It would have been nice to have had a nice long chat with Lorenzo Rank.
For 40 years, Rank chronicled Oswego happenings for the Kendall County Record, inserting a bit of his interesting take on life into each of his columns. Unfortunately for me, Rank died some 40 years before I was born. Even so, I have gotten to know him over the past 40 years by reading almost every one of the columns he wrote as part of a project to record Oswego history as it appeared in local weekly newspapers.
The project actually began, as did so many of the good things that have taken place in Oswego since World War II, with Ford Lippold. The former editor and publisher of the Oswego Ledger and the Oswegoland Park District’s first executive director, Lippold was deeply interested in local history. As his contribution to the nation’s Bicentennial in 1976, Lippold, whenever he had time, read microfilmed issues of the Record at the Oswego Public Library, using his portable typewriter to transcribe selections from the paper’s Oswego news column that struck his fancy. Working for a few years on the project, Lippold produced about 30 pages of transcripts of Rank’s Oswego news column.
The transcription proved a handy source for our monthly “Yesteryear” columns when I was the editor of the Ledger-Sentinel in Oswego. But while Lippold’s transcriptions were interesting, entertaining, and illuminating, they were admittedly spotty. Ford said he collected items that caught his eye and made no effort to assure comprehensive coverage of the community’s 19th Century news. So with an eye towards both producing more “Yesteryear” materials and creating a searchable compilation of Oswego news items, I decided to keep adding onto what Ford had started.
Now, those 30 or so pages have expanded into, currently, more than 5,000 pages of Oswego-related news items from the Record, as well as from the Illinois Free Trader published in the 1840s at Ottawa; the Kendall County Courier, published in the 1850s here in Oswego; the Kendall County Free Press, also published in the 1850s, both here in Oswego and in Plano; the Oswego Ledger, starting in 1949. I’m currently working (sporadically, I admit) to add news from the 1970s and 1980s from the previously mentioned papers plus the Fox Valley Sentinel, published here in Oswego during the 1970s. It’s fun to browse the files, which we’ve posted on the Little White School Museum’s web site. You can download them here: https://littlewhiteschoolmuseum.org/learn/historic-oswego/oswego-news-columns/
Rank’s Record columns, by the way, account for more than half of the total.
Rank was born in Germany July 1, 1827. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1847 and first lived in Plainfield before moving to Plattville, where he stayed at Platt’s Tavern while he pursued his trade as a tailor. By 1850, he had arrived in Oswego, first boarding at the Kendall House hotel before moving to the stately National Hotel on Main Street. With the exception of several months in 1858-1859 spent in California, he stayed in Oswego the rest of his life.
He proved a keen observer of the social and political scene. Always interested in politics, when Abraham Lincoln debated Sen. Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa in 1858, Rank headed down to take in the event. He later recalled he was smoking a cigar when the crowd suddenly surged towards the speakers’ platform, forcing his lighted cigar into the bare neck of the man standing in front of him. Fortunately, he said, the press was so great the angry man couldn’t turn on him, and in any event was soon carried away by the river of humanity.
Rank’s political views favored the then-new Republican Party. And after Lincoln’s 1860 election as President, Rank got a real political plum. In November 1861 he was appointed postmaster of Oswego, replacing Democrat John W. Chapman.
For 13 years thereafter, Rank kept the post office in the stone building on the corner of Main and Jackson now occupied by the Prom Shoppe store (and where Chapman had kept it since November of 1855).
Then in 1874, Rank built a frame building with a square false front in mid-block on the east side of Main Street between Washington and Jackson, and moved the post office there, while he lived in a two-room apartment on the second story.
The lot on which Rank built his new post office had been the site of the stately National Hotel, where he’d lived after coming to Oswego. But the National, along with every other building on that side of Main Street between Washington and Jackson streets, had burned to the ground in February 1867. Only the National’s native limestone stable survived the conflagration.
Local businessmen immediately rebuilt a block of sturdy brick and limestone storefronts—named the Union Block—extending from Washington Street north to the alley at mid-block. But the old National lots remained empty until Rank put up his frame post office.
When John R. Marshall had begun the Kendall County Record in May 1864, his idea was to encourage local correspondents to report their neighborhood news. On Nov. 14, 1867, Rank published his first Oswego news column, becoming the Record’s very first community correspondent. He was to keep writing his weekly “letters,” as he referred to them, under the pseudonym U.R. Strooley, until he finally retired with his last regular column on May 27, 1908.
Rank’s columns were filled with news, gossip, and observations he made while living right in the middle of downtown Oswego. He reported on village government, the schools, and business happenings while encouraging Oswego to become a better community. That included weekly commentary on the services at all Oswego churches.
A confirmed amateur, he frequently mocked his own reporting skills. On Dec. 2, 1869, just a couple years into his reporting career, he noted: “I accidentally overheard a lady express her opinion concerning myself in connection with my last week’s report of the Literary Association; it was something like the following: ‘Whoever it is that reports for the Record from this town is very much out of place in his natural calling which doubtless is that of driving an oxen.’”
His lack of racism was notable for the time. During the post-Civil War era, an African-American farming community flourished southeast of Oswego, and in June 1903, Rank wrote with evident pride of the graduation of Ferdinand Smith from Oswego High School: “He holds the distinction of being the first colored graduate of a Kendall county school and the young fellow is popular with the whole class.”
He was also a strong proponent of women’s rights. When the Great Bloomer Controversy arose, with critics insisting women wear dresses while riding the era’s new-fangled bicycles, Rank observed on Aug. 7, 1895: “According to those newspaper fellows that are commenting on bloomers, it would appear that all what makes women pretty is their dress. Don’t mind those fellows.”
Rank, who never married, retired as Oswego’s postmaster in 1887, and devoted his time to his Record news column. He retired from the column itself in 1908, although he occasionally contributed political pieces to the Record until he died Aug. 15, 1910.
In his will, Rank left the old post office building to the Village of Oswego for, he hoped, use as a public library.
Of his old friend’s funeral, John R. Marshall, in the Aug. 17, 1910 Record, wrote: “The number at the church spoke emphatically of the respect in which this man, alone in the world, had been held by his fellow townsmen. He was a man to be copied after, an unsullied, moral, unselfish existence and one that will be missed in Oswego.”
Which is about as good a eulogy as any journalist could expect.
Rank’s building continued to house the post office after he death, until it moved in 1912 to the new Burkhart Building at the southeast corner of Main and Washington streets. As their Oswego correspondent explained in the Oct. 11, 1911 Kendall County Record: “The frame structure that has been used as a post office for so many years was willed to the village by the late Lorenzo Rank—a place he occupied for so many years of his life—but the village authorities do not feel warranted in going to the expense of having it placed in better order, and Postmaster Richards desires better quarters for the growing business of the office, and he will be well and conveniently housed in the new block.”
After the post office finally moved to the Burkhart Building in January 1912, and since Oswego had no library, the Rank Building was used for a variety of purposes by the village, including, after some modifications, as the temporarily shelter for the Oswego Fire Brigade’s fire hose cart.
But beginning in the late 1890s, Oswego’s Nineteenth Century Club began a community lending library in their club rooms above the brick storefronts in the Union Block on the east side of Main Street.
In 1929, the club concluded an agreement with the Village of Oswego to move their public/private lending library to the Rank Building in accord with Lorenzo Rank’s will.
As the Record reported in its “Oswego” news column on April 3, 1929: “The Nineteenth Century Club library has been moved from the club rooms, to the Rank building. A number of years ago this building was donated by Lawrence [sic] Rank, a former postmaster and public-spirited citizen for town purposes with a library suggested. The new quarters will be ideal for the use to which it is being put.”
The Nineteenth Century Club’s community library was open every Wednesday afternoon and evening, staffed by club member volunteers. The structure continued to be maintained by the Village of Oswego, which also retained ownership.
The Rank Building housed the community’s library until 1964 when the new Oswego Public Library was completed at the south end of Main Street. The new building was financed by donations and the proceeds from public events.
With the new library assured, the Oswego Village Board had already decided to sell Rank Building, seeking bids in the late fall of 1963. Three sealed bids were received for the building, which was sold to Oswego resident William Miller for $4,285. Miller agreed to make substantial improvements to the deteriorated building in lieu of demolishing it, including extending sewer and water service to it, rewiring it, and installing a new roof. Miller also subsequently added a rear wing to the building that housed modern office space.
Under Miller’s ownership, the building was home to a number of businesses, from a pet shop to a home decorating business, to an antique shop, the office of John M. Samuel Design and Drafting, and finally the offices of the Ledger-Sentinel, the community’s newspaper.
The building today continues to house commercial enterprises and stands out as an excellent example of how a vintage building can be maintained to continue to add to the character and the heritage of a community.
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