nel-

The Age of Sail

The Our Son. When this once-proud schooner sank in 1930, it was the end of an era. Here she is in 1922, her sails trimmed and her best years behind her.

Chicago Historical Society

son of the Our Son later stated, "Captain Mohr ought to have a medal for the chances he took."

A "car ferry" arrived during the rescue and stood by for a time as a precaution. (Car ferries are ships operated by the railroad lines to carry railroad cars across Lake Michigan. They have rails installed on their decks.)

All the ancient mariners-Captain Nelson was 73, the cook was 52, and the others ranged between in age-reached the deck of the Nelson safely. Then, without incurring damage from the battering thrusts of the derelict sailing ship, the steamer backed away.

Lake steamers are held to schedules almost as strict as those which govern freight trains. They have scant time to linger along the way. Still, Captain Mohr, realizing that he was watching the end of an era, held the Nelson in sight of the dying Our Son for almost an hour. He put his ship back on course only after the waves rolled without hindrance over the place where Our Son was last seen.

The age of sail was over.

There was an epilogue, however.

Some weeks later Captain Nelson stood in the old Chicago Coast Guard station, answering questions. After a lifetime spent in sail Nelson was at last resigned to "going into steam." He had been offered a post on a car ferry as a wheelman. For this he needed what was known as a "lifeboat ticket," a document not required for masters in sail. He was being queried about port and starboard, about launching lifeboats, and about other elementary aspects of seamanship.

His interrogator was Capt. John 0. Anderson, the station commander, who as a youth had been trained under Captain Nelson.

Seriously, even solemnly, the absurd ritual was completed. At the end Anderson filled in a form certifying that Nelson understood the rudiments of seamanship.

Then Anderson signed it.

That made the end of the age of sail official.

The Lost Illinois Prairie

BY W. J. BEECHER

Thanks to the steel plow) a local invention) the Prairie State has lost its prairies. But afew precious parcels remain) to remind us qf the splendors that were here before us.

known as Avondale which, when I first knew it, was toward the outskirts of the metropolis, the third station from the downtown train shed on the Northwestern Railroad. At that time there was more open land than housing in Avondale and I caught butterflies in its ragweed jungles and enjoyed a kind of spacious freedom city children do not have now. We referred to the weedy parcels of empty land as "prairies," thus using a term unknown to children in the eastern states.

What was "prairie"? The French originally used it to describe the grassy fields of L'Ile de France around Paris, and the voyageurs simply applied it to the more extensive and beautiful grasslands of the New World. It was a sea of grass that began in earnest on the west bank of the Wabash River in Illinois, a thrilling sight to settlers traveling for weeks through the dark eastern forest. Where they had seen the sun only in spangled prismatic flashings among the treetops, now ¡t he sky suddenly opened outward like the expanding diaphragm of a huge lens. It was a delightful experience, they reported. The vast opening of the sky, the waving of the grass ocean to the horizon, the incredible profusion and variety of wildflowers raised spirits. The lilting jangling notes of the bobolink, delivered on the wing, or the clear whistles of the meadowlark were cheerful sounds. Even the mournful cries of the curlews and other prairie shorebirds fitted the vastness of the flat land.

I GREW UP IN A CHICAGO NEIGHBORHOOD

Dr. W. J. Beecher, an ecologist, conservationist, and ornithologist, is director of the Chicago Academy of Sciences.

166 Chicago History

The grasslands of North America go back forty million years to the Miocene epoch, but they were restricted by the rainy climate of the glacial warm periods during the last million.

With the final melting of the ice eleven thousand years ago, the prairies emerged.

Remnants of prairie, left behind from an eastward grassland invasion in post-glacial times, formed "openings" into the forest of Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan, but they were generally considered worthless. The pioneers were accustomed to clearing the forest, and the ring of the axe in hardwood was heard everywhere. Moreover, timber was needed for homes, furniture, and fuel. And the cleared forest land was easy to plow, while breaking the prairie sod required six horses, and people able to do it commanded a fee of $5 an acre at a time when the land itself cost only $1 an acre. Finally, prairie streams seemed to lack the flow necessary for grist mills.

Upon reaching Indiana, the settler moved westward through 15 Mile Prairie, between the walls of dune-land forest on the north and the Kankakee marsh on the south. He was thus guided quite naturally through the grassy gateway of LaPorte into the Grand Prairie of Illinois, which rolled on like an ocean to the Rockies.

The expression "sea of grass" is well taken.

The billowing grassland, open and sunny, broke upon the forest as the sea upon a dark and somber coast, with many an inlet and embayment cutting deep. There were numerous forest "islands," too, the prairie groves which attracted settlers and finally became townsDowner's Grove, Deer Grove, Buffalo Grove, Holderman's Grove. The settlers needed wood, but perhaps they were also attracted to the groves by a biological urge to locate on the edge

Ch icago H istorical Society

of something. A hunter instinctively follows the edges where forest and prairie meet, the edge of a marsh, the bank of a stream, because living creatures are more abundant on edges. It is an expression of the fact that their needs are seldom supplied within a single life zone. But perhaps there was a psychological reason for settling on the edges of groves. Perhaps the open sky was too overwhelming and the forest edge offered friendly shelter from the burning sun and prairie wind.

For a time the prairie remained untouched, though much admired . Pioneers, bursting out of the eastern forest after their long, dark journey, felt their spirits soar. Gordon S. Hubbard, journeying to Chicago by steamer, landed at Douglas Grove on Chicago's present South Side where the prairie could be seen through the oak woods. Here is how he described it in 1818 : "Climbing a tree [I] gazed in admiration on the first prairie I had ever seen. The waving green, intermingling with a rich profusion of wild flowers, was the most beautiful sight I had ever gazed upon. In the distance the grove of Blue Island loomed up, beyond it the timber of the Des Plaines River, while to give animation to the scene, a herd of wild deer appeared, and a pair of red foxes emerged from the grass within gunshot of me. " These early settlers and travelers used superlatives to describe the beauty of the prairie. It is always the prairie that is compared with the Garden of Eden. Perhaps the awesome beauty of

The team of oxen shown above, at the Burr Oak Farm in Illinois, 1871, is pulling a plow very similar to the first steel-moldboard plow. This sod is raw prairie; the prairie grasses did not grow as tall in Illinois as in other parts of the Midwest. From Harper's Weekly.

the forest was hidden by the giant trees. And the prairie was covered by unbelievably beautiful wildflowers, which changed the face of the landscape weekly, from spring through fall, in one vast kaleidoscope of color.

Unlike the European steppes-those great central grasslands of Poland and Russia which come into full bloom in early June-the American prairies came into their most riotous color in August. In early May all was still green. The bird-foot violets, bluets, and blue-eyed grass formed no really discernible masses of color. In June the wild phlox, shooting stars, and wild indigos made more notable patches. Then came the lavender and pink bee balm and obedient plant, New Jersey tea, and the yellow St. J ohnswort and evening primrose. Finally, in July and August, there was a deluge of color as the blazing star, compass plant, lead plant, rattlesnake master, bush clovers, black-eyed Susan, goldenrod, and aster danced in the prairie breeze. Late, too, came the tall bluestem cordgrass, and Indian grass, growing in patches eight feet tall. In the low prairies the switch grass and cordgrass, used to thatch pioneer roofs, outlined the borders of the low marshy areas where waterfowl and' marsh birds gabbled and trilled continuously, day and night.

Chicago History 167

The Lost Illinois Prairie

Left, New Jersey tea at Goose Lake Prairie. An indigenous American plant, New Jersey tea was at home in the midwestern prairie as well as in eastern meadows. During the Revolutionary War its leaves were brewed as a substitute for tea; hence its name. Right, switch grass, a prairie plant used in thatching roofs.

Courtesy Ray Schulenberg

The pioneer traveler approached those sections of the Grand Prairie given over to tall bluestem with caution. A man on foot was lost at once; only on horseback could one see over the rich brown trident heads of the famous "turkeyfoot." These grasses, rooting twelve feet into the ground, formed part of an incredible sod, ten thousand years old. It made the prairie almost invulnerable to attack when the settlers finally realized that, in farming woodland, they had been collecting the chaff and throwing the wheat away.

By the 1830s the quality of the prairie soil was known. It was so rich and deep that it would not need fertilizer for a hundred years! Corn leapt out of the ground in unprecedented yields per acre. But breaking the sod required gang plowing with four to eight yoke of oxen. After a few years the overturned vegetation rotted and the soil became easier to work-but it still stuck to the wooden moldboard. Generally a boy walked alongside the plow with a wooden paddle and the plow was stopped every few feet so that he could scrape off the heavy soil.

The solution to this problem was simple but revolutionary-a genuine breakthrough. In 1833, on a farm five miles northeast of Joliet, John Lane got the idea of attaching a highly polished steel saw blade to the moldboard of a plow, which scoured itself clean as wooden moldboard plows would not. A stone monument at the site today marks the occasion, and a living grandson attests the fact. In American Agricultural Implements, however, Ardrey states that Lane 168 Chicago History

made the first steel moldboard plow in a blacksmith shop on the site of the present Illinois Central station in Chicago.

Although Lane seems to be the first inventor of a self-scouring plow, the plow that broke the plains was invented by John Deere at Grand Detour, Illinois, in 1837. There is no way of knowing whether he had heard of Lane's plow or hit upon the idea independently, but Deere also used a saw blade in forming the moldboard of his plow. Two more were made in 1838, and by 1840 his output was 40 plows. The steel moldboard was apparently replaced by a highly polished moldboard of wrought iron for production purposes. By 1847, John Deere and Company had moved to Moline where, ten years later, their output was 10,000 plows a year!

The sharp steel share of the Deere plows sliced through the 10,000-year-old root mass of perennial grasses and oak seedlings without being torn out of the ground, and their polished moldboards rolled back black ribbons of soil in long furrows. They also cut the web of prairie life. Thousands of species of plants, mammals, birds, and countless insects-champions that had survived ages of competition as an integrated ecological community-were destroyed.

With Deere's invention, the life of the prairie, the beauty of its dancing flowers and waving grasses, disappeared forever. By the 1880s, with draining and tilling, Illinois was a tamed land and the prairie was almost entirely under the plow. Indians and wild things were across the Mississippi River and still retreating annually

Left, tall bluestem, also called turkey foot. Right, shooting star at Goose Lake Prairie.

Courtesy W . J. Beecher

before the roaring advance of human exploitation.

Among the animals which vanished with the landscape was the prairie chicken, an American grouse once so abundant that it was killed for the pot by every prairie family. We have specimens in the Academy of Sciences collection labeled Lincoln Park, Chicago, and only sixty years ago they were still hunted in the Calumet region. As the prairie passed extensively under the plow in the 186os, the prairie grouse at first became more abundant because the waste grain was added to its diet. For a brief moment in history, fantastic bags were recorded. There were contests, and two men shot six hundred in ten days. But the uncontrolled plowing continued, and in 1887 and 1888 Illinois closed the hunting season on prairie chickens for the first time. Since 1933 there has been no legal hunting of the species, and yet it continued to vanish as its grassy nesting areas became corn and soybean fields. Suitable breeding grounds have been purchased in the southern counties of the state by the Illinois Chapter of the Nature Conservancy, and the birds are slowly being rescued from extinction.

The ancient prairie chicken courtship dance which the Indians copied, and their strange "booming" on breeding grounds, which can be herd for miles on a still spring morning, have, as a result, not yet disappeared from the Illinois land.

No reasonable person rails against reasonable progress. But the history of exploitation reveals that, once a breakthrough like the plow with a

steel moldboard is made, a chain of events is set in motion that cannot be restrained until the entire resource is exploited. People anxious to make a living for their families were not inclined to question whether it was a good idea to destroy all of the prairie Eden which they had earlier thought so beautiful. Private exploitation continued until almost all the eastern forest was shorn to the ground and virtually all the prairie was under the plow. Even today the American government is not so enlightened as to believe that it is the duty of the Congress to preserve as national parks "for all time for all the people" representative areas of all ecological communities original to the continent.

In the spring of 1673, Joliet had recognized that a continental divide existed at Chicagoone which he declared could be crossed by a canal two miles long and seven feet deep. In fact, Chicago was founded as a canal town. With the completion of the hundred-mile IllinoisMichigan Canal in 1848, connecting the Atlantic drainage of the Great Lakes with the Gulf drainage of the Mississippi River, Chicago became the center of all the exploitation of forest and prairie.

By the 188os the entire south branch of the Chicago River was glutted with both river boats and Great Lakes vessels as sugar and molasses from the lower Mississippi River were traded over the gunwales for cotton goods from the East and grain from the prairies. The banks of the river were piled cliff-high with sawn lumber ready for shipment. The great hardwood forest Chicago History

169

The Lost Illinois Prairie

of Michigan and Wisconsin was being torn out of the quivering earth and Chicago was the lumber capital of the world.

A forest may in time recover, and there are excellent examples among the eastern hardwood forest now under protection. But the prairie turned out to be a far different story. Once a prairie was turned over by the plow it never returned to prairie. What came up in the fallow fields instead were weeds which originated in the Eurasian steppe, possibly because their early blooming habits gave them a head start on native plants. These weeds accompanied man on his westward invasion, attacking every parcel of disturbed land. That is why, in my Avondale "prairies" which began as abandoned farmland, there was not one original prairie plant. My playground was a garden of Eurasian plants.

All this I came to know by the time I was an adult. Professor Victor Shelford, the foremost ecologist in Illinois, had stated that the prairie was extinct in Illinois except for a few segments along railroad rights of way and a few other spots. I watched these disappear, acre by acre.

One was the old Ashburn airport area at 79th Street and Crawford, reaching west to Cicero. I also searched for fragments of the prairie in a sort of futile, nostalgic way, and found some spots in the back lots of cemeteries where prairie dock and tall bluestem grass still bloomed.

Then in 1940 I found a first-class prairie of over a hundred acres, just west of the Glenview Naval Air Station. There this gem had persisted for thousands of years, surrounded by large estates and the air field-but it was marked for subdividing and I was unable to get either state or county to take it over. Even my revered "Cap" Sauers, superintendent of the Cook County Forest Preserve District, felt that he could hardly convince the Cook County commissioners that land without trees on it could be worth $15,000 an acre. And yet, in 1969, several years after its demise, some of us were able to go before a local foundation and convince its board to pay $ 1 10,000, to be matched by an equal sum 170 Chicago History

of federal money, for the purchase of six-acre Peacock Prairie, only a few miles south. Public interest in ecology had begun to grow by then, and we were able to make an impassioned plea for what was billed as Illinois' "last prairie."

Yet these few acres were not the last. Even as we were seeking to preserve Peacock Prairie, we knew of a fantastic prairie of 1800 acres, only sixty miles southwest of Chicago, that had miraculously escaped the plow. This one, situated in the old glacial valley of the Illinois River in Grundy County, was about to be zoned for industrial use. The Illinois Valley was slated to become "the Ruhr Valley of the Midwest," and our opponents were U.S. Steel and U.S. Gypsum. To arouse the public and inform the people of what they were about to lose, I published an article in the Chicago Tribune M aga;::,ine called "The Last Prairie," illustrated with color photographs. The response to that 1967 article and the ones that followed-they were part of a barrage of public education-was truly remarkable. The campaign was waged in the local press and on radio and television, much of it led by the Open Lands Project, which had taken the prairie under its wing. The Illinois public was aroused by the threat of losing the last remnant of prairie in a state that had once been two-thirds prairie. From the housewife who phoned me and asked if she could type letters to help save the prairie, to the anonymous donor who offered a million and a half dollars to save and hold the prairie until the state found money to buy it, the public response was moving. I believe there is something genetic in people that binds them to the wild earth that nurtures them, something that says "Stop" when a dreadful mistake is about to be made. Under a new director of the state Department of Conservation, William L. Rutherford, and with the approval of Governor Ogilvie, the state acquired Goose Lake Prairie.

Then a strange thing happened. Unknown to me, others had been tramping those old railroad rights-of-way and cenetery back lots. The

photographs in the press enabled some of them to recognize prairie, and reports began to come in-a small prairie site here, another there.

Most of them were too small to consider. Others, well within the city, were valuable real estate.

At least one, the Markham Prairie at 157th Street and Kedzie Avenue, has been saved through the efforts of my friend, Dr. Robert F. Betz of ortheastern Illinois State University, Gunnar Peterson of the Open Lands Project, and others. Louis, David, and Myer Gensburg made a gift of their 60 acres in 1971, and matching funds from the federal government will make it possible to buy the rest. The total comes close to 150 acres on which nearly 200 species of plants occur, representing the prairie of the Chicago Plain-what my Avondale "prairie" had originally been. Betz has been finding small prairie plots in small abandoned country cemeteries all over the state. He has had remarkable luck in getting local groups, often historical societies, to maintain such areas as historical remnants of the Illinois prairie. Their

The prairie grouse. Once abundant, it is now an imperiled species.

Courtesy W. J. Beech er

value as gene pools for Illinois prairie plants is extremely high.

The prairies that the pioneers saw were actually a result of the American Indian's practices. Annual rainfall in Illinois favored forest growth, and the prairie was maintained only by fire. The Indians burned it regularly, and there were natural fires as well. Fire, swept by west winds, is the only way to account for the prairie on the west bank of the Des Plaines River, and the forest on its east bank. The prairie groves, made up mostly of bur oaks, tell the same story.

Only the bur oak, with its thick, corky bark, could have withstood the scorching fires that killed the other forest trees. Nevertheless, Illinois school children-for reasons best known to their teachers-recently chose the white oak as the state tree.

The Chicago prairie is well documented.

Geologist Henry M . Bannister of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, writing in the 1860s, described the grassy Chicago Plain as being an ancient glacial lake bottom. Riding horseback

The Lost Illinois Prairie

The Illinois & Michigan Canal, shown as a black line on the map, connected Chicago, on Lake Michigan, with La Salle, on the Illinois River. Thus the entire area between the Great Lakes and St. Louis became navigable. The chart gives distances between La Salle and points south on the Illinois River.

inland from the present shore one could clearly see the old shorelines, from which the oncelarger Lake Michigan had withdrawn over a period of thousands of years, because they were forested. First one came to the oak ridge on which Clark Street ran north, an ancient sandbar left high and dry. Beyond, for four miles to the west, was flat prairie, twenty feet higher than the present level of the Lake. Then came the rise (beyond Cicero Avenue) to the next oak ridge. Beyond that, one traversed several miles of still higher flat prairie land until it terminated (at Narragansett Avenue) against the wooded moraine that had been the oldest shore of the lake-when its waters covered present-day Chicago to a depth of 60 feet. We now can establish that this larger lake, filled with glacial melt water, existed twelve thousand years ago.

From that level Lake Michigan shrank by degrees as the Des Plaines opened its mile-wide valley through the moraine hills to the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. The retreating glaciers finally unlocked Niagara Falls too, thus drawing off water into the Atlantic drainage. In the final phases, as the waters withdrew from the Chicago Plain in both directions, there was left behind that continental divide known to Joliet in 1673, when he averred that a canal could unite the two great drainage systems. No doubt he was geographer enough to envision a town at Chicago some day-French, of course.

Chicago Hlstorical Society

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Chicago History

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Heinrich Schliemann's Chicago Journal

BY DONALD ZOCH ERT

The man who located ancient Troy was first ef all a hardboiled businessman.

When he visited Chicago, he observed everything, from window blinds to slaughterhouses.

INTRODUCTION (1822-1890) was probably the most romantic figure in the history of archaeology. He was possessed by an idea that came to him in childhood: that Homer's legends were indeed history, and that he had been ordained to rediscover that history. To this end he bent his life. Schliemann's search for Homer's Troy-and his discovery of its site even as the orthodox hooted at his grand claims and amateur methods-won him lasting fame.

Schliemann made a fortune in Crimean grain, California gold, armaments, exotic foods and dyestuffs, real estate, and stocks and bonds-all to foster his mission. When he reached the age of 42, he retired from the counting-house and turned toward the dream. He had already traveled widely and immersed himself in languages both ancient and modern. In 1867, his travels brought him to Chicago.

This was Schliemann's third visit to America, although his first to the Queen City of the Prairies. His itinerary took him from New York to Detroit, thence to Chicago, St. Louis, Washington, ew Orleans, Cuba, and eventually back to New York and the return voyage to Europe. His observations of Chicago, recorded in English in his journal (he was versed in 18 languages), provide a unique view of the city through the demanding eyes of a European master of commerce. Troy lay in the future. It is the businessman, not the dreamer, who visited Chicago.

HEINRICH SCHLIEMANN

Donald Zochert is a reporter for the Chicago Daily News. His special interests include history and early rnidwestern literature.

Courtesy Historical Picture Services, Chicago.

Heinrich Schliemann, 1822-1890, German businessman, traveler, and archaeologist. His was a businessman's, rather than a socialite's, tour of the city.

In preparing Schliemann's observations for publication, paragraphing and punctuation have been added, abbreviations have been spelled out, and syntax has been anglicized.

The demands of space have limited prefatory notes to the identification of only some of the persons and places mentioned in the journal.

Chicago History

173

A Chicago Journal

THE JOURNAL departed for Chicago in less than his usual form, the impeccable German having spent an insufferable night at Detroit's Franklin House which, he confided, "is very bad." The discomfort was forgotten, however, when he discovered Dr. Alfred Castle among his Chicago-bound traveling companions the next morning. A native New Yorker and Harvard graduate who had taken up residence on the Illinois prairie more than thirty years earlier, Dr. Castle was well-equipped to dispute on " democracy," "republicanism," or anything else: he claimed to be a cousin of Ethan Allan and was married to the great-granddaughter of Gen. Israel Putnam. Francis A. Hoffman, to whom Schliemann presented himself in Chicago, had equally impressive credentials.

Former lieutenant governor of Illinois, Hoffman was local counsul for three German duchies in 1867-no doubt the reason Schliemann sought him out-and was secretary of the Germania Fire and Insurance Company at 39 LaSalle Street. The particulars of Hoffman's rise are essentially as Schliemann recounts them, with this addition: he was also a tireless evangelist for German immigration, and he directed Lincoln's efforts to capture the German vote in the presidential campaign of 1864. Capt. E. E. Ryan, whose buggy and knowledge were placed at Schliemann's disposal, was surveyor and adjustor for both the Germania Insurance Company and the Illinois Mutual Fire Insurance Company.

SCHLIEMANN

Chicago, November 13, 1867 I started yesterday morning at ro A.M. from Detroit by the Michigan-Central road and arrived here at g P.M. The railroad has only one track but is very substantially built. The cars are very elegant and convenient.

There is much more cultivation and many more settlements on both sides of this railroad than on the Cleveland-Toledo railroad. We passed a number of fine agricultural towns, which are fast growing. The soil is very good throughout. We passed a corner of Indiana and some distance on the shore, and even rode through Lake Michigan.

I stopped here at the Tremont House, which is three times as large as the Hotel de !'Europe at Hamburg. Together with large blocks of other enormous buildings, it had been built on low 174 Chicago History

ground which was formerly washed by the waters of the Lake, so that the drainage was bad or obstructed. They were all raised 5 to 6 feet, and during the process, the traffic on these blocks was not interrupted.

I rode nearly the whole distance from Detroit with two most interesting persons, Dr. Castle from Wyoming, Illinois, and R. M. Steel from St. John, Michigan. I disputed a great deal with Dr. Castle over Democracy and Republicanism.

The virgin forests here in the country consist principally of ash trees, which are used for sounding boards in pianos.

Each mile of railroad costs about $19,000 to build.

This morning I called on F. Hoffman & Co., 39 LaSalle Street. Mr. Hoffman, 46 years old,

Francis A. Hoffman, former lieutenant governor of Illinois. Schliemann was interested in this Horatio Alger character, who started as a bootblack, became a banker, lost his fortune in the crisis of 1861, and held a respected position as an insurance agent when he met Schliemann in 1867.

Chicago Historical Society

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Chicago Historical Society

hardly looks 30. He came here in 1839, when the city had only 3,500 inhabitants, and he has witnessed its growth to its present number of 250,000. He is a native of Herford, Minden. In Chicago he was first a bootblack, then a knifecleaner, then a waiter, then a schoolmaster, which he was for 8 years, then a clergyman, then a lawyer, then lieutenant governor of Illinois, and then a banker. Having lost his whole fortune in the crisis of r 86 r, he became commissioner of the Illinois-Central railroad, which he was for 4 years. Finally he became an insurance agent, which he is now. When he first came here, the site of the present city was nearly all virgin forest.

He kindly sent with me the most amiable Capt. E. E. Ryan, to show me the city. This gentleman, who is the surveyor for the insurance company, accompanied me in his buggy.

Property on the best streets costs $1,500 and even $ r ,800 per foot front, 125 feet deep; less in other streets. Enormous and most beautiful massive buildings, entirely of brick or with stone fronts, are springing up in every direction; the traffic is tremendous. The greater portion of the town still consists of frame buildings, although they are gradually doing away with them and building massive brick ones.

Not just some blocks of houses, as I supposed, but all the houses of this populous city were raised by 5 to 6 feet-and this gigantic work was

The raising of a hotel, the Briggs House, at Randolph and Wells Sts., in 1857. Schliemann did not see Chicago's tremendous accomplishment, which consisted in raising the entire city out of the mud, but marveled over the tale. As can be seen, the project had an Egyptian quality, both in the manpower used and the breadth of the undertaking. It took 600 jacks to raise the Briggs House. The men worked in perfect synchronization, simultaneously turning each screwjack a fraction of an inch, and it is said that diners in the upstairs rooms were undisturbed as the building was slowly lifted.

done without interrupting the traffic one moment. . . . Moreover, the ground being sandy, the streets can neither be macadamized nor paved in the usual way. They are, by Nicholson's invention, covered with planks, on which are placed blocks of wood I foot long and 6 inches broad by 4 inches wide. These are placed upright with a one-inch space between them, which is filled up with gravel and pitch.

Fine gravel is then strewn on top to wear the whole in.

Captain Ryan knew his companion. He gave Schliemann the "wealthy German businessman" tour of the day, beginning naturally enough with John A. Huck's prosperous Eagle Brewery, located in the 400 block of North State Street. Huck was a former alderman drawn into politics, it seems, by his opposition to liquor restrictions. His house is believed to have been the last destroyed in the Great Fire four years later.

When Schliemann visited the Washington Street tunnel, work had just resumed after long and vexing Chicago History 175

A Chicago Journal

delays; it was not completed until the final day of 1868. The unidentified grain elevator was typical, and of great interest to a man who had made a fortune in the grain trade. As for the theatre, we may assume that Schliemann viewed the celebrated Joseph Jefferson in the title role, for Jefferson was scheduled to play it.

CJIIC.\GO WATEU WOHKS.

The Captain first showed me the brewery of Huck, which covers ro acres and consists of a vast malt house, an immense brewery, and vast vault houses for storing the beer. He is building another vault house containing 8 immense saloons 200 feet long by 20 feet wide.

Each barrel contains 30 gallons of beer, and 350 of these are stored on each side in two rows, one above the other. The upper storey above these saloons is filled with ice which keeps the beer cold; it has an iron floor and is lined with the same metal, to prevent moisture from penetrating.

Huck brews 50,000 of these immense barrels a year, and this winter he is brewing 350 barrels daily. His workmen earn $50 to $60 monthly, and his clerks from $roo to $167. He gets his hops from Wisconsin; his oats from Illinois.

J. A.

Chicago Historical Society

The pumping engine of the Chicago Water Works, which Schliemann visited . From the 8th Annual Report of the Board of Public Works, 1869.

A diagram showing the tunnel dug under Lake Michigan to provide water for Chicago. The water enters the pumping chambers and from there is moved to the Water Tower which, as Chicagoans know, survived the Fire of 1871. In 1867, when Schliemann was visiting, work on the Washington Street tunnel, which was to accommodate traffic, was progressing. From the 8th Annual Report of the Board of Public Works, 1869. .,

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176 Chicago History

Chicago Historical Society

Chicago Historical Society

We then drove to the tunnel they are now digging 50 feet below the surface of the Chicago River. The river itself is 20 feet deep. This slanting tunnel is intended for equestrians, pedestrians, and carriages, for the bridges are not large enough to handle the growing traffic.

We also visited the great waterworks which supplies all the houses with water brought from a distance of 2 miles inside the lake by a subterranean passage. The passage is 75 feet below the surface of the water, which is 39 feet deep, and it is 5 feet high. The stock of these waterworks sells at 90% and pays 7Âź% on its nominal value of I oo.

We then visited the Board of Trade, which was crowded with people who come there to buy and sell. A clerk was reading the morning telegram from New York.

Heating apparatus here comes in the most fantastic forms and shapes. I often see it in the form of screens. The iron stoves have windows of isinglass so that one can see the fire.

The names of the streets are not placed on the corner houses, but on the panes of the lanterns on the corners of the streets, so that they are visible when the lanterns are lighted. The keys to the hotel bedrooms are fastened to a rightangle bolt of iron 5 inches long, so that nobody can pocket them ....

We went to a grain elevator made of boards

A grain elevator at the mouth of the Chicago River at about the time Schliemann visited Chicago. Note that the railroad cars enter the building directly, on tracks that are laid on the floor of the giant storehouse.

Schliemann saw an operation of this size when he visited a grain elevator, but the method of transporting the grain was by ship, as in the view of the loading of the Osceola some decades earlier, shown in A. A. Dornfeld's article in this issue.

which are placed flat atop each other and fastened together by huge irons. There are 30 bins in that elevator, each of which can hold 30,000 bushels of grain. An engine drives the elevator buckets, which can lift 5,000 bushels of grain an hour out of a boat and into the bins.

While the grain is being elevated it is carefully weighed.

They use these elevators as storehouses. For storing the grain for 5 days, they charge 1 ٢ a bushel. For elevating and relowering the grain they charge $3 for 1 ,ooo bushels. They can easily load a vessel with 30,000 bushels in 3 hours, and there are larger elevators here that can lift 20,000 bushels an hour. These large elevators can store as much as 1,200,000 bushels. They are now putting up an elevator that can hold 2,000,000 bushels of grain.

The average exportation of grain from Chicago is 66 million bushels, and it will not fall short of 100 millions this year. To think that it was only 1838 when the first 78 bushels of grain Chicago History

177

A Chicago Journal

were brought to Chicago for export! Ships can load here directly for Europe, for they go along Lake Michigan into Lake Huron, pass by the Straits of Detroit into Lake Erie and by the Welland canal or the Soo of Canada into Lake Ontario and thence by the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic Ocean.

Everywhere here I see the spirit of improvement. They have adopted the French slate roof with variegated color for the fronts of many private dwellings. The stone is brought from Athens, Illinois.

We passed two large skating-parks, one of which was covered all over. We also went to the Pacific depot, recently built for the Pacific Railroad, which is immense. There must be a great many thieves here, because in the saloons of said depot are more than 20 placards: "Beware of confidence men," "Beware of thieves."

Tonight I went to McVicker's Theatre, where Rip van Winkle or The Sleep of Twenty rears, by Washington Irving, was presented.

There are no curtains in the hotels. Instead there are very neat shutters fastened inside the windows, consisting of 4 doors provided with a sort of persiennes called "blinds." Each door of the shutter has two parts, and one can shut the lower or the upper half of the windows; the slats or the shutters are moveable like "jalousies."

Schliemann now turned to another aspect of the city-one that would raise it to prominence as the nation's hog butcher and meat packer. November 14, 1867, was a day of steel rails and slaughter houses.

The brothers Power-presumably Chauncey and James-are not mentioned in the business directories of the day. The Mr. Douglas who presided over the Illinois Central Railroad was John B. Douglas; the commissioner of the railroad's land department was John B. Calhoun, not as Schliemann has it. Charles Duffield marketed his canvassed hams as " Duffield's Celebrated Hams" and claimed they won a prize at the 1851 World's Fair in London. Culbertson, Blair & Co. was the sixth largest meat packing operation in the city, doing an annual business of more than $2.7 million. The university which Schliemann visited was the University of Chicago-obviously his host whisked him away-and the optics from its famous 178 Chicago History

telescope are still in use at Northwestern University.

The Union Stock Yards had been in operation nearly two years at the time of Schliemann's visit.

Chicago, November 14 This morning I called at the vast Power Bros. dry-goods store. Mr. Chauncey Power accompanied me to see a Mr. Douglas, the president of the Illinois Central Railroad, who was not in.

He therefore introduced me to the land commissioner, Mr.John P. Calhoun, who gave me a complimentary ticket for the whole of the Illinois Central Railroad . He told me that the railroad had a grant of 6 miles along every alternate section of the road, which is 705. 73 miles long. In all, they have 2,395,000 acres, which they are selling to settlers for $7 to $ 15 or, on the average, $10 an acre. By law, the proceeds from the land are used to amortize the bonded debt, which amounted to $17.5 million and has gradually been reduced to $8 million.

From this requirement are excepted 300,000 acres as well as the interest-fund. The amount of the issued stock is $22.5 million, 75% of which is held by Europeans.

We went back to Power Bros.' immense store.

They have 4 hoistways for lifting and lowering goods, and each one can lift a ton. A huge furnace in the cellar heats the whole building by steam.

Formerly, the banks were allowed to deposit with the state government 110% in bonds issued by any state, against which they would issue 100% in notes countersigned by the state controller. They used to deposit the cheapest state bonds, and thus the risk was great.

The Illinois Central Railroad is a fogy concern, al though 1 20 immense railroad trains arrive at and leave this beautiful city daily.

I called again at Mr. F. Hoffman's. At his request, the surveyor for the Germania Insurance Co., Mr. Phil Adolph, a Polish Jew, conducted me in his buggy to the packing-houses of Charles Dufield and Culbertson Blair & Co., each of whom slaughter about 100,000 hogs and

8,000 to 9,000 oxen annually. I witnessed the killing of both.

The pigs are kept in large pens under the very roof of the house, driven into a small pen, caught by a pair of tenailles [tongs] by a hind leg, lifted up, cut in the throat, moved off, cleaned, and suspended. It is curious to see a thousand corpses of hogs suspended in immense rows. In the winter they each kill about r ,ooo hogs daily.

From the bowels of the hogs they boil out a yellow lard used for grease. They also boil 75 to roo barrels of oxen-tallow daily. In their smoking-houses they each smoke 33,000 hams at once. They cure the hams first in a pickle of sugar, saltpeter, and salt. Afterwards they sew them up in canvas and label them.

At 3 P.M. Mr. Chauncey Power called at my hotel and drove me in his buggy to show me the town. The red slates in the French roofs of the houses are mostly pointed. The American roof is flat.

We first went to the university, which possesses an observatory with the largest telescope in the states.

We then went to the stockyard, which is 6 miles from the city. The superintendent, Mr. John B. Sherman, gave us leave to visit the whole establishment, which covers 345 acres of land and cost $1,700,432; with additional charges, about $1,800,000. There is an immense hotel, a large bank, and 120 acres planked and covered with pens and yards laid off in blocks; the planked roads are 30 to 40 feet broad. There is an artesian well 1, r oo feet deep, which delivers 40,000 gallons of water daily.

The cattle dealers (or stock-dealers) bring their stock here, to sell it. 988,064 hogs, 392,604 cattle, 209,737 sheep, 1,122 horses and 244 mules have been brought here this year. The establishment is extremely grand. It is west of the city and there is no doubt that the city will reach this point within a few years.

The stockyard is in shares.

This detail from a lithograph advertising the operations of a "Modern First Class Pork Packing and Canning Establishment of the United States of America" shows the hoisting of the pigs described by Schliemann in his Chicago journal.

Chicago Historical Society

Chicago History 179

Chicago Historical Society

Chicago Hlslorlcal Society

John 8. Sherman, superintendent of the Chicago stockyards.

George Howland, principal of Chicago's Skinner School, where the boys and girls were not segregated.

Schliemann found that the seating arrangement had "a wonderful moral influence."

Schliemann's final day in Chicago was spent in the schoolroom. What he found there struck him with as much force as anything he had seen in the bustling streets of commerce, particularly because his own education was hard-earned. Skinner elementary school was located at Jackson Boulevard and Aberdeen Street; the high school was nearby, on Monroe Street between Halsted and Desplaines Streets. The Mrs. Reed who spoke French to perfection may have been Mary E. Reed; the high school principal was certainly George Howland . The Greek exercise which left Schliemann so astonished, and which he transliterated with dubious accuracy, was Kurou AnabasisXenophon's account of Cyrus's march upcountry. As for the Latin inscription, it is a pun on a schoolroom aphorism from the Aeneid, although whether Schliemann's or the students' we will have to guess. The aphorism, mens conscia recti, may be translated as "a mind conscious of rectitude." The Illinois Central officials mentioned near the conclusion of this entry are John Remmer, secretary to the president, and Marvin Hughitt, general superintendent.

Instruction is given by 25 male and 280 lady teachers. Each class ought not to contain more than 40 pupils, but since they haven't enough rooms there are 60 in many classes, which is too much for one teacher. There are two schools which have 200 pupils each, and each has only one teacher. A blue flag is hung at the door of the class which distinguishes itself by its deportment, and the U.S. flag at the door of the class which excels in attendance for the week.

In Skinner's school are 22 schoolrooms with 1 gentleman and 23 lady teachers. The pupils in this grammar school are from 6 to 19 years old, though they can enter the high school at 13. In every grammar school there are 1 o grades, according to the pupils' capacity.

In all the classes the pupils of both sexes sit together. This has a wonderful moral influence on them and stimulates a most wholesome and laudable competition, for each sex desires to excel the other. They sit together like brothers and sisters and learn to respect each other. Each pupil has a small iron desk with an oblique wooden board and sits on a small round seat fastened to the floor with an iron foot.

The classroom walls are lined with slate tables 4 feet broad, on which the pupils reckon and draw. I was particularly interested in the

Chicago, November 15 Mr. Chauncey Power called on me this morning at 1 1 with his nephew Ira Power, the son of James Power, and George C. Clerk, the president of the Board of Education, and took me in a buggy to Skinner's School.

There are 20,000 pupils in 21 schoolhouses in Chicago, and 5 new schools are being built.

180

Ch ica go History

"object-teaching" of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. So, for instance, the teacher asks to what kingdom the different objects-a lamp, a table, and so forth-belong.

We then went to the high school, in which instruction is given by 1 1 gentlemen and 3 lady teachers. One of the ladies, Mrs. Reed, is a German from Bavaria. She is highly intelligent, speaks French to perfection, and is married to an American. She was teaching German, and I marveled at the great progress of her pupils, who read the well-composed exercises they had prepared at home. The principal of this school was reading English poetry with his pupils; his name is Howland.

We went to another class called the "Normal School," which produces lady teachers. The young ladies of this class appeared to be from 14 to 16 years of age ; they were occupied with natural philosophy by reckoning. Every hour they have a 5-minute recess for "calisthenics."

They rise and place themselves in military order on opposite sides of the room and toss bean bags from one side to the other, catch them, and throw them again. Or they sit down in a circle and hand the bags around with great celerity.

She who is quickest and best is queen. They open the windows during the exercise, and all is done with military precision.

We then went to a Greek class, where boys and girls of 13 to 16 were to my utter astonishment reading and translating Ko'poo 'Ara' barus with great facility. I heard with equal astonishment that for 5 years all the valedictorians in all the subjects have been girls. They even write prose compositions in Greek. Each pupil is graded according to his capacity and assiduity.

There will be 3 high schools here next year.

million in bonds, plus $2,330,000 or IO% of the stock, and will still have $340,000 for improvements. The government tax is 7% on their gross earnings.

In three years, the company has laid 223 miles of new rails and has made very great additions to the depot works.

Mr. M. Hughitt, the superintendent, showed me the establishment. They have leased the railroad from Iowa Falls to Dubuque for 20 years with the option of making the lease perpetual, and they pay 35% of their gross earnings.

He showed me the depot for merchandise, which is 500 feet long and 1 ; o feet wide and has 2 tracks for cars. On level ground, each locomotive can draw 35 to 40 cars, each loaded with IO tons. Even on grades, one locomotive can draw 25 cars. The company, having bought land on the lakeshore, has been filling the lake. This year they have taken 18 acres from Lake Michigan. On their lake ground they have leased some ground to two elevators, for $25,000 a year in all. They are building themselves a nice port, 250 feet wide by 1250 long, so vessels can unload at the very cars.

There is a watch factory 40 miles from here, and a clock factory eight miles from here-both on shares and paying well.

St. Louis, November 17 I left Chicago yesterday at IO by the Illinois Central Railroad, which is very well built.

There is seldom any shaking.

The country is continually perfectly flat ....

mens conscia recti men' s and women's conscia rec ti

I called again at the office of the Illinois Central Railroad, where I saw Mr. Remmer, secretary to the president of the road, who says that the net earnings are 58% and the expenses 42 % this year. This year they are paying off $2

Acknowledgements: The journal is printed with the per-

mission of the Gennadius Library of the American School of Classical Studies, Athens, and through the courtesy of the library's direct6r, Francis R. Walton .

Credit is also due George Weller of Rome for assistance in acquiring a copy of the manuscript.

Chicago History

181

Fifty Years Ago

As recorded by newspapers in the collection ef the Chicago Historical Society

1923 Jan. I. The Chicago Public Library begins a week-long celebration of its fiftieth birthday.

Carl Sandburg reads a poem written for the occasion.

Jan. 3. Two who began at the bottom rise to the top. James Simpson, who started as a $5-aweek office boy at Marshall Field & Co., and F. Edson White, who began as a clerk in the slaughter room of Armour & Co., are named presidents of their respective firms.

Jan. 9. Thousands of Jews and Christians attend the funeral of Dr. Emil Guster Hirsch, for 43 years the rabbi of Sinai congregation. Dr. Hirsch, 71, was one of the country's foremost pulpit orators and scholars.

Jan. 12. Fifty motorists are arrested for speeding in Lincoln Park.

Jan. 16. The Old Town Club at 321 Plymouth Court, one of the city's most sumptuous establishments, files for bankruptcy. Substantial loans from such prominent citizens as George M. Reynolds, Julius M. Rosenwald, Charles A. Stevens, and the late Mayer Levy failed to keep the club afloat as its dues-paying membership fell to 100 from a high of 800 in 1919. Dues were $1,000 a year.

Jan. 17. Ald. Michael Kenna, widely known as "Hinky Dink," announces that he will withdraw from the City Council in favor of his senior colleague in the First Ward, Aid. John J. Coughlin, familiarly called "Bath House John." Kenna will, however, retain the ward's cornrnitteeship.

The Chicago City Council rules that all Ku Klux Klan members must be discharged from the municipal payroll.

182 Chicago History

Chicago Historical Society, Dally News Collection

"Hinky Dink" Kenna and "Bath House John" Coughlin, political bosses of Chicago's notorious First Ward. See Jan. 17.

Jan. 20. Work begins on the Orrington Hotel in Evanston. To cost $2,000,000, it is expected to be one of the finest in the country.

Jan. 22. Armour & Co. announces that the Chicago stockyards are to be deodorized. The first step, already under way, is "to take the smell from the beef tankhouses."

Jan. 26. Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson declares that he will not run for renomination. His declaration precedes by hours the indictments of Frederick Lundin and 19 other supporters for allegedly defrauding the school board of over a million dollars. Lundin is known as the political brain behind the mayor's Republican machine.

Hundreds of women, rallying behind Mrs. Lottie Holman O'Neill, the first woman member of the Illinois State Assembly, stage a mass meeting at the Auditorium. They demand equal rights, including the right to serve on juries.

Jan. 3 1. The Chicago, Aurora, and DeKalb Electric Railroad is sold as junk. It became obsolete after a paved automobile road was constructed between Aurora and DeKalb.

Feb. 3. Oscar Wilde's Salome, being presented by a Negro theatre company, will be followed in repertory by Moliere and Shakespeare.

The troupe, playing at the Avenue Theatre at Indiana Ave. and 31st St., is directed by Raymond O'Neil.

Feb. 4. The city's fire department is declared completely mechanized. Buck and Beauty, the department's last fire horses, make a ceremonial final run for Engine Company No. 1o.

Feb. 6. Four thousand pack Orchestra Hall to hear French hypnotist Emil Coue and watch him cure the lame and the rheumatic.

Feb. 17. The six-day bicycle race at the Coliseum ends. The winning team: Maurice Brocco, Italian ace, and Oscar Egg, Swiss expert. Most of the contestants will appear shortly at a similar event in New York.

Feb. 18. Two labor union business agents shoot it out at a South Side cafe, and one is killed.

They had quarreled over control of unions in the movie theatres, described as "a field full of rich picking."

Feb. 23. Chicago's Washington Park Club, the newly organized racing association of Illinois, names Arthur Meeker, vice-president of Armour & Co., as its first president. The club's purpose is to bring thoroughbred racing back to Illinois.

Plans for an airline between Chicago and New York are announced, following a thor-

Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson, who did not choose to run in 1923, with William Dever, reform Democrat who succeeded him. In this photograph, taken during the campaign, the men are accompanied by their wives.

Fifty Years Ago

ough study of the feasibility of a nightly dirigible service between the two cities. Members of the sponsoring corporation include Marshall Field; William Wrigley; Owen D. Young, vice-president of the General Electric Company; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, former candidate for the vice-presidency of the United States.

Feb. 24. Opponents of the Ku Klux Klan begin a week of mass meetings at the Coliseum.

Opera singer Ganna Walska, wife of Harold F. McCormick, cancels her Chicago debut after highly unfavorable out-of-town reviews are reprinted in the city's newspapers.

Mar. 1. Although a spate of n ew construction is creating a surplus of " exclusive" high-rent apartments, rents in the poorer districts, $40 to $50 last month, rise $10 to $15.

Mar. 2. The Structural Engineers Association of Illinois endorses a plan for draining the Chicago River, now considered useless for navigation, and laying subway tracks on its bed.

Mar. g. Charles D. Norton, Chicago civic planner, dies in New York at the age of 53.

Mar. IO. The Cradle, a new adoption home, opens its doors in Evanston.

Mar. 11. Five hundred members of the bootblacks' union, together with their friends and relatives, hold a dinner on the seventeenth floor of the Capitol Building, State and Randolph Sts. Mar. 1 5. Journeymen bricklayers win a pay scale of $1.25 an hour, an increase of 15¢ over last year's contract.

Mar. 20. A branch of the Italian fascisti, organized in Chicago, is just a "social club," according to its officers.

Mar. 24. Work begins on a $3,000,000 annex to the Edgewater Beach Hotel. The annex, to have 425 rooms and an underground parking garage, will be connected to the hotel's main building by a 1 77-foot walkway.

Mar. 27. Night court resumes in Chicago after seven years. Presiding Judge John Haas suspends the sentences of arrested drunks on 184 Ch icago Hi story

Chicago H istorical Society, Daily News Collection

Emil Coue in Chicago in 1923. His accomplishments (see Feb. 6) were real enough, but not every cripple who sought his help was an hysteric, nor could he even have treated every one who was. As a result, he was jeered and reviled at the railroad station when he left town.

condition that they attend church regularly and warns them, "If you come in here again I may tell the copper to slap you one in the snoot.''

Mar. 28. The Logan Square Bank, closed since March ro because of a shortage of funds and the suicide of its president, reopens with its depositors as stockholders. The first community bank in Illinois, it will soon be joined by the Sixteenth Street State Bank, which also closed its doors and is being reorganized along similar lines.

Mar. 30. Chicago's theatres and concert halls are fully booked this chilly Easter. Helen Gahagan opens in Molnar's Peter and Paula and the Moscow Art Players begin a threeweek engagement, while long-run hits include the Cat and the Canary, Blossom Time, and Sally .

Among other scheduled performers this week: contralto Mme. Schumann-Heink, dancers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, violinists

Albert Spalding andJascha Heifetz, Thurston the Magician, and the Sells Floto Circus with Buffalo Bill's Wild West.

Apr. 2. Illinois miners celebrate the 25th anniversary of their 8-hour day, won after a ninemonth strike in 1898.

Apr. 3. Reform candidate William E. Dever is swept into the mayor's office on a Democratic tide. Supporters of "Big Bill" Thompson lose their city council seats in the municipal election.

Apr. r 3. By commission of President Warren Harding, Mrs. Mabel Reinecke of Chicago becomes the United States' first woman collector of internal revenue, at an annual salary of $6,000. Collector Reinecke is also the first woman to hold federal office in the city.

The Illinois legislature votes women the right to serve on all juries in the state, despite the

The bootb lacks' union di nner , Mar. 11. Ch icago Tribune phot ograp h.

Chicago Historical Soci ety

Chica go History 185

A poster advertising the Chicago appearance of Thurston the Magician (see Mar. 30). The Harry Kellar referred to is now largely forgotten, but he is reputed to be the first performer, other than Indian fakirs, to successfully perform the feat of levitation.

World-famous, Kellar retired from the stage in 1908.

186

Chicago History

Chicago Historical Society

Fifty Years Ago

opinion of State Sen. James Barbour of Chicago that the experiment should be tried out downstate before being introduced in Cook County.

Apr. 15. The wages of common laborers in the packing houses rise to 43,½¢ an hour.

May 4. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, cuts the Chicago Federation's organizing allowance in a move against the city's radical organizers, particularly in the steel industry.

May 10 . Heirs to the Springer estate, r ,ooo strong, meet in Chicago to press their claim to the site of the city of Wilmington, Del. The claim is based on a grant of land from King George II to Charles Christopher Springer, b. 1658.

May 13. Mother's Day is widely observed in Chicago's churches, where attendance is second only to Christmas and Easter. The Rev. J. W. Hoyt, of the Belden Ave. Baptist Church, preaches on "The Best Woman in the World" this morning and on "Family Quarrels" this evening.

May r 5. Charles E. Springer, Chicago realtor, refuses to put up $10 to join his relatives' suit against Wilmington, which he describes as "bunk."

May 17. U.S. Secretary of Labor James]. Davis addresses 5,000 Chicagoans celebrating the r 09th anniversary of Sweden's independence in Humboldt Park.

May 20. Florenz Ziegfeld, founder of the Chicago Musical College in 1867 and father of the originator of the Follies, dies in his home on West Adams St. Leaders in business, musical, and military circles are named honorary pallbearers.

May 21. Commissioner of Public Works A. A. Sprague says the city will rush work on the Roosevelt Road and Adams Street bridges.

Turning aside requests that the work be delayed pending federal hearings on the discontinuance of navigation on the Chicago River and the building of fixed bridges across it,

Sprague declared that the West Side has been waiting 12 years for Roosevelt Road already.

May 24. Police prevent school board trustees ousted by Mayor Dever from entering the first meeting of the newly appointed board.

May 27. A baseball game between the American Giants and Kansas City, members of the Negro National League, is interrupted when the bleachers in the ball park at 39th St. and Amsterdam Ave. collapse. The game is resumed after 28 injured fans are removed, and the American Giants win, 5-4.

May 28. Chicago's Anti-Saloon League announces that enforcement of the 18th Amendment is "too great a strain" in this city and goes out of business.

June 2. More than 50,000 attend the Ku Klux Klan's initiation of 700 new members near Rockford .

June g. The Chicago Cubs win their fourth game in a row but still stand sixth in their league.

June 14. Clyde M . Carr, steel manufacturer, bequeathes two million dollars to cultural and charitable institutions, thus becoming one of Chicago's notable benefactors. Principal bequests: one million dollars to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and a half-million to the Art Institute.

June 20. President Harding commutes the sentences of 22 Chicagoans still in jail following their conviction, as IWW members, for conspiring to cause refusal of military duty during World War I. June 22. Chicago's portable schoolhouses become intolerable in the current heat wave, and children are brought outside to do their lessons in the shade.

June 30. Two thousand attend the opening of Hawthorne Racetrack. The Chicago Tribune's fashion editor, A. T. Gallico, advises that "the well-dressed racing enthusiast does not run to fancy clothes" and that "fantastic" waistcoats and large diamond rings are not seen at Belmont Park.

Chicago History 187

Books

Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters

Justin G. Turner & Linda Levitt Turner Knopf, 1972. $15. truly significant books in the field of Lincolniana these last few years, but now we have a volume that surely will be considered and consulted by every student of Lincoln for many years to come. In fact, as original source material, it should be alongside The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln on all library shelves and in the collections of those interested not only in Lincoln, but in the Civil War. Furthermore, this volume sheds a good deal of badly needed light on one of the most controversial ladies in our history. Often maligned in the past, Mary Todd Lincoln has, particularly in recent years, had her share of almost maudlin apologists. The public has been subjected to much distortion, sentimental slush, and sensation-mongering as far as Mary Lincoln is concerned. But now the wife of the Civil War president is allowed to speak for herself through her letters.

And speak she does, in forthright, often bitter, often charming, and almost always revealing letters.

We owe the editors a considerable debt for an extremely thorough, scholarly, and in all ways admirable presentation. Justin Turner, now of Los Angeles but a former resident of Chicago, is one of the nation's leading collectors of Lincolniana. The result of his search for Mary Lincoln's letters, begun many years ago, is the printing of her 609 known letters, dating from 1840 to 1882, a very large percentage of which have either never before been printed or are found only in obscure publications. Turner and his daughterin-law Linda Levitt Turner have been meticulous in their scholarship. Although people mentioned in the letters are identified, the editorial apparatus never obscures the central figure.

The Turners furnish a running commentary, effectively linking the letters together and supplying the necessary interpretive and factual material. While clearly sympathetic to Mrs. Lincoln, they have demonstrated their belief " that the most balanced view of Mary Lincoln-one that offers neither condemnation nor apology-can be obtained from reading her letters."

The letters to her husband, family, and friends lay bare the many tragedies of her life. The assassination of her husband, the stresses of the Civil War, the deaths of three sons, the trying years of widowhood, and her highly debated obsessions and mental disbalance are all here. Also included are letters to major figures of the Civil War-General Grant, THERE HAVE NOT BEEN MANY

188 Chicago History

Senator Sumner, and Secretary of War Stantonwhich reveal her sometimes clumsy attempts to influence the political events of her day. She was frequently involved in rather unpleasant efforts to influence high decisions and was often critical of those who did not bow to her whims. It is quite clear that she carried on these machinations on her own, without the approval or knowledge of her husband.

In a letter to Judge David Davis in 1867, she castigates William Herndon, who was openly antagonistic to her, as " this miserable man." She further writes, "I shall assuredly remain firm in my conviction-that Ann Rutledge, is a myth." Herndon was largely responsible for advancing the rumor of a romance between Lincoln and Ann Rutledge, a story that has been discredited by historians despite its tenacious grip on the public imagination.

We are fortunate that today there exist a number of projects to preserve and publish the letters and papers of our nation's great men. We are perhaps even more fortunate that historians like the Turners have seen fit to seek out the letters of those near and dear to our great men, especially the letters of one who has been so buffeted by the winds of time.

E . B. Long* *E. B. Long is associate professor of American studies at the University of Wyoming. Formerly a long-time resident of the Chicago area, he is a specialist in the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln.

A Community in Search of Itself: A Case History of Cairo, Illinois

Herman R. Lantz Southern Illinois Univ., 1972. $10.00.

1812, a Baltimore financier named Comegys raised funds to buy holdings and organize a settlement in Cairo, Illinois. Its site near the juncture of three states and at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers seemed to promise profitable development. But the enterprise failed; the speculators lost their money; their titles reverted to the government. The collapse of this plan set a pattern of social and economic sterility which was to continue, almost unbroken, for a century and a half.

Why this stereotype of disappointment in circumstances at least as favorable as those of other cities which typify American achievement? Herman R. Lantz, a sociologist, has set himself the task of analyzing the discoverable elements in the community's long habit of failure. He examines Cairo's many efforts to establish stable economic bases-as a river port, as a rail center, as a continental transshipment crossroads,

SHORTLY AFTER THE WAR OF

¡----as a service and supply point for neighboring localities, as a host to new or expanding industries. None of these attempts prospered. The most nearly consistent of Cairo's sources of revenue has been traffic in liquor and vice, which however has damaged the city in other directions. Drinking and prostitution helped to pay taxes, but kept away more desirable taxpaying enterprises.

Lantz does not so much state as suggest reasons for this cheerless record. Some factors were largely beyond the control of Cairo's policymakers. Cities are located on the Mississippi in order to live off it, but the river distributes punishments as well as rewards, and Cairo has never found cures for its perennial flood and seepage problems. And it wasn't Cairo's fault that the river trade dried up, or that the railroads passed it by. But other river towns survived these setbacks. Cairo had no planners, only schemers; the interests pursued were not civic but individually selfserving; citizens never identified with Cairo, they only lived there.

The best question raised by this excellent study, though never explicitly put, deals not with Cairo but with the whole concept of community economy. What is a healthy community? One which supports itself with something left over? By that test, New York is a worse failure than Cairo, and the models to emulate are Las Vegas and Reno. Is it "progress" to make a pasture into a parking-lot, or to replace an unprofitable second-hand bookstore with a profitable bingo parlor? If the pasture doesn't feed its owner and the parking-lot does; if bingo parlor taxes support libraries and municipal symphony orchestras, what can we say but yes?

Chicago Historical Society

Cairo, Ill., at the mouth of the Ohio c. 1846- when its settlers were certain that its excellent location would make it one of the most important cities in the Midwest.

Well; the other thing we can say is no-and obstinately persist in the search for a self-supporting economy which will yield libraries and orchestras while still preserving pastures and second-hand bookstores. The lesson of Cairo is that we'll never achieve either, let alone both, without working for the communities we work in. Commuters cannot make communities.

Digby B. Whitman* *Digby B. Whitman is a well-known Wisconsin writer and critic with a special interest in mid western history.

Illinois: A History of the Prairie State

Robert P. Howard Eerdmans, 1972. $10.95. possessed the natural resources of Illinois. Blessed with fertile land in abundance and hardwood forests, bounded on three sides by rivers and a lake for early water transportation, underlaid with enormous coal deposits and petroleum for fuel, and settled by restless pioneers and exploiters, Illinois by 1850 was rapidly evolving into a state which would hold the key to the development of the interior of the United States. After the Indians were driven from their land during the early nineteenth century, Illinois received waves of French, British, European, and American immigrants-until by 1890 it was the third most populous state, and Chicago,

FEW STATES OF THE UNION

Chicago History 189

Books

with nearly 1,100,000 people, was the second largest city.

In 28 chapters, Robert P. Howard traces this development from the earliest French settlements to 1971. With catalog-like completeness, he chronicles the settlement of Illinois, the development of villages and cities, the growth of agriculture, commerce, transportation, and industry. Railroad developers and aggressive entrepreneurs during the mid-nineteenth century pushed Illinois' economy along so rapidly that by I goo manufacturing, retailing, and railroad employment exceeded agricultural employment.

The publishers advertise that "outside of Chicago there is a state called Illinois," and Howard has succeeded in placing Chicago in its proper perspective within the state's development. With equal thoroughness he mentions a host of Illinois politicians of national prominence, such as Edwards, Douglas, Lincoln, and Lowden, and urban leaders represented

by Thompson, Cermak, Arvey, and Daley. But his volume fails to achieve its full measure of promise; in fact, it suffers from dullness. The sketches of political figures, industrial leaders, utility magnates, and railroad builders are lifeless. At no point do the activities of the fur traders, the village dwellers, the farmers, the merchants, the miners, or the denizens of the highrise apartment complexes along Chicago's lakeshore come alive. The volume's bibliography provides the clue to this shortcoming. Howard read widely and deeply in a vast array of secondary and documentary sources, but there he ended his search. The letters, diaries, and newspapers available in Springfield, Chicago, the District of Columbia, and other places are regr-'.!ttably neglected. Before a satisfactory volume on the history of Illinois can be written, those rich sources must be consulted.

Howard adequately discusses state and local politics, transportation, money and banking, some elements of the history of education, and the rise of labor unions. Never comprehensively covered, however, are the struggles to initiate reforms, whether by Peter Altgeld, F lorence Kelly, William Thompson, or Richard Daley. The bitter clash between the vested interests and the poor, between urban and rural elements, between the Grangers and the railroads, between employer and employee, and between wets and drys are so attenuated in these pages that only a bland, undramatic history emerges. History to be important must deal not only with the institutions of men but with their lives, emotions, and thoughts.

D onald J. Berthrong* *Donald J. Ber throng is chairman of the department of history, Purdue University.

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Ch icago History

Brief Reports by the Staff Jean duSab le : Fath er of Ch icago

by Lawrence Cortesi Chilton, 1972. $5.50. for young adults, and their parents, Lawrence Cortesi has brought to life the free Haitian black trader and explorer who brought peace to the Great Lakes Indians, married a Potowatomi princess, and led a group of her father's people to settle "Eschicagou." Neutral during the Revolutionary War, he was nevertheless kidnapped by the British, who suspected his French connections, with the result that his Indian allies joined the revolutionists. Later, as American land agents evicted the older settlers of the Northwest Territory, he took up arms against the American government. Pardoned and once again a man of peace, he lived to see John Kinzie the owner of the former duSable property, to watch the American flag fly over a military area called Fort Dearborn, and to witness the retreat of many of the Indian families he had led to the spot destined to become the crossroads of a continent.

IN A GREAT ADVENTURE STORY

Th e Sma ll House Ha lfway Up In t he Next Block ed. Mary Frances Rhymer McGraw Hill, 1972. $9.50.

IN THIS VOLUME are preserved some of the scripts of Vic and Sade, a radio serial written by Paul Rhymer in the depression-ridden 1930s and 1940s. Vic, Sade, and their son, an "ordinary" family, were loved by millions of Americans who chuckled over the non-events in the never-never land on the next block. Nothing of serious social or personal significance ever happened there, and the small upsetting incidents-about one per episode-were taken care of by Sade in the middle of the night when Vic was too sleepy to really argue.

Only when Vic bought a new hat that Sade did not like did she argue in broad daylight. Though there must have been great charm in the acting, there is also plenty in the writing. A treat for the nostalgic, doubly so because the scripts were nostalgic when they were new.

Lost America : From the Atlantic to the Mississipp i ed. Constance M. Greif(

That Most Distressf ul Nation : The Tam ing of the American Irish

Pyne Press, 1972. $17.95.

Quadrangle, 1972. $7.95.

a testimonial to the beautiful buildings built east of the Mississippi River and then destroyed. More than 250 structures are illustrated and memorialized in brief descriptions that give the dates of their births and deaths. Some of Chicago's finest buildings-the Home Life Insurance Company, the Tacoma Building, the older buildings on Lake Shore Drive, the Masonic Temple, the Garrick Theatre, the old Stock Exchange-are enshrined here, driving home the point that even the newer cities east of the M ississippi have a heritage worth preserving. A companion volume, from the Mississippi to the Pacific, should be available by now.

THE PUBLISHER

A TREASURE OF A BOOK,

Stop-Act ion Dick Butkus and Robert W. Billings E. P. Dutton, 1972. $6.95.

Stop-Action succeeds in conveying Dick Butkus' lifelong dedication to his profession, football, and his distaste for those who do not take pride in themselves and their work. The passages on Butkus' recovery from his knee operations are especially fine. As a book about football, however, Stop-Action is pedestrian compared to, say, Asinof's Seven Days to Sunday, Kramer's Instant Replay, or Parrish's They Call It a Game.

The Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson , Volume I: Beginn ings of Education , 1900- 1941 Walter Johnson and Carol Evans, eds.

Little, Brown, 1972. $15.00.

THIS FIRST of a projected eight volumes contains several hundred notes, letters, and papers which Stevenson wrote between the ages of six and fortyone. About a third of the way through the book the reader begins to see sure signs of the wit, style, and tolerant understanding that were to be the marks of the mature man. The editing is competent, though not outstanding.

Crusad e for Justice : The Autob iography of Ida B. We ll s ed. Alfreda M. Duster University of Chicago Press, 1972. $3.95 .

IDA B. WELLS, whose name graces a South Side public housing project, came here to protest racial discrimination at the Columbian Exposition. She lived in Chicago until her death in 1927 and, from here, led many militant battles for her people. Her fascinating and frank descriptions of Negro leaders, white social reformers, politicians, and events make her autobiography a must for those seriously interested in women's history, black history, or the history of Chicago.

by Andrew M. Greeley describes this wide-ranging essay on the American- and the Irish-Irish as "playful" and "paradoxical," and indeed it does manage to contradict itself at almost every turn while maintaining a tongue-in-cheek tone. The Irish are shown, in many tables whose statistical validity is unfortunately not revealed to the reader, to possess such positive (albeit ill-defined) virtues as "liberalism" and " success."

Yet the author tells us, from his own convincing experience, that they are fearful of social change, uneasy about having blacks move into their neighborhoods, lacking in self-confidence, and distrustful even of personal accomplishment. Early on, Irish women are described as "slaves" to their men; later, "there is no need for women' s liberation in Ireland" because "the mothers have been running the country for centuries."

At any rate, says the author, this whole Irish mystique is disappearing from the American social landscape even as the consciousness of other ethnic groups resurges. Success has killed the Irish in America. And yet there is a young Irish mother on the South Side of Chicago, writing her son a poem about the unconquerability of the Irish spirit- and as he reprints her poem, Andrew Greely wonders if he might just be wrong about the Irish.

Motion Will Be Den ied : A New Report on the Ch icago Conspiracy Trial

by John Schultz William Morrow, 1972. Cloth, $11.95; paper, $3.95.

"The courtroom," Schulz believes, "became a sort of diving bell, trapping all occupants in a plu nge into the American psyche and the undercurrents of American history." Unfortunately, he's not enough of a writer to sustain that vision, nor enough of a lawyer to assess the trial's serious legal implications.

Still, his report is valuable for its "gavel to gavel coverage" and its insight into the personalities involved.

The Chicago Schools: A Social and Political History

by Mary

J.

Herrick

Sage Publications, 1971. $15.00.

A painstakingly detailed survey of the problems which have plagued the school system since 1832, by a long-time Chicago teacher. "There are only two things," Mary Herrick writes, "of which the Chicago schools have always had mo re than enough-children and crises." Her book proves this assertion admirably.

Chicago History

191

THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY North Avenue and Clark Street, Chicago, Illinois 60614 Telephone : M lchigan 2-4600

OFFICERS

Andrew McNally m, President Theodore Tieken, 1st Vice -President James R. Getz, 2nd Vice-President Gardner H. Stern, Treasurer Clement M. Silvestro, Secretary and Director TRUSTEES

Bowen Blair Emmett Dedmon Stewart S. Dixon James R. Getz Philip W. Hummer Willard L. King Andrew McNally III Mrs. C. Phillip Miller

Bryan S. Reid, Jr. Nathan A. Scott, Jr. Gilbert H. Scribner, Jr. Harold Byron Smith, Jr. Hermon Dunlap Smith Gardner H. Stern Theodore Tieken Mrs. Philip K. Wrigley

MEMBERSHIP The Society is supported almost entirely by income from its endowment, by contributions, and by memberships. Membership is open to anyone interested in the Society's activities and objectives. Classes of membership and dues are as follows: Annual, $ r 5 a year; Life, $250 (one payment); Governing Life, $500 (one payment); Governing Annual, $100 (one payment) and $25 a year; and Patron, $rooo (one payment).

Members receive the Society's magazine, Chicago History, invitations to all special functions held by the Society, and periodic notice of new exhibitions. Members and their immediate families are admitted free to the museum at all times.

Single issues of Chicago History are $2.25 a copy by mail.

Library subscriptions are $10 for two years (4 issues).

Chicago Historical Society

An engraving from Harper's Weekly, 1883, showing the lumber distr ict of Chicago as seen from the West Sid e waterworks. In that year, 3,803,000,000 board feet of lumber were received and shipped by the city ' s lumber yards. Although the trend toward steamships was well under way, most lumber was still being shipped under sail.