“Let’s Talk Oswego History” we suggested, and a good crowd showed up

So last Saturday, July 15, we sponsored a program at Oswego’s Little White School Museum based on a bit of a new idea. Instead of a standard media presentation and lecture—in other words, what WE think might be interesting—we decided on a new “conversation” format to give those attending a chance to bring up topics that interested them. And it seemed to work out pretty well. Thanks to everyone who was able to take the time to show up!

I started the afternoon off giving a capsule history of the museum itself, built as a Methodist-Episcopal Church in 1850, bought by the Oswego School District in 1915 after the congregation dissolved and merged with the German Evangelical Church—now the Church of the Good Shepherd United Methodist—just a couple blocks away, and serving as school district classroom and storage place until the early 1970s when it was slated for sale and certain demolition. The Oswegoland Heritage Association was established in 1976 to save the building, restore it, and open a community museum in it, a project that was finally completed, largely with volunteer labor, 25 years later.

I also gave a capsule history of Oswego’s settlement by the extended Pearce family, who arrived exactly 190 years ago this year in June 1833.

Then the floor was opened to questions. At the suggestion of Jim Seidelman, we prevailed on the Little White School Museum’s Collections Assistant, Noah Beckman, to jot down the questions as they were asked.

For those who weren’t able to attend, here’s a list of the questions asked and answers I, and sometimes members of the audience, supplied:

Q. Is Wilson Street named after the U.S. President or first settlers William and Rebecca Wilson, brother-in-law and sister of the Pearce brothers, Daniel, John, and Walter?

A. Wilson Street was not named after President Wilson, but rather after William and Rebecca Wilson, whose cabin was erected on the southeast point of today’s busy “Five Corners” intersection of Chicago Road/Route 34/North Madison Street; Jefferson Street; and Route 25/North Madison Street. It was named long before Wilson became President and in any case Wilson was a Democrat and so would have been out of luck for street naming in Republican Oswego.

Q. Are there any buildings in Oswego involved in the Underground Railroad?

A. Years ago it became local mythology that just about every old house in Kendall County was rumored to be either a) a stop on the Underground Railroad or b) one of John Dillinger’s hideouts. A bare minimum of Kendall County houses can be reliably connected to the Underground Railroad’s efforts to spirit slaves to freedom, none that we know of in Oswego. That’s despite the active anti-slavery activities of many village residents. The problem is determining whether the houses sitting where they are today were the ones there during the pre-Civil War era, especially given that houses were moved from their original locations.

In 1907, Luella Hettrich had this house, built by Marcius Richards on Washngton Street, moved around the corner onto Monroe Street so she could build her new Dutch Colonial home. (Little White School Museum collection)

Q. Was moving houses common back in the 19th Century?

A. Extremely common! A number of Oswego houses and other buildings have been moved over the last 150 years, including the Little White School Museum itself. Evidence uncovered during the museum’s restoration indicated that it had been disassembled, moved to its current site, and reassembled. Gustaf Unonius, a Swedish immigrant, noted of Chicago in 1845 that all manner of buildings were continually on the move to make way for newer structures. “Moving the house does not necessarily mean that those living in it must move out,” he wrote. “I have seen houses on the move while the families living in them continued with their daily tasks, keeping fire in the stove, eating their meals as usual, and at night quietly going to bed to wake up the next morning on some other street. Once a house passed my window while a tavern business housed in it went on as usual.”

Speaking of moving buildings, at noon on Saturday, Oct. 28, the Oswegoland Heritage Association will host “Oswego’s Moving Houses,” a program by OHA Board Member Ted Clauser, that will be all about houses and other structures that have been moved around Oswego over the years. Pre-registration is $5, but walk-ins the day of the program are also welcome.

Q. Have we heard anything about the depletion of the silica sand deposits near Wedron, the sole freight carried by the rail line running through Oswego?

A: Rumors of the imminent closure of the old Fox River Branch of the CB&Q running through Oswego pop up periodically. Whether those deposits of white silica sand, used for fracking in the energy extraction industry, will run out any time soon is anyone’s guess.

The A.O. Parke building is probably the oldest commercial structure in downtown Oswego. Over the year’s it’s housed everything from a farm implement business to a Ford dealership. Pictured above in 1982 as the Jacqueline Shop, it currently houses the Prom Shoppe. (Little White School Museum collection)

Q. What is the oldest building still standing in downtown Oswego?

A. Probably The Prom Shoppe building at the northwest corner of Main and Jackson. Built of native limestone in the 1840s by local businessman A.O. Parke, the building originally housed Parke’s store and while he was Oswego’s postmaster, the Oswego Post Office. Over the decades it’s housed many varied businesses including the Zentmyer Ford dealership and garage, the Willis brothers tin shop, La-Z-Pines Driftwood Arts, Zentmyer Appliance, Rucks Appliance, the Jacqueline Shop, and the All-American Male. The next oldest buildings are the remaining storefronts of the Union Block at the southeast corner of Main and Washington. Built in 1867 after a devastating fire destroyed all the buildings on that side of Main from Washington to Jackson Street, the brick and stone block of buildings have housed a variety of businesses since then.

This small house on South Main St. built about 1839, is possibly the oldest building in town. One indication of its age is that it sits at an angle to the street, suggesting the exact route of Main Street wasn’t firmed up when it was built. (Little White School Museum collection)

Parenthetically, it’s likely the oldest building—certainly among the oldest—is the Bartlett House, the former offices of the Fox Valley Sentinel. Located where Bartlett Creek crosses under South Main Street, the house was built by the Aaron Bartlett family when they arrived at Oswego from St. Johnsville, NY in 1839.

The Red Brick School was built as a combo grade and high school in 1886. The classroom/gym addition to the left was added in 1926. The building was used purely for elementary classes starting in 1951. (Little White School Museum collection)

Q: Was there an effort to save the Red Brick School? When was it torn down?

A: Not that we know of. By the time the Oswego School District decided to sell the building, it was in bad physical shape and needed a LOT of expensive work. And in practical terms, it was an extremely large building that would have offered some fairly severe challenges for any volunteer group that was interested in preserving it. In addition, at roughly the same time, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy’s Oswego Depot was in the process of being abandoned, and many area residents figured it would make a better community museum. And, in fact, the Oswego Jaycees were in active negotiations with the railroad in the late 1960s to have the building moved and turned into a community museum when it was suddenly, with no warning, demolished. The Red Brick School was demolished in August 1965 to make way for the new Oswego Community Bank and Oswego Post Office.

Demolition of the Red Brick School in the summer of 1965. ByLine Bank and the Oswego Post Office currently occupy the block where the school was located. (Little White School Museum collection)

Q: How did Oswego become one of the safest towns in the U.S.?

A: A tradition of skillful community policing was established by Oswego’s law enforcement authorities early on. That tradition was then firmly anchored by Oswego Police Department Chiefs Bob Wunsch and Dwight Baird. Under those two chiefs, the force was thoroughly professionalized and a culture of keeping the peace as opposed to encouraging the paramilitary culture of so many of the nation’s law enforcement agencies was firmly installed and then supported by the village boards that have overseen the OPD.

Q: What is the history behind the old Spanish Revival home in Stonegate Estates?

A. The property that makes up Stonegate Estates was purchased by Doctor Lewis Weishew, who built the house. Lewis Jerome Weishew was born March 3, 1891 in Garardville, PA. He graduated from medical school in 1913 and purchased the Oswego family practice of Dr. L.C. Diddy. In March 1914 he married Violet Shoger in Oswego. The couple had one son, Don. Dr. Weishew served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War I. He returned to Oswego after the war, resuming his family practice and also specializing in arthritis treatment. Violet Shoger Weishew died May 19, 1920. He subsequently married Mabel Miller, and the couple had two daughters, Suzanne and Nan. In 1926, he bought the property bordered by Waubonsie Creek and the East River Road—now Ill. Route 25 and built the ornate Spanish Colonial Revival mansion overlooking the creek that still stands there. He built a new clinic at the corner of Main and Van Buren streets in 1928 where he continued his practice in Oswego until his death on June 30, 1948.

Layton Lippold built at least two Claremont Sears Roebuck & Company homes for Oswego customers. There are around 20 Sears and other kit homes in Oswego. (Little White School Museum collection)

Q: Are there any Sears catalog homes in Oswego?

A: There are at least 14 Sears & Roebuck kit homes in Oswego, plus at least two Montgomery Ward Wardway kit homes and one Aladdin kit home. Most of the Sears homes were assembled by local contractor Layton Lippold, father of Ford Lippold, founder of the Oswego Ledger and first executive director of the Oswegoland Park District. The Oswegoland Heritage Association is looking at the possibility of creating a driving tour of Oswego’s kit homes.

The Fox River Butter Company creamery was located on Ill. Route 25 just north of North Street and east of North Adams Street. The spring that cooled its milk and cream still runs to the Fox River from the old cave under the hill behind it. (Aurora Historical Society collection)

Q: Is there really a cave under Route 25 where the stone marker is located?

A. There is indeed a cave near where the granite boulder marker is located on Route 25, but it doesn’t extend under the highway. The natural cave was enlarged when a brewery was built on the site about 1870, with the water from the natural spring that flowed out of the cave used in the brewing process. The brewery closed in 1873. In 1876, W.H. McConnell & Company bought the building and converted it into the Fox River Butter Company that produced cream, butter, and cheese. It opened for business in January 1877 and was an immediate success, processing the raw milk of area farmers. By May 1878, the factory was producing 2,600 pounds of butter per week and was furnishing the Grand Pacific Hotel in Chicago with 20 gallons of cream daily. From May 1, 1878 to May 1, 1879, the factory produced 177,000 pounds of butter and 354,000 pounds of cheese. The cold spring water was used to cool the milk brought to the factory for processing. The natural spring still flows out of the old—now much smaller—cave and runs under North Adams Street a few hundred feet north of the Oswego Greenhouse to empty into the Fox River. Unfortunately, the old spring has been contaminated with extremely harmful bacteria and has been unfit to drink for several decades.

This first attempt at a conversation about Oswego history and numerous related topics seemed pretty successful, and some of the participants urged us to do it again sometime soon. Actually, it was lots of fun! It also produced a little welcome revenue for the museum’s operations.

Maybe it would make a good topic for a program during next May’s Historic Preservation Month, or possibly even sooner? Let us know what you think—and be sure to watch the Little White School Museum’s web page at www.littlewhiteschoolmuseum.org or their Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/LittleWhiteSchoolMuseum to see when we might get together again to chat.

How the Great Plains and the Prairie Peninsula awed us in the past – and still do

Back in the 1960s, some young German relatives of good friends of ours came to visit the U.S. They flew into California and then said they wanted to travel from there to my (then) small northern Illinois hometown to visit their American relatives.

Which was fine, but when they told our friends they planned to take neither a train nor a plane, but a bus from California to northern Illinois our friends tried really hard to talk them out of it, attempting to stress just how much space separates California and Illinois. But the German visitors were adamant. After all, they said, they’d taken buses all the way across Germany, and California to Illinois was only about two-thirds of the way across the U.S.

Three days later, they arrived in Chicago, thoroughly tired of being jounced around in uncomfortable bus seats, astounded by the size of the fraction of the U.S. they’d just traveled across—and having gained a new appreciation for the shear size of North America.

I thought about those two German girls as I recently read Ian Frazier’s Great Plains, a book recommended to me by my friend Judy Wheeler. “It reads like fiction,” she said, and I did find it really entertaining. Although first published 34 years ago, Frazier’s book holds up extremely well as he weaves stories of the Great Plains’ residents and ecology, their Native People, White traders and trappers, military personnel, and pioneers who arrived with great hopes that so many of them saw dashed in the end.

As Frazier notes, no state lies entirely in the region officially termed the Great Plains. Instead, the area includes eastern portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Texas; and western portions of North and South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma and all the way north into three Canadian provences.

The Great Plains are drier than their neighbors to the east, and are often sometimes called the shortgrass prairie to describe the former dominant plant life that grew there. That differentiates them from the tallgrass prairie, called the Prairie Peninsula by geographers, that starts in the eastern portions of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas and then extends east in a rough triangle that includes western Minnesota, nearly all of Iowa and northeastern Missouri, almost all of Illinois north of the state’s heavily forested southern tip, and a small triangular point reaching into northwestern Indiana.

The Great Plains and the Prairie Peninsula share something in common—besides almost limitless grasslands—and that’s the awe they inspired with the pioneers and often continue to inspire today.

In Frazier’s book, he recounts taking a friend visiting him in the mountains of Montana east to see and experience the Great Plains, something she was entirely unprepared for.

“We left the park [Glacier National Park] and turned onto U.S. Highway 89. A driver coming down this road gets the most dramatic first glimpse of the Great Plains I’ve ever seen,” he wrote. “For some miles, pine trees and foothills are all around; then, suddenly, there is nothing across the road but sky, and a sign says HILL, Trucks Gear Down, and you come over a little rise, and the horizon jumps a hundred miles away in an instant. My friend’s jaw—her whole face, really—fell, and she said, “I had no idea!”

The earliest pioneers had pretty much the same reaction to the Prairie Peninsula when they emerged onto the Grand Prairie from the Eastern Deciduous Forest of huge hardwoods in western Indiana. For some, it was a vision of farming without the intense labor of cutting timber and laboriously removing stumps before crops could be planted. Others, meanwhile, worried about where they’d find the trees to cut to supply the vast amounts of timber pioneering technology in the first half of the 19^th Century required. Still others were nearly overcome by the shear amount of open space, their vision extending to the far horizon, interrupted only by a few tree-lined creeks and isolated hardwood groves.

One of the earliest accounts by folks leaving the eastern forest and emerging on the Illinois prairie was left in 1817 by Englishman George Flower. He and his partner Morris Birkbeck established a British colony in southeast Illinois. His account was included in The Early Illinois Prairie by William Roger Harshbarger, written for the Douglas County, Illinois Historical Society in 2016: “Bruised by the brushwood and exhausted by the extreme heat we almost despaired, when a small cabin and a low fence greeted our eyes. A few steps more and a beautiful prairie suddenly opened to our view. At first, we only received the impressions of its general beauty. With longer gaze, all its distinctive features were revealed, lying in profound repose under the warm light of an afternoon’s summer sun. Its indented and irregular outline of wood, its varied surface interspersed with clumps of oaks of centuries’ growth, its tall grass, with seed stalks from six to ten feet high, like tall and slender reeds waving in a gentle breeze, the whole presenting a magnificence of park-scenery, complete from the hand of Nature, and unrivalled by the same sort of scenery by European art. For once, the reality came up to the picture of imagination.”

Ferdinand Ernst, an early German traveler in Indiana and Illinois was similarly bowled over: “On the 11th of July [1819], I, in company with ten travelers on horse, crossed the Wabash and entered the State of Illinois. If the traveler from the coast of the Atlantic Ocean to this point has grown weary of the endless journey in the forests, then he believes himself transferred to another region of the world as soon as he crosses the Wabash and beholds those great prairies alternating with little wooded districts.”

The prairie vistas here in Kendall County also drew approval from early visitors. In his 1877 county history, the Rev. E.W. Hicks writes of two of the county’s early settlers: “Among those who came out prospecting in the spring of 1831 were Earl Adams and Ebenezer Morgan from New York. They descended the Ohio to the Mississippi, and then up to St. Louis, where buying ponies, they followed the banks of the Illinois river to Ottawa, and up the Fox to Yorkville. Reining up their horses on the present Court House Hill, they gazed on the lovely stream below them, the wide, beautiful prairies beyond them, and the timber behind them. The green was dotted with flowers, the birds sang in the branches, and a group of deer stood gazing at the strangers from the edge of a hazel thicket some distance away. ‘Here,’ thought Mr. Adams, ‘is my home,’ and dismounting he drove his stake in the soil and took possession. Following up the river about two miles farther, they came to a creek, where Mr. Morgan halted and made his own claim. This done, they passed up to Chicago, sold their ponies, and returned home by way of the lakes.” 

It would be a few years before the two men were able to return to take possession of their claims. Morgan would not only claim land along the small creek, but also give his name to it as a lasting reminder of the county’s pioneer era.

In 1834, Morris Sleight, an ex-sea captain from Hyde Park, New York, traveled west to prospect for a likely place to settle, eventually winding up at Capt. Joseph Naper’s settlement about 12 miles east of Oswego on the DuPage River that became modern Naperville. In a letter to his wife, he explained how the surrounding prairies entranced him: “…the first view of an Illinois Prairie is Sublime, I may almost say awfully Grand, as a person needs a compass to keep his course—but the more I travel over them the better I like them. There is a great variety of Flowers now on the Prairies, but they tell me in a month from this time they will be much prettier.”

“The farm of Seymour Sloan,” painted in 1866 by Junius Sloan (1828- 1900) gives an idea of what the tallgrass prairie in north central Illinois looked like in the mid-19th Century. The 500-acre Sloan farm, purchased in 1853, was located near Kewanee in Henry County, Illinois. This wonderful painting is owned by the Kewanee Historical Society.

British writer Harriet Martineau visited northern Illinois in 1836. She was invited on a short trip from Chicago to Joliet, encountering her first prairie just west of the growing city on the lake. She described how the open prairie easily caused disorientation among the uninitiated: “I now found the truth of what I had read about the difficulty of distinguishing distances on a prairie. The feeling is quite bewildering. A man walking near looks like a Goliath a mile off. I mistook a covered wagon with out horses, at a distance of fifty yards, for a white house near the horizon; and so on.”

Orlando Walker had arrived here in Oswego by wagon train from Smyrna, New York in 1843. In 1906 his granddaughter, Helen McKinney Pogue, recounted how the rest of the Walker family made it to Oswego and why: “Orlando Walker wrote such glowing accounts of this beautiful prairie country to his brothers Seth and Lauriston Walker in Belchertown, Mass. that they packed their belongings and came to Illinois. Seth, by public conveyance and Lauriston all the way by ‘prairie schooner.’ When these people who had come from New England, saw the beautiful, smooth prairies covered with thick grass and a sprinkling of wild flowers, with the woodland in the distance, they thought it a paradise compared with the rocky country they had left.”

Mrs. M.E. Jeneson, writing in the 1906 Oswego Herald, noted of her family’s mid-19th Century move to Oswego: “My introduction to prairie life was like getting into paradise. No words of mine could convey to you the vastness, the grandeur and beauty of the natural prairie. It was in the fall of 1850 that the Jolly family left their old home and friends at Hillsboro, Highland county, Ohio, and traveled west by team, destined for Oswego, then the county seat of Kendall county, Illinois.”

Goose Lake Prairie State Natural Area, County Road 5000 E, Morris, Illinois.

These days, the Prairie Peninsula seems to be sprouting more homes, businesses, and paved roads than wildflowers, but interested folks can still get some idea of why those early settlers and travelers expressed so much awe at the tallgrass prairie by visiting area restorations at the 20,000 acre Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie at Ellwood; the 2,700-acre Goose Lake Prairie State Natural Area; or even the smaller 30-acre prairie restoration here in Kendall County at Silver Springs State Fish and Wildlife Area between Plano and Yorkville.

And even though the prairies are now covered with corn and soybean fields, you can get an idea of what the land looked like by driving south on I-55 into the flatlands from the Des Plaines River all the way to the Mississippi River Valley—in fact, there are probably more trees in that region these days than back in Morris Birkbeck’s or Ferdinand Ernst’s day.

Putting ourselves in their shoes for a moment, it’s easy to understand the feelings of shear astonishment of those folks, born and raised in densely forested areas, when they finally emerged from the trees onto those open prairies some two centuries ago.