Local history firsts are often fleeting, coming and going rapidly

One of the interesting, and not infrequently frustrating, things about studying local history is the speed at which significant individuals made their appearances and then disappeared from the historical record.

During the settlement era this was largely due to the kind of people—pioneer farmers—who settled in our neck of the woods. A footloose lot, they often remained in one place for only a short period of time. Down in the Yorkville area, for instance, Lyman Bristol settled, gave his name to a new village and eventually a township, and then headed farther west where he was killed in a wagon accident in California.

William and Rebecca Pearce Wilson settled at the busy modern intersection of Routes 34 and 25 in Oswego in 1833, becoming the village’s first residents.

Meanwhile in 1834, one of Rebecca’s brothers, Elijah Pearce, settled with his wife and children at today’s Montgomery with his son-in-law’s family where Pearce built and operated a stagecoach inn on the east bank of the Fox River.

On page 270 of the 1878 history of Kane County, The Past and Present of Kane County, Illinois, the author claims of Pearce that “for years he kept entertainment for man and beast” at his one-room log cabin inn on the banks of the Fox River.

But by “years” here, the author means two years. Because in 1836, the families of Elijah Pearce and William Wilson moved farther west in what would become Kendall County to a claim on Big Rock Creek near modern Plano, where the two men built a sawmill. And then, just a few years later, they sold the sawmill and moved their families out of Illinois altogether, settling in Jasper County, Missouri before moving even farther west to Kansas.

Levi F. Arnold, who with Lewis B. Judson mapped out the original village of Oswego in 1835 was also instrumental in Plainfield’s history—he was the first postmaster of both villages. He, too, appears and then quickly disappears from local history, but not by choice. Arnold died in 1844 in the same unrecorded epidemic that claimed his 2 year-old daughter, Josephine.

Main Street, Oswego, looking north about 1902. The building with the flagpole at right is the Star Roller Skating Rink. The Shoger-Park Building is at left center. (Little White School Museum collection)

This quick entrance and exit of folks who made important contributions to Oswego didn’t end with the settlement era, either, but continued right up through the 20th Century. A really good example of this phenomenon is A.P. Werve, who owned Oswego’s first automobile.

Anthony Peter Werve (pronounced WERE-vie) was born April 3, 1870 in Kenosha, Wis. He married Anna Margrete Christine Alsted on Oct. 4, 1893 in Kenosha, and the couple had two children.

A.P. was trained as a jeweler, but he also had a fascination for the new craze of automobiles and the internal combustion engines that powered them.

In 1899, Werve decided to move his family to Oswego where there was an open opportunity for a jeweler, since the community didn’t have one. On Sept. 6, 1899, the “Oswego” news column in the Kendall County Record reported that “A.P. Werve of Kenosha, Wisconsin, has opened a jeweler’s shop in the south room of the Shoger block.” The Shoger Block was a two storefront commercial block at the southeast corner of Main and Jackson streets. It was eventually torn down to built the Oswego Tavern—now the Oswego Inn.

The Shoger-Parke Building has been used for many purposes including the first Zentmyer Ford Garage in 1927. (Little White School Museum collection)

According to his business’s advertising, he dealt in watches, jewelry and musical instruments. He also gradually branched out in business. In the fall of 1901, he opened a feed mill in a frame addition at the rear of the limestone Shoger-Parke building kitty-corner across the street—better known today as the location of the former Jacqueline Shop, today’s Bella-gia Boutique and The Prom Shoppe. Within a few months, Werve moved his family to the upstairs apartment of the stone, and then in November 1901, he moved his jewelry store across the street into the same building.

There was plenty of room in the stone building where Werve’s jewelry and musical instrument business was located, and in April 1902 he was granted a license by the Oswego Village Board to install two pool tables.

A.P. Werve’s friction-drive auto, that he built in 1903. Taking a spin in the spring of 1904 are (L-R) Anna and Hattie Werve, Clarence Smith, Werve, and John Varner. (Little White School Museum collection)

But along with engaging in several kinds of businesses, Werve was also pursuing his automotive hobby. And in the spring of 1903 he unveiled the thing for which he became famous in Oswego history. As the Record’s “Oswego” news column reported on Oct. 28, 1903: “It should have been mentioned heretofore that Oswego has its first automobile. A.P Werve bought some of the parts, the rest he made himself and he has it now in successful running order.”

We should be ignorant of what Werve’s home-built auto looked like had not one of his tinkering buddies, Irvin Haines not snapped a photo of it while the Werve family took it out for a spin. Werve reportedly repurposed a used an inboard boat engine to drive the car, with power transmitted to the rear wheels via a friction pulley.

In Haines’ photo, Anthony Werve is at the wheel with his wife riding in back with their oldest daughter, Nettie. Also along for the ride were fellow auto enthusiasts Clarence Smith, riding in back with Mrs. Werve and Nettie, and John Varner in front with A.P. Both Smith and Varner were, at one time or another, employed as steam engineers to run Oswego’s water pumping operation. In addition, Varner was a skilled cyclist on the high-wheel bicycles of the era, while Smith enjoyed working on engines and, eventually, other Oswego autos.

Clarence Smith tinkers with an auto engine about 1905. Note the chassis on sawhorses behind Smith. (Little White School Museum collection)

Although A.P. Werve was celebrated for a significant Oswego first, he didn’t hang around very long to enjoy his fame as a local hero. In January 1904, he continued expanding his business by installing Oswego’s second bowling alley, also in the Shoger-Parke Building. Bowling had come to Oswego just weeks earlier with an alley being installed in the old Star Roller Skating Rink Building to capitalize on the latest community sports craze. As the Record reported on Dec. 23, 1903, “Oswego has been struck with a streak of unusual enterprises. The bank will soon go into operation and about the same time another new institution, a bowling alley. At the one where we can get money and at the other where we can spend it.”

Werve’s bowling alley, installed by Lou Young, Lew Inman, Irvin Haines, and Art Roswell, opened at the end of January, but even then, he was apparently looking to change professions and get into something where he could practice his automotive hobby—and get paid for it.

On April 13, 1904, the Record’s “Oswego” column reported that “A.P. Werve, our jeweler, is getting ready to move to Benton Harbor, Mich., where he has accepted a good position with the Searchlight Manufacturing Company.”

Searchlight manufactured internal combustion engines for early autos, along with other mechanical products, and Werve apparently found a good fit there. Unfortunately, Searchlight apparently got caught up in the financial Panic of 1907 and its operations were thrown into confusion, although it continued operating at Benton Harbor for a few years afterwards. According to a 1907 Benton Harbor city directory, Werve had gone back to his core business of owning a jewelry store.

Then, the Werve family, like so many others, headed west in search of new opportunities, and by 1914 were living in southern California where he ran a garage.

Werve also maintained his fascination with automobiles. In 1914, the Werve family came back to the Midwest to visit friends and family in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Illinois, stopping for a few days in Oswego. The Record reported on July 29, 1914 that “Mr. and Mrs. A.P. Werve and children left Monday morning for Los Angeles, Cal., expecting to make the trip by auto taking from four to six weeks.” A hardy and adventuresome crew indeed during an era when there really were few, if any, marked interstate roads.

The couple remained in southern California for the rest of their lives. After a career as a jeweler, business owner, Oswego automobile pioneer, mechanic, and rancher, A.P. Werve died on Aug. 8, 1951 in Imperial County, California. He and his wife are buried in Riverview Cemetery in Brawley, California with nothing to mark his brief, though significant, claim to fame here in northern Illinois.

Want to do your part to preserve and protect the history of the Oswego, Illinois area at the Little White School Museum? Join the Oswegoland Heritage Association–dues are just $20 per person per year. Send your check made out to the Oswegoland Heritage Association to Box 23, Oswego, IL 60543.

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Recalling food favorites of the good old (and not so old) days…

Anyone who knows me or who reads this blog regularly (or both, come to think of it) knows I really like food.

The other day, I got to thinking about the many different kinds of food I’ve had over the years, from childhood on, that I’ll not likely be able to enjoy again.

What brought on the introspection was starting off my meal at an area buffet restaurant with cottage cheese and pickled beets. Granted, that’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but it’s been a favorite of mine since I was a little kid. And while pickled beets and cottage cheese are available in just about every grocery store in the country, it was the cottage cheese that prompted memories of my favorite kind when I was a little kid growing up out on the farm.

In those days, we had our own cow, a placid Guernsey my sisters had named Daisy. My dad milked her twice a day in a stall in the barn, sitting a three-legged milking stool, occasionally expertly aiming a shot of fresh milk from Daisy’s udder to one of the barn cats that crowded around waiting for a treat. When he was done milking, Dad would take the bucket of fresh milk in the house and down the basement to run it through the separator that separated (most of) the cream from the milk.

My family used Daisy’s milk for a number of things, from morning cereal to coffee cream (the real thing!) to ingredients for baking and cooking. That milk was also manufactured into two other products that we really enjoyed, meaning now we’re getting back to the cottage cheese part of the story.

Sort of, kind of the containers we’d get from Aunt Bess filled with homemade cottage cheese.

My mother would occasionally take a large container or two of Daisy’s milk over to Aunt Bess McMicken, who was one of the many aunts and uncles I had out in that neighborhood who were of absolutely no blood relation to me at all. But they were all like family, especially Aunt Bess and Uncle Jim. Aunt Bess would then somehow magically transform the milk my mother took to her into cottage cheese, which we were invited to go back and pick up a few days later. She always packaged in in two tall aluminum containers, and it tasted wonderful.

It’s extremely unlikely I’ll ever have the chance to taste Aunt Bess’s cottage cheese again, in this lifetime at least. Nor will I ever be able to taste the butter my grandmother made from Daisy’s cream. I remember her making it with an electric churn, and then working out the buttermilk and the salt in using a wooden paddle in a large wooden bowl. My dad loved buttermilk, but I was never able to acquire a taste for it, although using it in pancakes, banana nut muffins, and the like is a really good idea. The taste of my grandmother’s homemade butter is another thing I’m probably never going to be able to enjoy again.

A couple more of my grandmother’s foods I’ll likely never see again are her molasses cookies (my dad would sometimes crumble up a couple in a bowl and have them for breakfast with some of Daisy’s milk) and her homemade bread, which my grandfather didn’t particularly care for. My grandfather, instead, loved sliced commercial bakery bread delivered by the Peter Wheat Bread man. That, however, was fine with me because that meant more of grandma’s amazing homemade bread for me.

Grandma’s cookstove looked something like this, and it dominated her farmhouse kitchen.

Grandma’s baking was all done in her huge black and white porcelain wood-fired cook stove that dominated her kitchen. She had a modern propane-fueled range, too, but she favored her cookstove for baking. How, I once asked her, did she regulate the temperature to get the right results? “Well,” she said, “you just stick your hand in the oven and when it’s the right heat, then you do your baking.”

When I was really little, we still butchered our own pork and beef, using hogs and steers my dad had carefully picked out and fed especially for the purpose. After butchering, we’d get the occasional covered bowl of pickled heart or pickled tongue from grandma that made really great sandwiches. Those are things you just don’t see in the grocery store these days, at least not around these parts.

During those long ago summers, my family seemed to attend a never-ending series of picnics, each of which featured a wonderful potluck dinner or supper. My mother’s specialty for these occasions was her baked fried chicken, which was outstanding. She made it by first dredging the chicken parts in seasoned flour and then frying it in her big cast aluminum Pan-American frying pan. Then she finished it by baking it in the oven. It came out nearly falling off the bone, cooked through, moist and tasting wonderful. That kind of chicken used to be available at the Amana Colonies out in Iowa, but in recent years it’s been dropped in favor of regular fried chicken—a culinary loss to the Midwest.

At our annual family reunion in August, along with my mother’s chicken, we enjoyed a huge selection of desserts, some of which I’ll likely never taste again such as wonderberry pie and ground cherry pie. Both wonderberries and ground cherries are relatively labor-intensive to grow and as they are considered heirloom plants these days, are not easily available at your local garden center. But back in that day and age, they were found in lots of farm gardens. My grandmother had a ground cherry patch outside her back door. They always reminded me of tiny yellow cherries growing inside Japanese lanterns.

In the early spring each year, the Wheatland United Presbyterian Church just down the road from our farm held their annual pancake supper, put on by the young farming families. It was their major fundraiser for the year, and was extremely popular, drawing visitors from far and wide. One of the major draws was the sausage they served with their pancakes. It was whole hog sausage, made from a couple entire hogs, which were donated by a congregation member and made by the volunteer sausage committee members. For my taste, it was seasoned perfectly with just the right amount of salt, pepper and—most importantly—sage, because you can’t have decent breakfast sausage without sage.

About the only thing better for breakfast than fried mush and eggs is scrapple and eggs. Our neighbor Sam’s homemade scrapple was a true gourmet treat of my childhood.

Enjoying that quality of sausage ever again is unlikely, as is the scrapple our neighbor Sam made after we moved into town. He called it by another of its Pennsylvania Dutch names, pon haus, and it was wonderful. You can buy canned scrapple these days, but it resembles scrapple about as much as Spam resembles ham. If you can wait, it’s really best to make a special trip east to Pennsylvania Dutch country in Pennsylvania or Delaware and either buy it at a farmers’ market or at a small country diner. But however you are able to get hold of some these days, it won’t hold a candle to the taste of Sam’s pon haus.

On our summer Kansas trips during my childhood we’d keep a sharp eye out for a sign advertising a roadside watermelon stand, where an ice cold slice could be had for 15 or 20 cents, welcome relief in those pre-air conditioned auto days.

Some of the foods I enjoyed in my younger life tasted good, I suspect, just because of the situation I was in when eating them. Ice cold watermelon at the picnic table of a roadside stand on the dusty Kansas prairie during a hot summer trip to visit relatives; fresh lobster boiled while we watched at a picnic table at a roadside stand along the Connecticut shore; Yorkshire pudding and roast beef in a Yorkshire, England restaurant; a fountain-mixed root beer at the soda fountain in Oswego’s Main Cafe on a hot 1959 summer afternoon; and a 2” thick slice of raspberry pie at a country diner during the Kansas wheat harvest all left wonderful memories of those times and places.

I recall asking my grandmother one time whether she’d ever like to go back to visit “the gold old days” of her younger life. After thinking for a moment, she ventured “Maybe for supper.” She explained that she missed the canned roast beef they used to put up when she was a youngster and a young married woman in the days before home freezers. She said the taste and texture of the meat, tender and moist, was simply not available any more.

So I seem to come by my food nostalgia naturally; it’s apparently embedded in my DNA. Some of those eating experiences are gone forever—Aunt Bess’s cottage cheese—but there’s an outside chance that I may someday still get a chance to enjoy a good scrapple breakfast again or maybe even a slice of wonderberry pie. A person can certainly hope…

 

When it was summer and the livin’ was easy…

Summer has not yet quite officially arrived in the Fox Valley, although summer vacation has. Family vacations are on the horizon, and the newly out-of-school kids are able to ignore the fact they’ll have to get back in the academic harness in a few months. Instead, they’re settling into whatever summer routines their parents have mapped out for them.

These days, in fact, kids are heavily scheduled and deeply involved in a variety of organized sports, from the littlest tots to teens. Practice for upcoming Youth Tackle Football League games is starting along with soccer practice, tennis practice, and a variety of other sports leagues that would have astonished us here in Oswego 60 years ago. And that doesn’t even count the swimming lessons, craft activities, reading programs, and all the other things parents get their kids involved in.

Oswego kids line up at the Red Brick School for a 1958 fishing derby at Hafenrichter’s Pond sponsored by the Oswego Park District. (Little White School Museum collection)

Back in the late 1950s when I was just a kid, the group I traveled with loathed structured activities of any kind, which was probably a good thing, since there weren’t too many of those kinds of things to do anyway. We did have Little League baseball, provided by the park district, but I lost my enthusiasm for that when John Seidelman threw a high hard one inside and managed to hit me right in the ear hole of my batting helmet one day. After picking myself up off the batter’s box, I found my enthusiasm for baseball had disappeared. In fact, I haven’t liked baseball all that much ever since.

We also had the summer youth programs of the Oswego (later Oswegoland) Park District overseen by Ford Lippold up at the Little White School and the Red Brick School, but we weren’t much interested in them, either.

The Little Rascals, with Spanky third from the left.

Mostly, we hung around in a group and played along Waubonsie Creek and the Fox River. Our games were greatly influenced by two books, Penrod and Sam by Booth Tarkington and The Story of a Bad Boy by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, not to mention “The Little Rascals” movie short comedies of the 1930s and 1940s.

Penrod and Sam concerned two boys growing up in the early years of the 20th Century. Their adventures enthralled us, and we tried to pattern ourselves after Penrod, Sam, and their friends. The Story of a Bad Boy, on the other hand, was Aldrich’s semi-autobiography about a boy growing up in a small New England town in the 1850s who wasn’t a bad boy at all. He did get into some interesting scrapes, though. And he and his friends had the neatest snowball war any of us had ever heard about. The “Our Gang” comedies, of course, involved Alfalfa, Spanky, the beautiful Darla, and their gang of friends who had the neatest adventures and cobbled together the most wonderful inventions ever.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (Daguerrotype in the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

Upon rereading as an adult, however, Penrod and Sam, published in 1916, is startling for its casual racism. During the 1950s growing up here along the banks of the Fox River, though, none of us knew what racism was. I recall being extremely confused when a friend who had traveled through the South reported there were separate bathrooms and water fountains just for black people, and it made us all wonder how come black people couldn’t drink out of everybody else’s water fountains. After all, we’d been going to school with black kids for years and they didn’t have to do that in Oswego. It really puzzled us. Even with its early 20th Century racism, however, Penrod and Sam is still an extremely funny book and we all read it several times.

The Story of a Bad Boy is still one of my very favorite books, although I can’t seem to persuade anyone else of its worth. And there, too, there was disappointment when I got old enough to learn more about Aldrich. Despite his charming book, Aldrich turned out to be an adherent of preventing immigration, particularly that of Catholics. But it’s possible to forget Aldrich’s foibles when submerged in his marvelous tale about his youthful hero, Tom Bailey, and his friends growing up in a small 19th Century seacoast town.

Nothing like cold watermelon on a hot summer day. The author, in his favorite cap won at a carnival in Oswego, is third from left.

“The Little Rascals” movies, that we watched as part of the numerous local kids’ TV shows of the 1950s have worn extremely well. Even so, every once in a while, some Hollywood genius decides to try reviving them with always disastrous results. It’s really impossible to improve on or recreate a true classic.

After having studied up using the right books and absorbed as much “Rascals” lore as we could, we ventured forth each summer to have fun—and have fun we did. The woods near my home became our special preserve. We built bicycle trails throughout the stand of young soft maples woods, and built a series of three villages located on those trails. We maintained the houses and trails in the woods for about two years, I think, before we were forced to move elsewhere by unfriendly neighbors.

We spent a LOT of time on the Fox River. Above, my fishing buddy Paul holds up a big carp he caught. We still go fishing together twice a year.

Shortly before the move, we obtained our first river boats, and so became even more independent. My boat was purchased from a young man in Aurora, as I recall. It resembled nothing so much as the kind of large wooden box that contractors mix cement in.

It was very heavy, made of one inch lumber throughout, with a three-quarter inch plywood bottom. It even had a keel, for what reason I was never able to determine. About all the keel did was to catch on the rocks on the bottom of the shallow Fox River.

Granted, my boat was very heavy, but that meant it was also very stable. Three of my friends could stand on the gunwale at one time, and the boat would come nowhere near to tipping over.

The nice thing about the Fox, of course, was that it was so shallow that it was difficult—though not impossible—to find a place deep enough in which to drown. There were holes, of course, but we learned where nearly all of them were and stayed away from them.

After it became too much of a hassle to keep our towns on the mainland, we moved to a large island in the river where we built similar houses and forts.

The move to the island occasioned the need for a communications system from the island to the mainland, and from there to our tree house. It was determined that tying letters to arrows and shooting them from the island to the mainland and from there to the tree house was the answer to our problems. On the first test of our new communications system, the fellow standing in the field on the mainland came within six inches of getting the arrow with the message through his foot, but he gamely picked up the arrow and message and shot it up to the base of the tree in which we had our fort. The plan was then to attach the note to a hunting arrow and shoot it up into the bottom of the trapdoor of the tree house. As he shot the arrow, however, the fellow on the ground yelled, “Here it comes!” Not quite hearing him, another of my compatriots opened up the trap door to ask what he said, just as the hunting arrow whistled past his ear. After narrowly averting disaster twice during the first message test, we decided to scrap the system for something a little less hazardous.

Elmer the Elephant: Gone but not forgotten.

I’m not sure what kids read these days, but I suspect that neither Penrod and Sam nor The Story of a Bad Boy are among the books parents will allow in the house. And, sadly, “The Little Rascals” comedies are not broadcast daily on the kind of live-action kids’ shows we tuned into back in the day like “Here’s Geraldine” or “Elmer the Elephant.”

I suppose, with the number of kids we have today, all these modern structured activities might really be necessary. I’m glad I never had to cope with them, though. For me, it was much more fun spending the summer with Penrod, Spanky, and Tom Bailey.