The effects of weather have been, and continue to be, historic…

Humorist Charles Dudley Warner once quipped “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” And during Warner’s lifetime (1829-1900), that was mostly true—though not entirely.

For instance, the amount of coal smoke from tens of thousands of stoves and fireplaces created sometimes deadly weather conditions in London, England. But the feeling at the time was that humans really couldn’t affect nature, especially the weather.

Nevertheless, in 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius proposed the hypothesis that massive amounts of human instigated fossil-fuel burning and other combustion that produced carbon dioxide was enough to cause global warming. His suggestion was met with general derision. But then in 1938, Guy Stewart Callendar, a British steam engineer, mathematician, and amateur climatologist gathered actual temperature records from the late 19th Century onward. When analyzed, his data showed that during the preceding 50 years, global land temperatures had increased. In other words, he proved global climate change was happening. In 1938. Something some still refuse to believe.

The heavy smogs in London during the 19th Century not only required carriages and wagons be guided by torch-bearers during daylight hours, but also killed people. That continued into the 20th Century with the notorious London Fog of 1952 that lasted for days and killed several people. (Illustrated London News)

But back to Charles Dudley Warner and his quip about the weather. There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that the weather has had a relatively huge effect on world history. From the 16th Century Kamikaze “Divine Wind” that supposedly disrupted a Mongol invasion of Japan to the 1588 storm that scattered the Spanish Armada, to Napoleon’s disastrous winter retreat from Moscow in 1812, weather’s effects keep turning up in the historical record.

Here in North America—the New World to Europeans but the same old place to the Native People who had been living here for thousands of years—weather began playing an important role as soon as those Europeans mentioned above arrived.

For instance, in 1620, a group of disgruntled British religious separatists left the Netherlands bound for what they hoped would be their very own New World utopia across the Atlantic. Earlier, they’d left England for the Netherlands because their brand of Protestantism was actively suppressed. But they found the religious tolerance of the Dutch intolerable and so decided to make a truly clean break and a new start in the New World, where they hoped to have the religious freedom to oppress other faiths.

They aimed to land in Virginia when they sailed from Plymouth, England on Sept. 16, 1620, but the iffy navigation of their ship’s captain instead landed them on the coast of modern Massachusetts, hundreds of miles north of where they planned to take up their new homes. During their first winter in North America, the unplanned-for cold weather nearly killed the lot of them, but they managed to survive, and then eventually prosper.

Meanwhile even farther to the north, the French were settling Canada, eventually creating a string of settlements along the St. Lawrence River from its mouth upstream to the La Chine rapids, so named because the first explorers hoped China was just beyond them. Although they kept expecting to run across Chinese officials as they continued ever farther west, they were, disappointed when they found the Pacific Ocean in the way of extending their travels.

The weather in Canada was even more brutal than that experienced by the English Separatists settled in Massachusetts. But intrepid French explorers and rapacious businessmen—usually one in the same—kept pushing farther and farther into the interior in their search for China and the East Indies. Among them was René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who managed to obtain the royal trade cession for what is now most of the upper Midwest. LaSalle pushed as far west as the thundering falls on the Niagara River between Lakes Erie and Ontario and in 1679, built the first large sailing ship on the western Great Lakes, the Griffin.

LaSalle’s expedition on its way south on the upper Illinois River looking for open water. They didn’t find any until they got down to modern Peoria.

There, weather again came into play when the Griffin, loaded with valuable furs collected from tribes from the western lakes, disappeared, likely sinking during one of the Great Lakes’ frequent and violent storms. The loss threatened to bankrupt LaSalle, but he managed to talk his way out of the problem and mounted yet another expedition in the spring of 1682.

Setting off from Fort St. Joseph on the St. Joseph River, a Lake Michigan tributary, the LaSalle expedition had to haul their canoes downstream on improvised sledges because the St. Joseph was frozen solid, as was the Kankakee when they portaged into it, as was the Illinois River as they traveled downstream from the Kankakee’s mouth on the Des Plaines. Not until they reached Peoria did they find open water. That allowed them to paddle down the Illinois to the Mississippi, and then down to the Mississippi’s mouth on the Gulf of Mexico. There, in an elaborate ceremony (he’d brought along his royal court clothes in case he met some of those long-sought Chinese officials) LaSalle claimed the entire Mississippi watershed for France, something that must have, at the least, bemused the tens of thousands of Native People who’d been living there for the past several centuries.

Weather continued to have its affects on history as the thin line of European colonies that stretched along the Atlantic seaboard grew and prospered. The frontier moved ever farther west as White settlement pushed the resident Native People ever farther west. By 1830, settlement had begun in what geographers eventually called the Prairie Peninsula, a generally open, huge, roughly triangular-shaped tallgrass prairie with its apex in northwestern Indiana and extending northwest all the way to the eastern Dakotas and southwest into eastern Kansas. It must have been quite a sight for those early pioneers when they emerged from the familiar dense timber that stretched behind them east all the way to the Appalachian Mountains and saw a seemingly endless sea of 6-foot tall Big Bluestem grass extending all the way to the horizon.

Pioneer farmers had to change their techniques when they reached the tallgrass prairie. Instead of clearing timber to plant their fields they had to “break,” or plow, the prairie, an expensive, time-consuming task.

All that open grassland was a great boon for those frontier farmers because they didn’t have to laboriously cut down towering old-growth hardwoods before they could farm the land. But the lack of timber also threw a wrench into traditional frontier farming techniques. While groves of hardwoods spotted the prairie and timber did grow on the east side of prairie water courses, the old ways of depending on logs for cabins and farm buildings, as well as to split into fence rails had to be modified.

The earliest prairie settlers here in northern Illinois staked their claims on the east side of groves and streamside woods in order to assure enough timber for building as well as for firewood. Because prairie pioneering required a LOT of timber for both. For instance, the rule of thumb for firewood was that it took about 30 cords to make it through a northern Illinois winter, a cord being a stack of wood 4 feet wide, 4 feet high, and 8 feet long.

The 1870 plat map of Big Grove in Kendall County’s Big Grove Township illustrates how the county’s groves were subdivided into smaller timber plots for sale by earlier arrivals to later arrivals who needed timber to build farmsteads and put up rail fences.

The earliest settlers who had vision and business sense quickly snapped up those isolated groves and other patches of timber out on the prairie, subdivided them into 10-acre plots, and sold them to later arrivals.

One of the other reasons early settlers preferred to locate their farmsteads on the east side of timber patches was to shelter against the prairie winds that came howling out of the west. In winter, especially, those winds could be brutal, as the early pioneers found out during the fierce winter of 1830-31. Forever after known as the Winter of the Deep Snow, the series of storms led to the deaths of countless settlers as well as many of the Native People who lived here. The weather that winter may even have created conditions that led to the Black Hawk War of 1832, Illinois’ last Indian war.

The 1838 U.S. Survey map of Oswego Township nicely illustrates how the earliest pioneer farmers staked claims hugging the sheltered east side of the region’s patches of timber. The area shaded in green shows the southern-most lobe of the Big Woods, a huge patch of timber that stretched from Oswego north to Batavia and east to Naperville.

But while the Winter of the Deep Snow put a damper on things, and 1832 saw war across northern Illinois, just a year later, the Year of the Early Spring led, at least in percentage terms, to the biggest population explosion in northern Illinois history. As described by Kendall County’s first historian in his 1877 history: “The year 1833 opened out splendidly, as if to make amends for the hardships of the year before. The snow went away in February, and early in March the sheltered valleys and nooks by the groves were beautifully green, and by the end of the month, stock could live on the prairies anywhere. It was an exceedingly favoring Providence for the few pioneers who remained on their claims; for had the spring been cold and backward, much more suffering must have followed. The tide of emigration set in early, and in one summer more than trebled the population of the county. This was partly because the emigration of the summer preceding had been held back by the [Black Hawk] war.”

And weather has continued to have more or less serious effects on our little corner of the world ever since. Annual spring floods—called “freshets” back in the day—regularly washed out the numerous dams and bridges on the Fox River, costing the dam owners and taxpayers substantial amounts of money to repair and replace. And weather’s effect on farming is well-known, from drought conditions to years that proved too wet. Townsfolk were also affected, from winters so cold they froze preserved food in area residents’ basements to summers so hot and dry the mills that depended on the Fox River’s waterpower had to temporarily close.

The old Parker Gristmill on the west bank of the Fox River just above Oswego during a spring freshet (flood) around 1910. The flood waters have completely covered the mill dam. (Little White School Museum collection)

The drought and destructive dust storms of the Great Depression years didn’t just affect the Great Plains—they had severe economic effects here, in Kendall County too, with dust storms carrying away tons of topsoil and dry conditions encouraging insect infestations that destroyed thousands of acres of crops.

The blizzards that swept down across the Great Plains east across the Mississippi didn’t stop with the Winter of the Deep Snow, but created both economic and political problems right up to modern times. The winter of 1978-1979 brought parts of northern Illinois to a halt. And when two January storms dropped heavy snow on Chicago, voters showed their displeasure with how the city handled snow removal by kicking Mayor Michael Bilandic out of office and electing Jane Byrne, the city’s first female mayor.

Unfortunately, the snow from the brutal winter of 1978-1979 didn’t only fall on Chicago. A good bit of it fell out here in the Fox River Valley, too. We were able to keep a walking path to the garage clear, though.

Most recently, on-going global climate change has created a confused weather situation not only here in the Fox Valley but across the nation. Far western states have lately been toggling between extreme drought and record floods and snowfall. The fragile electrical grid in Texas gets regular stress tests that it partially fails due to colder than expected winters and hotter than anticipated summers.

Meanwhile here in northern Illinois, winters have become increasingly mild, creating year round open water on the Fox River and the numerous water detention ponds created to control stormwater runoff that has attracted tens of thousands of once extremely rare Canada geese and various duck species.

And from what we see on the news these days, warmer weather is not only encouraging the northward march of such pests as fire ants, but the climate change causing it seems to be pushing the old Tornado Alley of the Great Plains eastward across the Mississippi River into more densely populated areas.

Even with climate change driven weather causing so many problems, though, we’re still only taking baby steps to try to do something about it. While weather has always had major effects on history, and while we do have the technical ability to do something about it these days, it looks as if Charles Dudley Warner’s quip is likely to continue to describe the situation for the foreseeable future.

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A century makes a difference…depending on the century

I think we can all agree that a century is a long time. But when it comes to advances in society and technology, some centuries are much more different than others.

Got to thinking about that the other day when I was musing about what was going on around my neighborhood in this small corner of northern Illinois. I imagine that to younger generations, 1923 must seem to be the misty, distant past. But to me, sure, it’s 100 years ago, but it doesn’t SEEM like that long ago.

My parents were both born well before 1923 and, in fact, would get married just seven years later. My grandparents were all born well before the turn of the 20th Century as were the old folks around town when I was growing up.

Back in the 1950s, we’d ride our bikes in our small-town Memorial Day Parade, led by a color guard of young, fit American Legion World War II and Korea vets—many of whom were born in the 1920s—while the aged veterans of World War I rode in cars and waved at the watching crowd. These days, it’s getting to be that the aged vets riding in the cars are Vietnam vets and the color guardsmen are veterans of Desert Storm and those 21st Century conflicts.

The author as a young biker with his Schwinn cycle decorated for the annual Memorial Day Parade.

So while time is catching up with us Baby Boomers, it still doesn’t make 1923 seem that far in the past. After all, a century before my generation, the first cohort of that post-World War II Baby Boom, was born was almost unbelievably divorced from life at that time. In 1946, society was well along the road to modernity. In 1846, the frontier was still moving west, Mexico still owned what is today the U.S. Southwest (although our war of conquest of it had begun in April), sailing ships were built of wood, the telegraph was just two years old, and the telephone’s invention lay three years in the future. Individual transportation and farm work depended entirely on horses, indoor plumbing was far in the future and safe and sanitary municipal water supplies were virtually non-existent. Air travel consisted of a few hot air balloon enthusiasts.

By 1946, the internal combustion engine had long supplanted horses to power vehicles and farm equipment; virtually every household was connected to the national electrical power grid meaning not only towns but individual homes enjoyed electrical lighting; indoor plumbing was the rule and not the exception; home refrigerators and washing machines were the rule not pricy exceptions; passenger airplane networks spanned the entire globe as did fleets of steel-hulled ships. Far more people lived in towns and cities than on the farm. 1946 was, in fact, a completely different world from a century before.

But looking back a century from today, we really can’t say that. Plunk someone from 1923 down in 2023 northern Illinois, and while the changes would be startling—and not a bit confusing—the commonalities would perhaps be just as surprising.

Many of the issues back in 1923, at least according to articles in the Kendall County Record, sound remarkably familiar.

Take, for instance, the problems we’re having with guns these days. Guns were a problem back then, too. As Kendall County Record Editor Hugh R. Marshall noted in the paper’s Jan. 10 edition: “The Chicago Tribune and the Herald-Examiner are putting on drives to stop the indiscriminate sale of firearms and skeleton keys. These are commendable acts and should receive the support of every citizen. There is too much lawlessness made possible by these sales.”

It was a prescient comment because in the paper’s Aug. 29 edition, Marshall reported: “We had a murder in Kendall county last week. The killing was the result of a revolver, or automatic, in the hands of a man who was not authorized to carry a ‘shooting iron.’”

Route 18 under construction at the west end of the Oswego Bridge, 1923. Route 18, also called The Cannonball Trail, ran from Chicago to Princeton, roughly following modern Ogden Avenue from Chicago to Naperville, then down Aurora Avenue o Aurora, south on modern Ill. Route 31 to Oswego, and then following modern U.S. Route 34 through Yorkville, Plano, and Sandwich on to Princeton. Construction was authorized during the 1923 construction year by state officials. (Little White School Museum collection)

Turned out a dispute between workers on the new concrete highway being built between Yorkville and Oswego that year turned violent, leading to the shooting and to the perpetrator getting 16 years in the state pen over in Joliet.

Which brings us to another similarity of those days of the Roaring ‘20s with this day and age: road construction, which these days seems to be going on 365 days a year.

Back in 1918, Illinois voters had passed a $60 million bond issue to build a network of “hard roads”—concrete highways—designed to link every county seat in the state. By 1923, construction was well along on the project, with Route 18, nicknamed the Cannon Ball Trail, being built through Kendall County as it linked Chicago with Princeton in western Illinois

The route went west from Chicago to Aurora following, roughly, the CB&Q Railroad right-of-way. From Aurora, the route ran south along the west side of the Fox River on modern Ill. Route 31 to Oswego, where it met modern U.S. Route 34 for the run west past Yorkville on to Plano, Sandwich and on west. By late 1923, the route through Kendall County was mostly paved and ready for traffic, with the rest of it completed the next year.

“Illinois already has a running start toward breaking her own world’s record for hard road construction mileage within a single year, and 1923 already looms as a red letter period,” Marshall marveled in June. “In 1922, when the world’s record was broken by the completion of 722 miles of road, there was built up to May 24 only 51.98 miles, as compared with this year’s record over the same period of 114.95. At present there are employed 7,000 men, 1,650 teams, and 87 [concrete] mixers in addition to the vast volume of other necessary equipment.”

And then there’s our modern problem of drug trafficking. These days it mostly consists of drugs being smuggled into the country across our northern and southern borders. During the 2022 fiscal year, nearly 35 tons of illegal drugs were intercepted along the nation’s northern border while 143 tons were seized at the nation’s southern border and another 150 tons were seized in coastal and interior areas.

From 1920 to 1933, federal, state, and local law enforcement officers spent millions of tax dollars to uphold the 18th Amendment’s prohibition of consuming alcohol. Numerous illegal distilling operations were conducted in Kendall County during that era. (Chicago Tribune photo)

In February 1923, Marshall observed: “The use of drugs and the increase in the number of addicts are matters which are causing much comment and agitation in medical circles. We hope that success will attend the efforts of leaders in Chicago’s organization against the use of drugs in their latest declaration of war.”

But the biggest drug problem a century ago was the illicit use and production of alcohol. Prohibition was in effect and illegally trafficked and consumed alcohol was a huge problem, even—or maybe especially—out in rural areas. Kendall County was, in fact, a hotbed of bootlegging with illegal stills producing illicit alcohol on industrial scales. Aided by better roads and fast, dependable and affordable cars and trucks, bootleggers found little Kendall a great place to do business.

In March 1923, a task force of federal officers and county sheriff’s police shut down a large Plano speakeasy operation and then raided the Schickler farm on the west side of the Fox River at Oswego, where they destroyed a modern still turning out 23 gallons a day.

“The work of Sheriff Barkley and his deputies in the cleaning up of several of the illicit liquor places of the county is to be commended,” Marshall commented. “They went after the job in a systematic manner and accomplished the results they sought. Kendall county can afford to be clean and should be. But the efforts of the law enforcement officers should not lag–it is said that two of these places grown where one is closed as in the case of the blades of grass…The worst time for this particular kind of law-breaking is in the summer months when many of the former Aurora bootleggers take up their station along the cement highways and peddle their nefarious stuff to those who have the right password.”

And finally, there is a spirited national discussion going on right now over abortion and, relatedly, birth control. Just like there was 100 years ago. Record Editor Marshall was a mild birth control skeptic who pointed out the rich would always have access to it when he wrote on Dec. 12: “The question of birth control is insistent in Chicago. There is one serious objection to its adoption—it would be practiced by those whose financial condition merits a large family and unsought by the illiterate and ignorant class where it should be practiced. But unscrupulous practitioners will help the wealthy while they laugh at those who are answering the impulses of natural instinct.”

Which sounds a lot like some of the arguments being issued these days after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to not only ban abortion but also, if they so wish, to restrict or even ban birth control.

So, yes, a century is a very long time. But as history has moved forward it seems as if the changes experienced over that most recent 100 year span have been a bit less startling in the ways they’ve changed our world.