While there are lots of places on the Internet that it’s wise to avoid, there are many other sites that are well worth a visit. One of those sites that I’ve been having lots of fun with during the past several months is the “Oswego Then and Now” page on Facebook.
The site is a haven for those nostalgic for the Oswego that was, especially those who’ve moved away, as well as a fun and friendly place for current residents to reconnect with old friends, reminisce about the village’s past, and—even for us natives—learn new things about the area. It’s networking at its very best.
The east side of Main between Washington and Jackson streets in 1958 just as Oswego was beginning its first major growth spurt since the 1830s and changing from catering to the surrounding agricultural area to becoming an ever-expanding suburban community. (Little White School Museum collection)
A recurring theme for many posters is alarm and, often, dismay and even anger at the profound changes the community has undergone, especially during the past 60 years or so. Which is understandable, given Oswego’s population has multiplied 20 times during that period, irrevocably turning the community from the small farm town it was to the still-growing suburban community it is today.
For those of us who have continually lived in the community longer than that 50-year time period, however, the growth has definitely been surprising, but is only truly new in the shear amount of it recently.
Because Oswego, its surrounding township, and Kendall County itself actually began a radical change from its former overwhelmingly rural character to a fast-growing urbanizing area soon after World War II ended.
The era of rapid change developed due to a few factors, the first three of which, as real estate dealers always insist on putting it, were location, location, location. The city of Chicago is the engine that powers growth in northern Illinois, especially the extreme post-World War II urbanization that quickly spread to the six collar counties surrounding the city and its county of Cook.
Kendall County is the only non-Collar County that borders on three of the Collar Counties surrounding Chicago and Cook County. This made it a target for profound growth and change after World War II.
Kendall, you see, is the only non-collar county that borders three—Kane, DuPage, and Will—of those fast-growing areas.
Couple Kendall County’s location, location, location with the modernization of the region’s road system that began after World War I and the advent and perfection of economical, dependable motor vehicles from cars to buses to trucks, plus the technological agricultural advances that meant fewer farmers and less farmland were required to produce ever-increasing amounts of crops and livestock on less and less land, and you’ve created a recipe for profound change. And keep in mind that change doesn’t always lead to growth.
All it needed was a kick to get our small corner of Illinois’ growth started, and that was provided by the post-World War II economic boom of the 1950s. That was fueled by the largest governmental aid programs in history, known as the G.I. Bills. The young men and women returning home after the war were hungry to start their own families and buy their own homes. Also, many of them looked to further their educations in order to get ahead in increasingly corporate America. And the G.I. Bills funded both of those things, at least for most of those who had served.
The county’s population boom started here in northeastern Kendall County with the sprawling Boulder Hill Subdivision, a planned community fueled mainly by low-interest G.I. loans and supported by industrial expansion by giant manufacturing firms ranging from Caterpillar, Inc. to AT&T, not to mention long-established area firms from All-Steel to Equipto to Lyon Metal to Barber-Greene.
Model homes on Briarcliff Road in Boulder Hill in September 1958 appealed to those eligible for G.I. Loans, with no money down and low interest rates. (Photo by Bev Skaggs in the collections of the Little White School Museum)
That first tranche of growth from the mid-1950s through the 1970s created the first major change as the Oswego area saw itself change from dependent on providing agricultural support services to becoming a bedroom community, the vast majority of whose residents had no connection with farming at all. Instead, they commuted not just out of Oswego but also north and east out of Kendall County to staff the Fox Valley’s surging industrial base.
And that was about the time I got into the local journalism business, first as a historical columnist for the old Fox Valley Sentinel and then in 1980 becoming the editor of the Ledger-Sentinel after the Sentinel and Oswego Ledger merged.
In fact, the single biggest news story we covered for the next several decades after the Ledger-Sentinel was established was growth and the profound changes it wrought in Oswego and the rest of Kendall County and the Fox Valley.
My interest in how local history dovetailed with what was happening in the rest of North America and the world gave me, I think, a useful perspective on what was happening here in the Fox Valley.
Change, it was clear, was the most important governing historical factor and had been for centuries. The cultures of the region’s indigenous people had constantly undergone change since they had arrived as the last Ice Age ended. Their descendants, then, were forcibly displaced by the White descendants of European colonists who had arrived on the Atlantic coast in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.
In the Treaty of Chicago, signed in 1833, the indegenous people of northern Illinois signed away the rest of their rights to their lands. It would lead, in three years, to the tribes being forced to remove west of the Mississippi River to secure the region for White settlement. (“The Last Council of the Pottawatomies, 1833,” by Lawrence C. Earle, 1902)
Illinois’ inclusion in the new United States was partially confirmed as the result of the Revolutionary War, and was finally assured by the treaty ending the War of 1812. The various wars with the region’s indigenous people that finally ended in northern Illinois in 1832 resulted in their forcible expulsion to areas west of the Mississippi River. And that, in turn, opened the region to the flood of White settlement that forever changed the area’s very landscape.
The U.S. Civil War of the 1860s also had a profound effect on the Fox Valley. Even though fighting took place hundreds of miles away, nearly 10 percent of the county’s entire population served, and more than 200 died. The end of the war saw Kendall County’s population steadily decline during the next century due to a number of factors. Among those factors was the 1862 Homestead Act that used the lure of free land to persuade farmers to head west to try their luck on the trans-Mississippi shortgrass prairies.
Not until the next historical inflection point was reached after World War II did the character of the county and, especially, our corner of it begin to profoundly change once again.
Downtown Oswego immediately after World War II, where businesses primarily catered to the surrounding agricultural area was about to begin an era of change that is still taking place today. (Little White School Museum collection)
And so here we find ourselves looking back on what proved to be a period of extraordinary, sometimes chaotic social, economic, and population change as what so many of us remember as the unchanging halcyon days of our youth. Because Oswego’s always been a great place for kids to grow up; it’s still one of the safest towns in Illinois. And besides, when we were kids, our parents were the ones who did the worrying.
These days, Oswego’s Little White School Museum has become the main repository where as many pieces of the area’s history and heritage as possible are being collected, safely stored, and interpreted before they’re lost forever. The collection keeps growing as us volunteers frantically work to save as much Oswego history as we can before it’s either paved over or pitched into a Dumpster.
So with those aims in view, at noon this coming Saturday, May 4, the museum—located at 72 Polk Street in Oswego—will host another program dedicated to chronicling some of that disappearing history. As its title suggests, “Lost Oswego” will be look at the community landmarks that have been lost through the years, losses that in many cases are far from recent. In addition, the program will recount some of the community’s public and private preservation successes that are helping remind us of the Oswego area’s rich history and heritage.
The program’s sponsored by the museum and the Oswegoland Heritage Association. Admission will be $5, with proceeds going to benefit the museum’s operations. Reservations can be made by calling the Oswegoland Park District at 630-554-1010 or visiting the museum program page at bit.ly/LWSMPrograms—or you can walk in on Saturday and pay at the door.
Even before Oswego became an official village, the area along what is today the east side of Main Street between Washington and Jackson streets was the center of growing mercantile activity.
Oswego, situated at the southernmost lobe of The Big Woods that extended north to Batavia and east to Naperville was described as a town of “30 or 40 wood buildings” by U.S. Government surveyors in 1838. (U.S. Township Survey Plats, Illinois State Museum)
The timeline on Oswego’s earliest years is not entirely clear—the 1830s was a time of explosive growth in Oswego and the rest of Kendall County—but it seems Levi Arnold had already established his store in the middle of that block by the time he and Lewis B. Judson laid out the original village’s grid of streets and alleys in 1835. When the village was granted its post office in January 1837, Arnold became Oswego’s first postmaster with the post office located in his store.
The east side of Main drew a variety of retail businesses in the ground floor storefronts with offices and residences located above. In 1842, Samuel and Thomas Hopkins built the stately Greek Revival-style National Hotel across the alley on the north half of the block where Arnold’s store was located. When county voters agreed to move the county seat to Oswego from Yorkville in 1846, the first terms of the circuit court were held in the hotel until a new courthouse would be completed. The block’s stores and offices benefited from the business drawn by the county seat and it also continued to draw trade from a wide hinterland surrounding Oswego.
This poor quality photograph, probably taken about 1864, is the earliest image we have of the east side of Main between Washington and Jackson Street. It clearly shows the majestic National Hotel, along with the wood frame commercial buildings that made up the heart of downtown Oswego before the devastating fire of Feb. 9, 1867. (Little White School Museum collection)
On the eve of the Civil War, county voters decided that locating the county seat in its far northeast corner had been a mistake. In the days of travel by horsedrawn vehicles and on horseback, a more central location made sense. And in 1859, voters agreed to move the county seat back to centrally-located Yorkville. But when the Civil War broke out in 1861, construction on a new Yorkville courthouse were slowed. Not until June of 1864 was the new courthouse finished and the county records finally moved to their new—and permanent—home.
The loss of business due to the county seat’s move was an economic shock. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, in the late hours of February 9, 1867, an overheated stovepipe caused a devastating fire that destroyed everything on the east side of Main from Washington north to Jackson Street, with the exception of the National Hotel’s two limestone horse barns.
The Kendall County Record carried an detailed account of the disaster:
DESTRUCTIVE FIRE IN OSWEGO!
It is not often we are called upon to record the fact of an extensive conflagration in our county, but now have that duty to perform and no doubt the people of Kendall will feel grieved at the great loss, which has befallen one of their villages.
On Saturday night last, Feb. 9th, at 10.30 p.m., fire was discovered in Hawley’s grocery store, in Oswego, on the south side of Main Street. When the door of the store was first broken open, the smoke and heat in the room was so dense that it was impossible to enter and discover the cause of the fire. The supposed cause was that a very hot fire had been kept in the stove all day, the pipe if which ran very close to the wooden ceiling, and on leaving the store, the stove had been filled tip full with coal making the pipe so hot as to ignite the pine boards and thence fired the building.
This store was in the third building from the corner west.
The first building on the southern corner was occupied by a watch and clock repairer. Small one story house, loss about $900.
The next was Lockwood’s harness shop with Smith & Hawley’s law office upstairs; loss about $1,500.
The building that first took fire was owned by J.D. Kennedy, Esq., and valued at $1,000–no insurance. Hawley’s stock of groceries was not insured. Up stairs was occupied by W.L. Fowler, justice of the peace.
The next building was occupied as a meat market by Young and Snook, and upstairs by Mrs. Gates, a widow lady. She lost all her furniture and clothing and narrowly escaped suffocation in the smoke. She made her escape in her night dress. Her loss is indeed a heavy one. The building was owned by Mr. L.B. [Lewis Brinsmaid] Judson and worth about $600; not insured.
Mr. M.S. Richard’s hardware store and tin shop was in the next building. Stock and tools nearly all lost. He owned the building, which was insured for $600, and $400 insurance on the stock. Mr. R’s loss is serious, as he was doing a large business and a store of that kind is indispensable in a village.
The next building was owned by L.N. [Levi Newton] Hall, the druggist, and was occupied by himself and Mr. F. [Frederick] Sierp, a boot dealer below, and up stairs was Odd Fellows Hall. The building was insured in the Aurora Company for $1,000. Mr. Sierp was insured for $600 on his stock, but it will not begin to cover the loss, as he is thrown out of a flourishing business.
The Odd Fellows saved their regalia and the most of their furniture. Mr. Hall, the druggist, had his stock insured for $1,500 in the Peoria Company. He estimates his loss at $1,500 above insurance. A great deal of his stock was taken out of the store, but from its nature (so many glass jars) it was greatly damaged. He has now the store opposite, formerly unoccupied by M. Whitman, where he is fixing up for business again.
Mr. David Hall had about $500 worth of goods stored in this building, which were all lost. No insurances.
Next was the National Hotel, owned and managed by Moses F. Richards, Esq. The burning of this was a serious loss to Oswego, as a hotel is necessary, and this was a good one. The building was worth $2,000. The furniture was mostly saved. Building and contents insured in the Aurora Company for $3,500.
It was by great effort that the barns belonging to the hotel were saved. One had taken fire, but by hard work the fire was extinguished by the citizens–snow was the extinguisher used principally. Had these barns got into a blaze, the flames would have crossed the street and burned several dwellings. The dwellings on the north side of Main Street were in danger several times from the great heat created by the burning block.
The once busy street now presents a sorry sight. Ragged brick walls, charred and blackened ruins, battered stoves, cups, &c., are all that remain to mark the places where stood Oswego’s business block and Hotel.
This great accident is of course discouraging to the villagers at the present time, but they will take courage and place handsome substantial stores where the old and tried buildings stood.
From what we could learn of the parties burned out, the total loss is estimated at $12,000. Insured for $7,500–of which the Aurora Company has $6,500. But while estimating this loss it must be borne in mind that to replace new buildings of this capacity of those burned, will cost as much again.
The town[ship] and corporation records were also burned.
While the blaze was a serious economic blow, the community’s business leaders gathered and decided to rebuild as quickly as possible. Under the headline “To be Re-Built,” a short item in the May 2, 1867 Record reported: “The block of buildings that was burned down in Oswego last winter is to be replaced. The rubbish is being cleared away and soon phoenix-like, a new block will spring from the ashes. The new stores are to have brick fronts and stone side walls.”
As a nod both to the recent war to save the Union and the consortium the group of business owners formed to build the new block of stores, it was dubbed the Union Block and was designed in the then-popular Italianate architectural style. The buildings, which were to fill the lots between Washington Street north to the alley that divided the block in two, were to have brick storefronts with limestone side walls and substantial basements. The storefronts were to be embellished with decorative cast iron. Front store windows were limited in size only by the plate glass making technology of the day.
Later that year, Record Editor John R. Marshall decided to take day trip up to Oswego, reporting in the June 20 Record: “In Oswego today for the first time since the fire last February destroyed the main part of the town, I was surprised and pleased to see the improvements making. The large and substantial foundations of stone and brick now taking the place of the debris of the burnt district give promise that the enterprise of Oswego will be developed to such an extent that the trade of the rich country surrounding will be secured at home instead of seeking Aurora and other points. I do not see why Oswego cannot afford to supply the farmers with merchandise at as low rates as he can buy elsewhere. The promise of improvements now making is that Oswego intends to lead. Business is improving and all seem cheerful.”
The Union Block photographed about 1870 with the final touches of its decorative cornices completed and the storefronts all occupied with businesses. It would take a few years for the rest of the block north of the alley at the north end of the Union Block to become filled with buildings. (Little White School Museum collection)
By Nov. 7, the Record could report: “Oswego is alive and is doing the best she can. More has been done the last summer in building than has been done in the past ten years. Six fine brick and stone front buildings have been erected and are now nearly complete. The builders are Messrs. [Lewis B.] Judson, [James] Shepard, [John] Chapman, [Thomas] Greenfield, [Marcius J.] Richards, and [Levi N.] Hall. They will have the finest block in Kendall County.”
Merchants gradually moved into the new building as each of the storefronts was finished. On December 12, the Record reported: “We have at last a genuine Oswego advertisement and we earnestly request our readers in that vicinity to give the advertiser, Mr. L.N. Hall, a liberal patronage that his neighbors may see that it is good to advertise and do likewise. Mr. Hall has a splendid new store and is fitting it up at great expense; he’s an energetic young man and will fulfill his promises. Call and see him in the new block.”
This 1904 photo of the Funk & Schultz grocery store (Charles Schultz is standing in the doorway at right above) in the Union Block clearly shows the kind of decorative cast iron storefronts that once graced the block. They decorative fronts were gradually either completely removed or covered up to modernize the block’s storefronts. Sharp-eyed visitors, however, can still find some of the original cast iron elements in the block. (Little White School Museum collection)
The second floor halls over the main floor retail businesses were also slowly occupied. Hall’s drug store, located on the alley at the north end of the block of stores, reportedly the same spot Levi Arnold’s first store and post office in Oswego stood, welcomed one of the village’s most prominent fraternal organizations to the hall above the store. According to Record Correspondent Lorenzo Rank, reporting from Oswego in the Feb. 13, 1868 Record: “The Odd Fellows occupied their new hall over the drug store last Tuesday evening; they have as good a [club] room as can be found west of Chicago, all newly furnished.”
As 1868 wore on, businesses continued to move in and occupy storefronts in the new brick block. On May 7 the Record reported: “We would call the attention of our readers to the new advertisement of N. Goldsmith & Co., in another column. They have just opened a new clothing place in the new Union Block, Oswego.”
David M. Haight’s store at the northeast corner of Main and Washington streets in downtown Oswego. Haight went bankrupt due to the financial Panic of 1893 along with many other businesses include the village’s druggist and banker, Levi Hall. (Little White School Museum photo)
In the July 16 Record, Marshall decided to give Oswego another boost—while also probably hoping to gain a little more advertising from the village’s merchants: “Oswego has recently shown a commendable enterprise in erecting a fine large brick block. This block contains six large elegant stores. All of these but one are already in successful operation, their occupants are undoubtedly getting rich fast. As an evidence of what may be done we mention an instance. Mr. D. M. Haight came to Oswego in April and occupied one of the new stores. The first month he did a small trade. The second month his trade amounted to nearly $2,000. The third month, June, it was increased more than a thousand dollars. Mr. Haight is a gentleman and understands his business. He keeps a splendid assortment of goods and, is well repaid. One gentleman informed us that his trade, amounting to about $500 per year, formerly went to Aurora. Since the recent enterprise facilities have opened it has stopped there.”
David Haight opened his business in the corner storefront at Main and Washington, a location he would maintain until the financial Panic of 1893 drove both him and Levi Hall into bankruptcy.
The sturdy block of stores was not finally completed until June of 1870. On June 16, Rank wrote in his “Oswego” Record column that: “L.N. Hall and the Richards are finally putting a cornice on their store buildings. VanEvra is the architect.”
And with the addition of the decorative cornices to the Union Block, there it stood for several decades, with businesses coming and going, and uses varying for the halls located above the stores. During those decades, stores came and went, with technology causing some of the changes. Harness makers, for instance, gave way to the Klomhaus Chevrolet dealership.
Shuler’s Drug Store in Oswego as it looked to us in the early 1950s as the village’s squad of newspaper carriers prepare to head off on their afternoon delivery routes. Note the building’s decorative cornice is still intact. The stairway door to Shuler’s Toy Land up on the second floor is visible at right. (Little White School Museum photo)
In the 1950s, Alva Shuler, owner of Shuler’s Drug Store, located where Levi Hall opened his drug store nearly a century before, also opened a toy store each Christmas in the hall above the drug store—a Christmas tradition that had been started by Hall even before the disastrous 1867 fire. As the Oswego Ledger reported on Oct. 25, 1951: “Shuler’s Toy Land will be open by appointment only from now until Nov. 10. From the 10th of November until Christmas Eve, Shuler’s Toy Land will be open every day. You will find a fine selection of the newest and finest toys in Shuler’s complete Toy Land.”
Shuler’s Toy Land was an absolute Mecca for those of us youngsters living in Oswego during those years of the 1950s when we could walk downtown after school and climb the creaky stairs up to the second story hall filled with the most wonderful toys—the exact ones we’d seen advertised on the TV shows we all devoured.
By 1958, the Union Block’s decorative cornices had been removed due to safety concerns, but some of the decorative cast iron storefronts were still evident. (Homer Durand photo in the collections of the Little White School Museum)
In May 1954, the decorative cornices that the store owners had installed as elegant finishing touches for the Union Block’s storefronts in 1870 were removed. As the May 6, the Oswego Ledger reported: “John Carr reported that overhanging cornices of the buildings on the east side of Main Street owned by Andrew Carr, A.M. Shuler, Wayne Denney, Ronald Smith, and Ida Mighell would be removed by June 1. The cornices were recently inspected by members of the village board and building inspector Halbesma of Aurora, and found to be in need of removal.”
The Aurora Beacon-News sent a photographer down to Oswego in 1960 to document the changeover from flagstone to concrete raised sidewalks in front of the Union Block. (Little White School Museum collection)
In addition, the picturesque old flagstone sidewalks from Jackson to Washington Street in front of the Union Block were removed and replaced by modern concrete walks. The work was approved by the Oswego Village Board in March 1959, and by August the work was underway, with the Ledger reporting: “It is hoped that the shoppers of the area will be patient while the repairs are underway and take into consideration the fact that the improvement program is planned for their convenience and shopping comfort as well as to add to the looks of the downtown area. Remember, all places of business are open during the usual hours.”
Downtown businessmen, with a wary eye on the new shopping centers popping up throughout the Fox Valley decided in the spring of 1972 to try to tie the downtown’s architectural styles together by building mansard canopies over the sidewalks past the Union Block and by adding mansard-like accents to many of the other buildings downtown.
On Sept. 21, the Ledger reported The Oswego Business Association had announced the downtown facelift project was complete: “A wooden shake shingle mansard roof was extended over most of the older buildings, several of the buildings were sandblasted and tuckpointed. Decorative potted trees and garden areas have been added to those already in existence in the downtown area, as well as concrete benches for those who would like to sit and visit or rest while in the village shopping.”
As this 2012 photo illustrates, the Union Block has been shorn of most of its Italianate architectural accents, while having a 1970s-era mansard canopy built over the sidewalks along its front. Note the modern building at the north end of the block that replaced the two storefronts destroyed by the 1973 fire.Even with all the changes over its more than a century and a half of existence, the block is still considered the heart of the village’s downtown business district.
Then in April 1973, the Union Block suffered its most serious disaster when fire broke out in what was originally Levi Hall’s Drug Store. By 1973, the storefront was home to the Oswego Ledger and Combs Real Estate, while the next door storefront housed the Main Street Home Center, an appliance store. Both businesses were gutted, as were the apartments that by then occupied the second story spaces above the buildings.
Like their business predecessors in 1867, the owners of the storefronts, Don and Ann Krahn, determined to rebuild, adding a modern brick two-story building to the north end of the old Union Block. Designed with commercial rental space in the lower and ground level spaces, the building also included apartments above.
Today, the Union Block and its new cousin finished in 1974 are still the heart of downtown Oswego. In the years since the village’s founding in 1835, and despite the substantial changes the community’s experienced since then, the Union Block has mirrored the history of many similar mercantile areas in small towns all over the Midwest while doing so much to maintain the architectural and economic character of Oswego’s historic downtown business district.
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.
Ford Lippold…
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.
Lorenzo Rank was born in Germany in 1827. He died at St. Charles Hospital in Aurora in August 1910, and is buried in the Oswego Township Cemetery. Rank was the Oswego postmaster for several decades and was also the Kendall County Record’s Oswego correspondent from 1867 to 1909.
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.
This poor quality photograph is the only image we have of the east side of Main between Washington and Jackson Street we have, but it clearly shows the majestic National Hotel where Lorenzo Rank roomed, along with the wood frame commercial buildings that made up the heart of downtown Oswego before the devastating fire of Feb. 9, 1867.
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.
The Union Block, looking north along Main from Washington Street about 1870 with the buildings’ decorative cornices added. What appears to be the National Hotel’s old stable is visible at far left, the only building on the block to survive the February 1867 fire. (Little White School Museum collection)
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).
Downtown Oswego about 1878, two decades before utility poles and wires would mar the downtown streetscape. By the time this image was created, Lorenzo Rank had built his frame post office and residence on the north side of the alley dividing the block between Washington and Jackson streets. (Little White School Museum collection)
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.
Oswego Postmaster Lorenzo Rank built this frame building in the middle of the block on the east side of Main Street between Washington and Jackson streets in 1874. Rank lived in the apartment above the post office. The post office was removed from the building in January 1912 and installed in the Burkhart Building at the southeast corner of Main and Washington. Rank willed the building to the Village of Oswego for use as a library. (Little White School Museum collection)
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.
The Rank Building as it looked while housing the Nineteenth Century Club’s lending library from the 1920s through the mid 1960s. It was sold after the tax-supported Oswego Public Library opened in 1964. (Little White School Museum collection)
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.
The Burkhart Block at Washington and Main in downtown Oswego was finished in 1911. It housed the Burkhart & Shoger Studebaker dealership, the Oswego State Bank, the Oswego Post Office (the storefront to the right next to the Oswego State Bank), and the switchboard of the Chicago Telephone Company. This photo was taken about 1913 by Dwight Young. (Little White School Museum collection)
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.”
Interior of the Oswego Library about 1950. The library was located in the Rank Building at 68 Main Street, and was operated by volunteers from the 19th Century Club. (Little White School Museum collection)
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.
The Rank Building as it looked in more recent years in downtown Oswego…(Little White School Museum collection)
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.
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.
I was going through some of my files the other day and came across a 25 year-old issue of Illinois Issues (my wife says I’m a hoarder; I prefer “archivist”). Illinois Issues was a fine magazine that once covered the state’s government and politics, and this issue had an article about regionalism in Illinois and its origin that had caught my attention all those many years ago.
According to author Harold Henderson, who was then a staff writer for the (still alive and kicking online mag) Chicago Reader, three major regional groups settled Illinois.
The first group to arrive in the state were Upland Southerners, mostly Scotch-Irish who had originally settled in Virginia and the Carolinas. It was a pretty hard-bitten group of folks who started moving west right after the French and Indian War ended in 1765. They first settled Tennessee and then Kentucky before spreading north up into southern Illinois, creating the state’s first American migratory wave.
The Borderers were experienced in the kind of pioneering that required dense stands of timber. Their techniques worked well in southern Illinois’ forests, but weren’t a good fit for the prairies of central and northern Illinois.
Upland Southerners—also known as Borderers—were not an entirely friendly group, not even among themselves (witness the very real and extremely bloody Hatfield-McCoy feud). In the article, Henderson describes them as “clannish, emotional in religion, and poor in material goods.” One author has suggested their shear orneriness was due to their ancestors, coming from the more contentious areas of England and Scotland, were “a double-distilled selection of some of the most disorderly inhabitants of a deeply disordered land.”
Many of them were deeply anti-slavery (a prime reason many of them emigrated westward), but they were also extremely anti-Black, though apparently for mostly economic reasons during that early era. Their contradictions abounded. For instance, although reportedly a pious folk, they often disdained organized religion. They were also fearless and were in the vanguard of each of the areas west of the Appalachians that were settled.
As a people, Yankees were the near antithesis of the Borderers. They were careful planners, with none of the devil-may-care pioneer sentiment of the Borderers. And they always had reasons for doing whatever it was they were doing, much to the anger and confusion of the Borderers. A New England Congregationalist minister once heard two western women, both Borderers, discussing a Yankee preacher, one saying to the other: “I don’t like these Yankee preachers; they are always proving things, just like lawyers.” If that view sounds awfully familiar in this day of “My opinion is as valid as your facts,” it ought to because it’s pretty much identical.
A typical Erie Canal passenger packet boat of the 1850s. Packet canal and steamboats sailed on regular schedules. Regular cargo vessels of the era only sailed when they had full cargoes.
Religious zeal, in fact, was actually a Yankee characteristic. In fact, their reading of the Bible led them to be the abolitionists and the prohibitionists who believed in both passionately.
Besides the intricacies of religion, Yankees cared almost as passionately about education, something Borderers tended to look upon with a healthy dose of suspicion. Yankees, in turn, could not understand why anyone would disdain either religion or education.
The third wave of settlers were the Midlanders, largely from Pennsylvania and Ohio. Although those states were their most recent addresses, many Midland family groups had already emigrated once, usually from New York or the New England states, but also from some of the Southern states. A good local example was the extended Pearce family that originated in Maryland, moved west to settle in Ohio for a few decades, and then pushed on to finally settle here in northern Illinois’ Kendall County in 1833.
The Midlanders’ sojourns in western Pennsylvania and in Ohio reportedly changed their perspective a bit from their Yankee brethren and gave it a more western tinge. The Midlanders often tended to be the mechanics, the business owners, and the builders of pioneer Illinois that sometimes melded the qualities of both the Borderers and the Yankees.
Midlanders arrived in northern Illinois mostly overland by wagon, pulled either by teams of horses or yokes of oxen.
While industrious, they were not quite as passionate about their religion or their politics as the Yankees and were not as single-minded as the Borderers. Usually, they were content to be left alone to make a living, build their mills, lay out their towns, and tinker with machinery designed to make life easier.
Interestingly enough, members of all three groups contributed to Kendall County’s frontier history.
The Borderers were among some of the earliest settlers, but they were people who didn’t stay long. Instead, they often moved on to other areas to become the first settlers there as well. The Yankees arrived after the Black Hawk War of 1832, and set about settling farms and building towns.
That strong religious component of the Yankees found it’s greatest expression in what was called the “Burned Over” area of upper New York State. It wasn’t wildfires that literally burned the area around Oneida, but rather the fire of evangelism that spurred strong abolitionist sentiments. That, in turn, resulted in establishing the Oneida Institute of Science and Industry in 1827, centered around the Congregational Church. Oneida sent scouts west from New York State in the 1830s, with the intent of buying up entire townships at the government price of $1.25 per acre and then reselling the land to like-minded folks who arrived later. Profits were to be used by each colony to establish a college.
Here in Kendall County, Oneida scouts bought up land claims in what eventually became Lisbon Township in preparation for a colony of the New Yorkers. Other Illinois colonies were established at Princeton and Galesburg. No college was established here in Kendall County, but many of those pioneering families, especially Congregationalists, sent their young people to Knox College in Galesburg, which was established by Oneida Institute settlers, along with colleges at Oberlin, Ohio and Grinnell, Iowa.
The Lisbon Academy was built in 1844 by the Yankees from New York many of whom came west as part of the Oneida Institute’s colonization project. The building’s no longer standing.
Probably not incidentally, these strongly anti-slavery Oneida colonies also became active hubs for the Underground Railroad’s activities spiriting slaves north to Canada and freedom.
The Midlanders, on the other hand, arrived soon after—although sometimes even before—the Yankees and began farming, laying out towns and establishing mills and “manufactories.” They were far more receptive to the Yankees’ ideas about education, ,religion, and their related abolitionism than the Borderers, who were opposed to the Yankees’ ideas for all three and actively hostile to abolitionism.
The Borderers are well represented in Kendall County’s early history by men such as the R. W. Carns and J. S. Murray families, who brought two enslaved women with them from South Carolina; and the John Boyd and Matthew Throckmorton families from Kentucky. The Yankees from Vermont and New York settled in Lisbon, Seward, and NaAuSay Townships, while the Midlanders pretty much covered the entire county. Typical of the Midlanders were those Pearces from Ohio who became the first settlers of Oswego Township and who also helped settle Montgomery just up the river a few miles.
And all of that got me to thinking about an article I’d just read in this summer’s issue of National Parks magazine. “5,000 Schools: How Julius Rosenwald’s Revolutionary Project Changed America” recounts how a wealthy Chicagoan who was the head of Sears, Roebuck & Company worked with Booker T. Washington to build schools. During the brutal Jim Crow era when White terrorism against Black Americans was at its height, Rosenwald, working with matching funds from Black communities, built 5,000 schools to educate Southern Blacks throughout the old Confederacy. That a wealthy Chicago Jew partnered with the other people they hated so much, their Black neighbors, must have driven the Klan absolutely nuts.
A classic Rosenwald School and its student body, Pee Dee, South Carolina.
That the South refused to build schools for their own citizens was not only a shameful cultural artifact of slavery era laws when it was against the law to teach enslaved Black people to read and write, but also the cultural remains of that suspicion of education, learning, and planning exhibited by the Borderers who left the South and settled here in Illinois and other places west.
And that, in turn (you see how I am continually plagued by falling down research rabbit holes?) reminded me of Alfred Browne. Young Alf Browne, just 18, enlisted in Company H, 146th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment in September 1864. The 146th was a 100-day regiment raised to persuade the Confederate sympathizers in central and southern Illinois that physically interfering with the Union’s efforts to win the Civil War was a bad idea. Alf and his comrades were stationed in Quincy to keep the pro-Southern element—called Copperheads after the poisonous snake—in check.
As an interesting sidelight of his service, after President Abraham Lincoln was shot in April 1865, Browne was detailed to Springfield as part of the honor guard around Lincoln’s funeral car.
After the war was over, Browne headed east and attended Oberlin College in Ohio, which you’ll recall was one of those staunchly abolitionist institutions established by the Oneida Institute. During his college days, he served during one winter as principal of a Freedman’s school in Montgomery, Alabama under the auspices of the American Missionary Association. The schools were set up all over the former Confederacy, under the general umbrella of the federal Freedman’s Bureau to educate former slaves, who had, by law you’ll recall, been prohibited from learning to read and write.
After graduating in 1872, Browne spent a year helping freed slaves in Texas before the violence there against anyone helping formerly enslaved people forced him to return to Illinois, where he served as a principle in public schools in Sheridan, Lisbon, and in other area communities.
The Freedmen’s Bureau was established by Congress after the Civil War to introduce freed enslaved people into the nation’s democratic society. One of the bureau’s major initiatives was to establish schools to teach basic reading, writing, and math skills. Kendall County native Alfred Browne taught in Freedmen’s schools in Alabama and Texas. The schools became major targets of violent Whites after Congress stopped Reconstruction. (Stafford Museum & Cultural Center image)
The point being that while the South did, and if we’ve been paying attention to recent events down there, seems still to disdain strong, quality systems of public education. Although disdaining education they also apparently feared allowing Blacks to become educated. Or at least said they scorned it. It’s hard not to notice how the members of the Southern elite don’t hesitate to obtain their Harvard and Yale degrees while making sure others will never have the same opportunities they themselves have enjoy.
Taking all that into account and given the sharp differences between the three regional groups that settled Illinois starting more than two centuries ago, it is not surprising the state has had a tumultuous history. In fact, when you really stop to think about it, the state’s 205 years of existence really is a cause for, if not exactly euphoria, at least surprise and even some amazement.
We’re preparing to observe another Memorial Day holiday—an observation my mother insisted on calling Decoration Day despite it’s official title having been changed many decades before her death.
On that day, it was our family tradition to visit relatives’ graves and decorate them with flowers, something that gave my parents a chance to tell me about the family stories involved with the people lying in the cemeteries we visited. The stories always fascinated me. In fact, they’re what piqued my interest in history all those many years ago growing up in the rural America of the 1950s.
My great-great-great uncle, Michael Wolf, is one of the Civil War veterans buried here in the Oswego Township Cemetery. Severely wounded at the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, he died of complications due to his wounds in 1884. (Little White School Museum photo)
It was impossible to ignore, during those visits, the graves marked with small bronze plaques, each with a miniature American flag rippling in the breeze that denoted veterans’ graves, including some of the relatives whose graves we decorated. And as it turned out, the veterans whose graves drew my interest all those years ago were just the tip of the military service iceberg here in our small corner of northern Illinois. As I found out later in life as my interest in local history grew, veterans of every war in the nation’s history, starting with the Revolutionary War that created the nation, are buried on Kendall County soil.
From the resting place of Henry Misner in the Millington Cemetery—a Revolutionary War veteran of the Pennsylvania Line—to those who served in 1812, the Seminole Wars of the 1830s, and the Mexican War and who then marched off to the wars in places both near and far overseas, the service of these men and women is recalled by their tombstones and epitaphs.
That service began even before Kendall County was established in February 1841. In the spring of 1832, a band of around 1,200 men, women, and children of the Sauk and Fox tribes crossed into Illinois from the west bank of the Mississippi River with the intention of living with a Winnebago tribal group in northern Illinois. The problem was that the group of Sauk and Fox, led by the Sauk warrior Black Hawk, had previously agreed not to come back to Illinois. Their arrival created panic among American settlers, many of whom were squatting on land that still legally belonged to the two tribes. The situation also persuaded members of other tribes, disgruntled at the mostly illegal influx of White settlers across northern Illinois to retaliate against what they saw as injustices perpetrated against them.
The resulting conflict was called the Black Hawk War, named after the warrior who led his people back to Illinois from Iowa. Most all of the settlers in our own Fox River Valley left on learning about the rumor of war, fleeing either south to Ottawa or east to Chicago’s Fort Dearborn—whichever proved closer. Several of the settlers who had claimed land in what would become Kendall County—it had not been surveyed or put up for sale yet, so their presence was illegal—and who fled to Chicago volunteered for militia duty.
Among those early settlers volunteering to serve were Edmond Weed, George Hollenback, Edward Ament, Stephen Sweet, William Harris, Thomas Hollenback, and Anson Ament. Methodist missionaries Jesse Walker and Stephen Beggs of the Walker’s Grove settlement—now Plainfield—also volunteered. That unit only served for 14 days but after it dissolved many of the men in it volunteered to serve a longer hitch in another, more permanent unit.
The Black Hawk War was over by the summer of 1832 and was the last to be fought in Illinois. But other wars were to follow at regular intervals, each drawing either volunteers or draftees—or both—to fight for their country.
In 1846, for instance, President James K. Polk took the nation to war against Mexico. By that time, Kendall County had been established, the county seat had been moved to Oswego, and the era of settlement was coming to a close. Upon receipt of the news that war had been declared, a mass meeting was called at Oswego. A torchlight parade marched to the schoolhouse—then a one-room structure on Madison Street just south of Van Buren Street—where patriotic speeches were given and a number of local men agreed to volunteer.
Company D, 2nd Illinois Volunteer Infantry was recruited here in Kendall and Kane counties by Capt. A.R. Dodge, a prominent lawyer. According to early historian the Rev. E.W. Hicks, Kendall County men serving in the company included A. H. Kellogg, William Sprague. David W. Carpenter, John Sanders, John Roberts, George Roberts Aaron Fields, Edward Fields, James Lewis, Dr. Reuben Poindexter, William Joyce, Benjamin Van Doozer, and William Potter, along with a Mr. Tacker, Mr. Hunt, Mr. Hatch and Mr. Sheldon.
The 2nd Illinois and the 1st Illinois both fought in the fierce battle of Buena Vista that was a U.S. victory. They then served in garrison duty before being discharged in 1847 and sent home.
Kendall County men fought at the fierce Battle of Buena Vista during the Mexican American War.
The outbreak of the Civil War, when a confederation of Southern states attacked the U.S. Government in 1861, again saw a torchlight parade in Oswego, this time to the courthouse that hadn’t yet been completed in 1846. Again, patriotic speeches were given and men pledged to serve. But it wasn’t until 1862, when it became evident the war was not going to be a short one, that Kendall County men and boys began heading off to battle in earnest.
Eventually, nearly 1,500 county residents would serve, a huge percentage of the county’s total 1860 population of 13,000. The largest number of county residents served in the 20th, 36th, 89th, and 127th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiments and the 4th Illinois Volunteer Cavalry Regiment. Several eventual county residents also served in the U.S. Colored Troops after their service was authorized by President Lincoln. Kendall County’s only Medal of Honor winner, Robinson Barr Murphy, served as a drummer boy in the 127th Infantry, earning the medal when he was just 15. Several hundred of those who so confidently marched off to war never returned, most dying of rampant disease or the results of wounds. And many more returned only to deal with what a later generation would call post-traumatic stress disorder as well as the lingering effects of wounds or hard military service.
Kendall County men also served in the 1896 Spanish American War, including Philip Clauser of Oswego, but the conflict—described as “A splendid little war” by future president Theodore Roosevelt—was over too quickly to draw many into service.
Getting ready for the 1919 “Welcome Home” celebration for World War I veterans who marched through downtown Yorkville to a celebration dinner on the grounds of the Kendall County Courthouse. (Little White School Museum collection)
U.S. participation in World War I also drew a number of Kendall County men into service, and this time, women like Oswego’s Mary Cutter also served, especially as nurses and YMCA volunteers. A total of 487 soldiers served and three—Archie Lake, Oswego; Leon Burson, Plano; and Fred Thompson, Yorkville—were killed in action.
The U.S. entered World War II when the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941. The German government declared war on us a few days later. In that conflict, about the same number of county residents, both men and women, served in the nation’s armed forces as served during the Civil War, this time amounting to more than 10 percent of the county’s total 1940 population of 11,100. Of the total who served from Kendall County, 32 were killed in action.
My second cousin, Sgt. Frank Clauser, was killed in action during World War II, shot down over the Medeterrain Sea during a bombing raid against Italy. (Little White School Museum photo)
And this time, those who objected to service that might cause them to kill others also honorably served the nation in other capacities, from battlefield medics to volunteering for experimental subjects that pushed medical science forward—and received official government recognition for doing so in the Alternative Service Program.
The county’s participation in military service to the nation continued during the Cold War era as well as the terrorism wars in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as soldiers went off to fight in the snows of Korea and the jungles of Vietnam and then to the deserts of the Middle East where so much religious and political turmoil has roiled the entire globe.
Starting as the Civil War ended, it became a tradition for young girls to decorate the graves of that war’s dead with bouquets of flowers. As Oswegoan Lorenzo Rank explained in 1898: “The spirit that then moved the decorators was that of pity; a pity that these young lives should have been sacrificed; that kind of practice would have tended towards aversion to war.”
Gradually, however, Decoration Day became a commemoration of the dead in all the nation’s wars and was renamed “Memorial Day.” This year’s commemoration will be held throughout the nation on Monday, May 29.
In between the normal holiday activities, why not take a few moments to recall the service so many of our men and women have provided to the nation through the years?
Back in April, 2012, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield caused quite a splash when they announced the acquisition of a photograph of a black Civil War veteran from Illinois. It was of such great interest because identified photographs of any of Illinois’ black Civil War veterans are so vanishingly rare.
In fact, the formal portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Hughes of NaAuSay Township here in Kendall County acquired by the Lincoln Library is the only identified example we know of.
For local residents it was, of course, of great interest to know that such a historic photograph is an image of a Kendall County resident. For those of us who volunteer at Oswego’s Little White School Museum, though, it was of even more interesting since the museum has had an identical original print of the portrait in its collections for several years.
This 1893 portrait of Nathan and Jane (Lucas) Hughes is the only identified photo of a member is the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment known. Original prints of the photo are in the collections of the Little White School Museum, Oswego; and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield. (Little White School Museum collection)
And a fine portrait it is, too, taken by Sigmund Benesohn in his Yorkville studio. Neither the Lincoln Library’s nor the Little White School’s prints are dated, but we figured it was probably taken in 1893 to observe the Hughes’ 10th anniversary. Nathan and Jane Lucas Hughes were married in Kendall County on Oct. 17, 1883.
Benensohn bought Charles Sabin’s Yorkville photo studio in April 1893. As Kendall County Record Publisher John R. Marshall reported on May 17: “Our new Yorkville photographer, Mr. Benensohn, is doing very fine work. He is an expert in his line, having learned the best points of artistic photography in Europe.”
And thanks to the marvels of newspaper advertising, we know exactly when that exceedingly rare photo of Nathan Hughes and his wife was taken. On July 19, 1893, Marshall plugged Benesohn’s new business again, fortunately adding a critical detail: “Artist Benensohn is making some extra fine pictures of Fox river scenery with his new view camera—an instrument that cost nearly $150. His river and street views are wonderfully fine and make us more proud than ever of our picturesque village. Take a look at his show-case in front of the Hobbs block. His portraits of Comrade and Mrs. Nathan Hughes are true to the life, and shows how excellent is Benensohn’s work in every line of photography.”
The resulting portrait does indeed show Nathan Hughes sitting comfortably with Jane standing at his left, arm resting on his shoulder. Nathan is wearing a formal frock coat with a boutonniere and, most interestingly, a Grand Army of the Republic membership pin on his left lapel, thus Marshall’s “Comrade” formulation.
The GAR was the Civil War veterans’ organization, the American Legion and the VFW of its day rolled into one. Membership pins were bronze, symbolically cast from melted-down barrels of rebel cannons. In Kendall County, GAR posts were established at Plano and Yorkville. Hughes—as well as Marshall—was a member of the Yorkville post, where he sometimes served as an officer, a tribute to his war service. In fact, Hughes was the only Black GAR member in Kendall County.
He deserved the organization’s tribute because he really had to work to serve. The first time he fought for his own freedom was as a young man who had a wife and three children, all living as slaves in Scott County, Kentucky. Hughes managed to escape from his owner, though he had to leave his family behind as he made his way north. He eventually ended up in northern Illinois.
Unfortunately, no one interviewed Hughes during his lifetime, so we don’t know what his feelings were when the South attacked the U.S. Army’s Fort Sumpter starting the Civil War, but it’s likely he was eager to do his part. At that time, blacks were not allowed to serve in the military, other than as support personnel such as teamsters and cooks. But the times were gradually changing and with the positive examples of such all-black military units as the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the idea that black Americans could be good soldiers began to be accepted.
It was an idea partly driven by practical need as the war dragged on and the pool of eligible recruits dwindled. So it was almost inevitable when, on May 22, 1863, the War Department issued General Order 143, establishing the United States Colored Troops.
Illinois Gov. Richard Yates began recruiting a Black regiment—eventually designated the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment—late in 1863, but the early efforts were slow, due to factors including lower pay for black soldiers and the brutal treatment black prisoners of war received at the hands of the rebels. But gradually the regiment’s companies were filled out with volunteers from all over the state. It was formally mustered into U.S. service at Quincy on April 24, 1864. Eventually, some 1,400 Prairie State Black soldiers would serve against the South in the 29th and other units.
Hughes was among those enlisting in the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry, where he was assigned to the regiment’s Company B. At the time, Hughes was no youngster. His military records state he was 33 years old; family tradition, however, says he was born in 1824, which would have made him 40 at the time of his enlistment. It’s possible he shaved seven years off his age in order to assure the army would take him.
The Battle of the Crater at Petersburg, VA during the seige of Richmond near the end of the Civil War capped an attempt to breach rebel entrenchments. Thousands of U.S. casualties resulted, including Nathan Hughes.
After some brief training, the 29th traveled east by rail, where they marched down 14th Avenue in Washington, D.C. on their way to the front in Virginia. As it happened, the regiment marched right past President Abraham Lincoln who was also riding down 14th Street that day.
The 29th had an eventful war, participating in Grant’s (unsuccessful) attempt to trap Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia before it reached the fortifications around Richmond, then in the disastrous Battle of the Crater in the Richmond fortifications at Petersburg, Va., as well as battles at Boydton Plank Road and Hatcher’s Run. As Victor Hicken observed in Illinois and the Civil War: “This was hard soldiering.”
Hughes was badly wounded during the Battle of the Crater, shot in the left leg near his hip. He must have been a tough guy, because unlike so many of his wounded comrades, he recovered from both his wound and being treated in one of the military hospitals of the era. He was released from the hospital just in time to march and fight (and be wounded again, this time in the hand) with the 29th all the way to Appomattox Courthouse where he was on hand for Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865.
But there were areas of the country yet to liberate even after Lee’s surrender. On May 9, 1865, Gen. Gordon Granger was ordered to concentrate his XIII Corps at Mobile, Alabama and then sail along the Gulf Coast to secure the area for the Union. Granger was a familiar name to Kendall County residents since he’d commanded the 36th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment—along with many others—at the Battle of Missionary Ridge outside Chattanooga back in 1863. In fact, the 36th had been the first unit to plant its regimental flag atop the ridge. The 36th included four companies of Kendall County residents, Company D, the Lisbon Rifles; Company E, the Bristol Light Infantry; Company F, the Newark Rifles; and Company I, the Oswego Rifles.
By June 18, Granger had arrived at Galveston, Texas with Major General Joseph A. Mower’s division of the XIII Corps. Granger intended to make a point with the soldiers he brought. Units that reportedly went ashore with Granger at Galveston on June 18 were all comprised of Black soldiers and included the 28th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, recruited in Indiana; the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry, recruited in Illinois; and the 26th and the 31st U.S. Colored Infantry Regiments, both recruited in New York.
It’s interesting to contemplate what the residents of Galveston must have thought seeing those 2,000 smartly uniformed and well-armed Black soldiers disembark and march through their city, especially since it’s more than likely the only Black Americans most of them had ever seen had been slaves.
On June 19th—a day that would be celebrated by Black Americans for ever after as Juneteenth—Granger issued his General Order Number 3 and had it read at three locations throughout Galveston so there would be no confusion about the new situation in which Texas found itself. Granger’s order read:
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, becomes that between employer and hired labor. The Freedmen are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
And the thing is, there were a LOT of slaves in Texas in 1865. As Union armies had moved through the Confederate states east of the Mississippi, worried slaveowners had sent more and more of their enslaved people west to Texas. In 1861, there were 275,000 slaves in Texas. By 1865, there were 400,000.
So Nathan Hughes was not only on hand for the rebel army’s surrender at Appomattox, but was also on hand to witness the first Juneteenth that celebrates the final legal liberation of slaves in the United States.
After his regiment was mustered out of U.S. service, Hughes went to Kentucky and brought his three children north to Kendall County. His wife decided to stay in Kentucky, apparently unwilling to travel north to live in unfamiliar country in Illinois.
Hughes and his children settled on a small farm along Minkler Road south of Oswego. He outlived his first two wives, Mary Lightfoot and Analinda Odell before marrying Jane Lucas, became a respected member of the Minkler Road farming community, and lived to see his grandchildren become the first Black students to graduate from high school in Kendall County. As the Kendall County Record put it in Hughes’ 1910 obituary: “It is a pleasure to bear testimony to his worth as a man and a patriot; he was loyal to his country and in all his associations was a quiet, self-possessed man of the best of traits…A good citizen, he has left a vacant place in the ranks of the ‘boys in blue.’”
We often seem to think our own times are the most turbulent, and when it comes to social issues it’s fair to say that now is certainly more than a little unsettled.
But U.S. history is studded with eras when controversy over social issues has driven the nation’s political dialog. The 19th century was particularly unsettled, and in its first half, none other than the U.S. Post Office found itself embroiled in two of the hottest of hot button issues of the day: abolitionism and a growing religious evangelical movement.
The postal service didn’t seek out these issues, of course. Instead, the issues were thrust upon the service by social and political forces far outside its control. In the end, uneasy compromises were struck that left many far from satisfied.
These days, there are a lot of issues plaguing the postal service, many inflicted on it by Congress and even more of them by the current postmaster general, Louis DeJoy. While DeJoy is seeming to weaken the postal service in what appears to be an effort to boost privatization of mail deliveries, at least we don’t have to worry about postal officials opening and censoring our mail. At least as far as we know.
Not so back in the 1830s, when pro-slavery postal officials as well as private citizens were engaged in efforts to stop abolitionist tracts from being mailed to residents of southern states.
On July 29, 1835 a pro-slavery mob broke into the Charleston, SC post office, stole anti-slavery tracts from the mail and burned them the next night.
For instance, on the night of July 29, 1835, a small group of men broke into the Charleston, S.C. post office and stole a huge pile of anti-slavery tracts, a mass mailing sent by the American Anti-Slavery Society to persuade Southerners to renounce slavery. The next night, the tracts were burned.
It was the opening move in an increasingly bitter, and ultimately unsuccessful, campaign to make sure the idea of slavery would not see any opposing viewpoints in the South and so threaten the region’s dependence on slave labor. Actually, the mailing was probably the first use of junk mail, made possible by the combination of new, more efficient papermaking techniques and the perfection of the steam-powered printing press along with the era’s remarkably efficient postal service, efficiencies ironically created by Southerners.
It was already illegal in slave-owning states to circulate abolitionist literature, no matter what that pesky First Amendment to the Constitution said. The gang that stole those anti-slavery tracts in Charleston were convinced they were upholding state’s rights.
The Anti-Slavery Society had targeted its mass mailing carefully to the 200,000 most distinguished movers and shakers in the South, figuring—incorrectly as it turned out—that mail to important men would at least be delivered. What actually happened was that pro-slavery forces were energized even more than before.
Mail schedule: This notice listing the mail schedule for Oswego and other Fox Valley area communities was published in the Illinois Free Trader, an Ottawa newspaper, in 1840—a full 21 years before the start of the Civil War. (Courtesy of the Little White School Museum)
And it didn’t take long after that for Southern postmasters to simply start interdicting the mail on their own, with no gang of thieves necessary to encourage the process, and with the full cooperation and assistance of the Post Office Department itself. Abolitionist tracts, newspapers, and magazines were simply turned over to local officials for destruction, with First Amendment rights considered inferior to the right of whites to own black slaves and not be criticized for it.
The issue’s importance to the South did not wane as years passed either. In 1849, George H. Legg, the postmaster in Spartanburg, S.C., was jailed by local officials for his refusal to turn over a letter for inspection by local pro-slavery groups.
The resulting abridgment of First Amendment rights that prohibited mailing anti-slavery literature to the South was only lifted following the Civil War after the issue of slavery itself was settled by force of arms.
The case of the Sabbatarians was also a national issue on which the post office found itself on the wrong side thanks to its insistence on delivering the mail as quickly and efficiently as possible to everyone everywhere in the nation.
In order to make sure the mails reached post offices as quickly as possible in those days of mail carried in horsedrawn stagecoaches, the system operated seven days a week. The arrival of the stagecoach carrying the mail was a major social and economic event, especially for those living in the small towns like the ones that were springing up here in northern Illinois on what was then the western frontier.
A Stanley M. Arthurs (1877-1950) painting of an 1830s stagecoach arriving in a village, with the driver blowing his tin horn to announce the arrival. Illustration from Scribner’s Magazine, November 1908.
When the coaches neared a settlement with a post office, the drivers blew their long tin or sheet iron horns to herald the mail’s arrival. The sound of the horn was the signal for anyone who could to get to the post office to see if any letters for them had arrived, and to listen to others read aloud the latest political and social news from the newspapers and magazines the coaches carried.
Mary Simmerson Cunningham Logan, wife of famed Civil War General John A. Logan, recalled the thrill of hearing the stage driver’s horn when she was a young girl living in southern Illinois in the 1840s. Her father had enlisted to fight in the war with Mexico and the family was starved for news.
“I can to this day in imagination hear the sound of the long horn the stage-driver used to blow as he entered our town at the midnight hour twice a week,” she wrote in her memoirs. “I was then but twelve years of age, and yet at the first sound of the horn, in moonlight or darkness, I would rush out and never stop running till I reached the post-office.”
1830s sheet iron stage driver’s horn in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. 65-3/8” long.
On most days, this rush to the post office—which in the 1830s and 1840s was often located in a community’s general store or local inn—was eagerly looked forward to by all residents. However, when the coach arrived on a Sunday, ministers saw the male halves of their congregations evaporate at the sound of the coach driver’s horn as they hurried down to the post office to hear the latest news.
The discontent caused for the more religious members of communities by the disruptions created by the Sunday arrival of the mails resulted in the Sabbatarian movement, which aimed at halting Sunday mail delivery.
In April 1810, Congress had decreed that postmasters were required to deliver every item they’d received in the mail on every day of the week, including Sunday—the Sabbath—and to open their offices every day the mail arrived. Including Sunday.
The opposition to the new law grew swiftly and the loosely organized opposition’s members became known as Sabbatarians.
Not only did the Sabbatarians want the mandate to open post offices every day of the week eliminated, but they also opposed the mails even moving on Sundays. And that threatened to have an economic impact on not only the businesses that relied on frequent, fast mail deliveries, but also the private contractors who carried the mails via stagecoaches and wagons.
The arrival of the mail stage in town instantly drew crowds to the post office—no matter what day of the week it was—to hear the latest state, regional, and national news it carried.
The Sabbatarian campaign grew for the next 20 years, with petition after petition (many at the instigation of the Presbyterian General Assembly) being dispatched to the post office department demanding cessation of Sunday delivery.
But by the late 1820s, the anti-Sabbatarian movement, one of whose leaders was a Wall Street merchant with the marvelous name of Preserved Fish, had begun to grow as well. Fish and his allies organized their own petition drives, even helped by some religious groups, such as the Alabama Baptist Association, that treated Saturday as the Sabbath.
Also joining the fray was travel book author Anne Royall, whose books hinted darkly at a conspiracy by Sabbatarian Presbyterian postmasters to destroy the separation of church and state.
Finally in 1841 the Sabbatarians were able to get the post office to curtail Sunday service on some routes. The invention of the telegraph also helped the Sabbatarian cause as merchants soon found electronic communication of vital economic news faster, though more expensive, than the mails.
Amazingly enough, it wasn’t until 1912—a little over a century after the Sabbatarians’ campaign started—that the post office finally agreed to halt mail delivery and order the closure of all post offices on Sunday.
Today, the postal service is still struggling to survive, although it no longer has to worry about the combined assaults of pro-slavery forces and the Sabbatarians. Which, I suppose, might be mistaken for progress by some. The main threat to the postal service today is its own top management and Congressional privatizers, who all seem determined to sabotage efficient mail delivery in an apparent effort to entice private companies to take over delivering the mail.
It’s not often that a Kendall County resident is present during a momentous historical event, but that was the case when the first Juneteenth took place at Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865. When he issued his General Order Number 3, Union Major General Gordon Granger formally—and forcefully—notified the State of Texas that slavery was irrevocably eliminated.
And last week, President Joe Biden signed legislation making Juneteenth the United States’ newest national holiday as a symbolic celebration of the end of slavery throughout the nation.
Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger
From the time of its settlement as a part of Mexico that welcomed U.S. colonists, Texas had enthusiastically embraced slavery. Mexico’s abolition of slavery in 1829 was, in fact, one cause of Texas’ 1836 war of independence. The Mexican government had encouraged Stephen A. Austin to recruit settlers for Texas. He mostly recruited in the southern U.S., encouraging slave owners to emigrate by allowing them to purchase an extra 50 acres of land for every slave they brought with them. Both before and after it was admitted to the Union in 1845, East Texas and the state’s Gulf Coast became major cotton growing regions relying extensively on slavery.
So when the Southern states seceded, Texas went right along with them, citing Northern efforts to end slavery as the main reason they were leaving the Union. In their Declaration of Causes approved by the Texas legislature on Feb. 2, 1861, the state’s leaders contended:
“We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
“That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States.”
Legally, slavery had been abolished by President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued in 1862 immediately after the bloody Union victory at Antietam. Lincoln’s executive order did not free all the nation’s slaves. Instead, it was aimed at the South as an economic weapon and therefore freed the slaves only in areas of the Confederate states not under the control of the Union Army. And that meant Texas. But the state’s slave owners, like those in the rest of the Confederacy, paid no attention to Lincoln’s proclamation.
On May 9, Gen. Granger was ordered to concentrate his XIII Corps at Mobile, Alabama and then move to the Gulf Coast to secure the area for the Union. Granger was a familiar name to Kendall County residents since he’d commanded the 36th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment—along with many others—at the Battle of Missionary Ridge outside Chattanooga back in 1863. In fact, the 36th had been the first unit to plant its regimental flag atop the ridge. The 36th included four companies of Kendall County residents, Company D, the Lisbon Rifles; Company E, the Bristol Light Infantry; Company F, the Newark Rifles; and Company I, the Oswego Rifles.
Gen. Joseph A. Mower
By June 18, Granger had arrived at Galveston with Major General Joseph A. Mower’s division of the XIII Corps. Units that reportedly came ashore with Granger at Galveston on June 18 included the 28th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, recruited in Indiana; the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry, recruited in Illinois; and the 26th and the 31st U.S. Colored Infantry Regiments, both recruited in New York.
Serving in Company B of the 29th was Nathan Hughes, who had escaped from slavery in Kentucky before the war, fled north into Illinois and briefly lived in Kendall County before he enlisted to fight for his own freedom. By the time the 29th came ashore at Galveston, Hughes had been wounded twice—once at the Battle of the Crater—and was a seasoned veteran.
It’s interesting to contemplate what the residents of Galveston must have thought seeing 2,000 smartly uniformed and well-armed Black soldiers disembark and march through their town. Especially since it’s more than likely the only Black Americans most of them had ever seen had been slaves.
On April 19th, Granger issued his General Order Number 3 and had it read at three locations throughout Galveston so there would be no confusion about the new situation in which Texas found itself. According to Granger’s order:
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, becomes that between employer and hired labor. The Freedmen are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
And the thing is, there were a LOT of slaves in Texas in 1865. As Union armies had moved through the Confederate states east of the Mississippi, worried slaveowners had sent more and more of their enslaved people west to Texas. In 1861, there were 275,000 slaves in Texas. By 1865, there were 400,000.
Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Hughes, photographed in July 1893 on the occasion of their 10th wedding anniversary. Hughes, a witness to the first Juneteenth in 1865, is proudly wearing his Grand Army of the Republic medal. He was the only Black member of the Kendall County G.A.R. (Little White School Museum collection)
In addition, Texans tended to believe that while perhaps slaves had been freed elsewhere, certainly their enslaved people wouldn’t be freed. As William Lee Richter wrote in The Army In Texas during Reconstruction, 1865-1870. “Planters vainly hoped that they would be compensated for the loss of their slaves or that the Supreme Court or the election of 1866 would overturn the Republicans’ majority in Congress. In addition, there was a cotton crop to bring in that fall. For these reasons, the planters forced their ex-bondsmen to stay on the plantation as slaves in fact, if not in name. To achieve this end, the farmers liberally employed whipping and murder.”
Southerners began resisting extending basic rights, including the right to vote and to peacefully assemble, as soon as the war ended. The U.S. Army and the newly formed Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands worked hard to combat the racist violence with which the South responded to its defeat at the end of the Civil War, but those efforts proved ineffective. The violence grew to such an extent that during the Presidential election campaign of 1868, John R. Marshall, publisher of the Kendall County Record in Yorkville—himself a veteran of the Civil War who served in the Sturges Rifles—was far from alone when he wondered whether the war had ended two years too soon:
“Did not the war end too soon? Is the cursed spirit of rebellion crushed? Are we to be threatened with the bayonet at every Presidential election? If the Democrats are defeated in November they threaten the bayonet. If they are successful, they will overthrow the acts of Congress passed during and since the war. Slavery or serfdom will be re-established and the country will be placed back to where it was in the days of Pierce and Buchanan. Then the five years’ war will have been a failure and this progressive people will have once more to contend with the devils of treason and slavery.”
That, however, was in the future, a bleak future at that, in which it would take nearly a century from the time Gen. Granger issued General Order Number 3 until acts enshrining civil and voting rights in U.S. law. From the time Granger impressed upon Texans that slavery was over once and for all, Black Americans began quietly observing June 19 as their own private day of independence from being enslaved and finally gaining their freedom.
After showing the U.S. Flag in Galveston, the 29th marched to the Rio Grande River where it was part of the Army of Observation tasked with reminding Maximilian and his French supporters that the United States was not pleased with their intervention in Mexico. The 29th was mustered out of U.S. service on Nov. 6, and its troops left for their homes.
Nathan Hughes came back to Kendall County and settled on a small farm on Minkler Road, went down to Kentucky and found his children, and brought them back to Illinois. His wife, however, decided to stay in familiar Kentucky and not move north. He eventually remarried. His grandchildren became the first black high school graduates in Kendall County, and THEIR grandchildren and great-grandchildren became teachers and professors, and lawyers and other professionals.
The family, now scattered across the nation, continues to pay forward the momentous results of that first Juneteenth Nathan Hughes had been part of in 1865.
The patriarchs of the extended Hemm, Burkhart, and Shoger families that settled in Oswego Township pose for a family picture in the early years of the 20th Century. German represented a large percentage of immigrants to Kendall County in the mid-19th Century. (Little White School Museum collection)
In the history of Kendall County written in 1914, one of the writers spoke with pride about the breadth of the county’s ethnic heritage.From the perspective and mindset of someone writing in 1914, the county’s ethnic make-up probably did seem pretty broad. He mentioned, in particular, those of English, Scottish, German, and Welsh descent, plus some Irish and Scandinavians as well as those who could trace their families back to the French Canadians frontiersmen who once lived here and other areas throughout northern Illinois.
To modern sensibilities, though, that doesn’t sound like much of an ethnic mix at all.
Ku Klux Klan in its modern, second incarnation wasn’t strong yet—it would be another year before it would be officially reconstituted by William J. Simmons in 1915 atop Georgia’s Stone Mountain and begin sowing hatred of anyone who wasn’t an Anglo-Saxon protestant. In addition, the Red Scares of the years after World War I had yet to get their start, fueled to a fair extent by the Klan’s racial and religious bigotry.
Bigotry towards ethnic groups, in fact, was common and growing, especially as the county’s white European, Canadian, and other settlers began enjoying their second, and sometimes third, generations in the U.S.
Two other ethnic groups—African Americans and Hispanics—weren’t even mentioned in that 1914 county history. During that era, there weren’t many of either group in Kendall County—but there were some—and those who were here kept a low profile, as did others across the nation.
But despite their lack of recognition, Kendall County did have an African American population in 1914, and, in fact, had had one since the early 1830s.
The first Blacks who emigrated to Kendall County had no say in whether they wanted come or not. In the summer of 1833, a group of three families emigrated to Kendall County from Camden, S.C. and settled on the north side of Hollenback’s Grove in today’s Big Grove Township. When they left North Carolina, the families of R.W. Carns, J.S. Murray, and E. Dyal decided to take two ‘former’ slaves with them. The Rev. E.W. Hicks, in his 1877 history of Kendall County, notes that the Carns family brought a Black woman named Dinah, and the Murray family brought a woman named Silvie with them from South Carolina.
Noted Hicks, “They were the first colored people in the county and both died here.”
Whether, as Hicks reports, they were former slaves is debatable, even doubtful. It’s also extremely unlikely they had any choice about whether to become pioneers on the Illinois frontier.
Kendall County’s first courthouse, where the county’s first and only slave auction was held, was this frame building. This photo was probably taken in 1894 shortly before it was torn down to make way for a private residence. The 1864 courthouse cupola is visible to the left rear. (Little White School Museum collection)
Blacks were rare enough to create interest—and sometimes consternation among some—in the years leading up to the Civil War. By that time, Illinois had passed some of the strictest anti-Black laws—called the Black Codes—of any state in the union. In 1844, another former Carolinian, M.O. Throckmorton and his father-in-law, William Boyd, seized an African American who was riding on a sleigh-load of dressed pork being hauled to Chicago by a resident of Bureau County named McLaughlin. Insisting the fellow was an escaped slave, Throckmorton and Boyd hauled the Black man to Yorkville where he was turned over to Sheriff James. S. Cornell. Cornell, without much choice in the matter due to existing state and federal law, reluctantly put the unfortunate Black man up for sale at auction at the courthouse in Yorkville. But no bids were forthcoming, probably because most of the crowd were grim-faced members of the Kendall County Anti-Slavery Society. Eventually, one of the society members made the winning bid of $1, and the former prisoner was sent on his way to Chicago, and presumably on to Canada and freedom.
From the 1830s to the 1860s, a tiny number of Blacks made Kendall County their home. But in the years after the Civil War, a substantial influx of African American farmers arrived from the former Southern slave states and settled in the county, mostly in an area a few miles south of Oswego.
One of the Black men who arrived in the county after the war was Anthony “Tony” Burnett, who had been liberated by the 4th Illinois Cavalry during the war. Burnett joined the regiment’s Company C as a cook and later returned to Oswego with Lt. Robert Jolly where he enjoyed a close relationship with the family. Burnett is buried in the Jolly family plot at the Oswego Township Cemetery with a U.S. Government-issued tombstone that reads, “Cook, 4th Illinois Cavalry, Co. C.”
Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Hughes posed for this formal portrait by Yorkville photographer Sigmund Benensohn on the occasion of their wedding (anniversary in July 1893 (Little White School Museum collection)
Nathan Hughes, a veteran of the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, which had been recruited in Illinois, and Robert Ridley Smith, who served in the 66th U.S. Colored Infantry, both moved to the Oswego area after the war. Hughes worked a small farm south of Oswego on Minkler Road. He also joined the Yorkville Post of the Grand Army of the Republic, the only Black county resident to do so, and where he served in various offices.
A number of other Black farming families also settled in the Minkler Road area where they worked small acreages. Their children were educated in the same one-room country school their White neighbors attended, without comment, suggesting the Jim Crow bigotry that was raging in the South had yet to reach this far north. Not that it wasn’t on the way.
By the 1920s, there were formal Klan organizations in Kendall County and the surrounding area. On June 7, 1922, the Kendall CountyRecord reported: “The Ku Klux Klan initiated 2,000 candidates near Plainfield Saturday night. It is said some 25,000 members from Chicago and adjoining cities were present. The KKK is making a big stir in politics.”
Students at the one-room Grove School south of Oswego in December 1894. The Black children in the front row are all members of the Lucas family that farmed in the Minkler-Grove Road area. (Little White School Museum collection)
In February 1923, the Record noted that a 75-member Klan organization had been established in Sandwich, and then on June 4, 1924 reported from Yorkville that “Members of the Ku Klux Klan from Aurora, Elgin, and Joliet staged a big picnic and demonstration at the big woods east of town Friday. It was a perfect day for the outing and several thousand visitors took advantage of the day to visit Yorkville, the beauty spot of the Fox, and take part in the events of the organization.”
But that was all in the future. In the late years of the 19th Century and the first decade of the 20th, Black families were considered part of the community. Robert Ridley Smith raised his family in Oswego, and they became well-known and respected members of the town. Smith was for many years the janitor at Oswego’s large school building, and, a combat veteran of the Civil War, he didn’t seem at all shy of occasionally reminding area residents that Black Americans had a history worth acknowledging.
Robert Ridley Smith was the long-time janitor at Oswego’s community school in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His children all graduated from the school, the first Black high school graduates in Kendall County.
For instance, in the Record’s April 17, 1907 edition, the paper’s Oswego correspondent reported: “Bob Smith, the colored janitor of the schoolhouse, had some grave humor out of the school Monday. He raised the flag on the schoolhouse at half mast; all wanted to know what it meant, but he told them they must guess it. Finally the principal came along and he too wanted to know what Bob meant by it, and then Bob replied that the day was the anniversary of the death of Lincoln and that it was appropriate for a negro to show his mournfulness.”
Smith’s son, Ferdinand, was a racial pioneer. The June 17, 1903 Record reported: “Ferdinand Smith holds the distinction of being the first black person to be graduated from High School in Kendall County. He was one of the graduates of the [Oswego High School] Class of fifteen who graduated on June 1, 1903.” Smith’s graduation address was titled “Power to Meet Our Wants.”
The next year, the Record reported Ferdinand’s sister Mary’s graduation, and in 1906 noted their sister Frances was among the graduates: “To Miss [Frances] Smith fell the task [of representing the community’s African Americans] on this occasion and she did the duty assigned her in a dignified and ladylike manner, showing no symptoms of embarrassment whatever. Her paper was on ‘Afro-American Progress.’”
Robert Smith, sone of Robert Ridley Smith, played varsity baseball for Oswego High School in the first quarter of the 20th Century. His older brothers and sisters were the first Black students to graduate from high school in Kendall County.(Little White School Museum collection)
The Smith family was athletically inclined as well. A photo of the 1907 Oswego High School baseball team shows yet another Smith sibling, Robert, standing proudly with the rest of the team, fielder’s glove in hand.
The picture is startling for the casual refusal of Oswego’s public high school to participate in a shameful era of U.S. sports history. At the time Robert was happily playing high school ball in Oswego against other area schools, his fellow African-Americans were banned from playing in the Major Leagues.
Today, Kendall County is more ethnically diverse than at any time in its history, with people from all over the world living, working, shopping, and sending their kids to school here. But it is worthwhile to understand, especially during Black History Month, that it is the extent, not the diversity itself, that is new.
The saga of Roger Matile attempting to track down local history, one blog post at a time, while avoiding the French. Although they do make good fries and toast.
historyonthefox 