Before the colors fade: How we created a local history museum from scratch

I admit I’m often a bit slow on uptake so I didn’t really occur to me until a couple weeks ago that this year will mark the 30th anniversary of the start of efforts to catalog and safely and properly store the mass of artifacts, photographs and negatives, and archival documents we’d collected at what had become Oswego’s Little White School Museum.

So after the thought occurred, it also occurred to me it might be valuable for others to learn the story of how today’s museum collections came to be created and managed. Before the colors fade, here’s a brief rundown of what took place all those years ago that resulted in the museum the community has today.

Photo of Little White School taken by Daryl Gaar in July 1970 in preparation for a real estate appraisal report for the Oswego School District. It looked even worse by the time restoration work began in 1977. (Little White School Museum collection)

The project to save the historic building and create a local history museum in it had begun in 1976 when a grassroots group of local residents established the Oswegoland Heritage Association (OHA) to oversee the project and raise funds to finance it. In a way, it was sort of reminiscent of one of those old Mickey Rooney–Judy Garland movies where they say “Let’s put on a show!” to raise money for some project or another. But this project turned out to be a lot more complicated, with many more moving parts, than one of those old movies let on.

The first thing that had to be done was to stabilize the badly deteriorated building, which required deciding what kind of project we were going to do, restoration or renovation. The OHA Board decided to restore the exterior of the main structure, built in 1850, to its looks in the earliest image we had of it, which dated to 1901. At the same time, it was also decided to renovate the badly deteriorated Jackson Street entrance hall and classroom addition, which had been added in 1936, to accommodate visitors and create a community museum room.

After exterior restoration was completed, the Little White School Museum became a valued community landmark. (Little White School Museum photo by Stephanie Just)

So, right off the bat, the OHA was working on a two-track project.

Also, as soon as the community learned the building was undergoing restoration and renovation, they began dropping off Oswego-related historical artifacts, photos and negatives, and documents. With two complicated projects already underway, those items were simply warehoused in the building’s basement to await figuring out what to do with them sometime in the future.

As it turned out, the exterior restoration and the renovation of the entrance hall and the museum room were completed by Oswego’s sesquicentennial celebration in 1983, thanks to local contractor Stan Young. He’d attended the Little White School as a youngster and figured out ways to achieve everything from restoring the building’s wooden front porch to recreating its missing bell tower.

The museum room—soon to be renamed the museum gallery—was filled with Oswego history exhibits created by OHA Board members and volunteers. It opened to the public in April of 1983.

In the meantime, the OHA Board was discussing what ought to be done with the building’s main room, renovate the two existing classrooms, front entrance vestibule and basement stairways, or remove the drop ceiling and interior walls and stairwells that had been added since 1930 and return the room to its original open 36×50 foot appearance during its original use as a Methodist-Episcopal Church and, starting in 1915, as a one-room school for grades 1-3. After much discussion, the board decided on the restoration option for the main room, taking its look back to  the era of  transition, 1913-1915, when its use changed from church to school. My friend from high school, Glenn Young, was persuaded to oversee the project, something he’d be closely involved with for the next 19 years.

Restoration work, consisting of removing all the interior walls and the drop ceiling began in the fall of 1983. Fortunately for us, Caterpillar, Inc. was undergoing one of its periodic strikes and my high school classmate Jim Williams, and cousin-by-marriage Omer Horton were both free to volunteer partial days on the project, getting it done much faster than we’d expected. It was about that time the park district retained Oswegoan Mark Campbell and Don Drum to help with the project every Saturday.

In 1994, the basement of the Little White School Museum was an unorganized jumble of items–including priceless artifacts and documents–that had been dropped off during the previous nearly two decades. The first task was to create some sort of order out of the existing chaos. (Little White School Museum collection)

But by the fall of 1993, a decade later, the interior restoration project was far enough along that the board decided to finally get serious about organizing, cataloging, and properly storing all those historical photos, documents, and artifacts that continued to arrive. But, again, it proved more easily said than done.

Keith Coryell works on shelving 3-dimensional artifacts in 1995 following the initial macrosort of the Little White School Museum’s collections. (Little White School Museum collections)

The basement storage area was an unorganized jumble of priceless items that were in danger of damage, and there was no museum office where files could be created and kept. So, the first item of business was to clean out a corner of the basement to create suitable office space. That required coordination with the restoration project as the two efforts were going on at the same time. It took a while, too, because volunteers only worked Saturday mornings and park district-financed construction people only worked Saturdays as well.

A bit earlier in time one of the old farmhouses on Douglas Road in Oswego was being demolished to make way for new development. We were given permission to salvage the kitchen cabinets and doors and doorframes from the building, which were used in the new office. Some used countertops were also located that fit the cabinets just fine. A couple used file cabinets and desks finished out the furnishings.

Stephenie “Stevie” Todd works on the macrosort of the Little White School Museum’s collections in late 1994. (Little White School Museum collection)

Also about the time we were ready to start the organizing and cataloging project, we were lucky enough to gain the services Stephanie “Stevie” Todd, of one of the best historical researchers in the Fox Valley. She was able to procure the volunteer services of Keith Coryell, an actual museum professional who was (fortunately for us) between jobs at the time and willing to help us get started with our project.

We figured early on it was vitally important to get off to a good start. We’d heard horror stories of museums where they’d had to change their systems of cataloging items for one reason or another, sometimes losing track of huge portions of their collections. Because the most important trick with museums isn’t cataloging and properly storing items, it’s the ability to find them again once they’re placed in their forever storage home.

Also, we had to decide exactly what our collection was supposed to represent. Those of us who like old things have an urge to save everything, but we knew we had limited storage space, and so had to decide what our paramaters were. The OHA Board decided the items we collected were to directly deal with the 68 square miles inside the Oswego School District, including the families, businesses, farms, towns, and other things that included.

Cabinets removed from a farmhouse undergoing demolition and some used countertops furnished the new museum office. (Little White School Museum collection)

The “what” settled, the questions related to “how” were next to solve.

We had decided years ago to use a trinomial artifact numbering system, with the first number being the year the item was donated, the second number denoting the order it was received during the year it was donated, and the third number affixed to individual items in multi-item collections.

That was fine and fit in with they way many museums numbered their items. The next decision was whether to number all classes of items—documents, photos, and artifacts—the same. At that time, many museum had different numbering schemes for each type of item, which didn’t seem sensible to us. We figured if someone was going to come to the museum looking for, say, items dealing with the Shoger or Burkhart families, they’d want to see a listing of every item, no matter what kind it was, related to the family or other topic they were searching for. We also though our system would be of benefit for our own staff when, say, looking for items to create exhibits. If we were doing an exhibit on Church School or Bohn’s Grocery Store, we’d want to turn up whatever photos, documents, and artifacts in the collection.

The museum office this past autumn, filled with file cabinets, a new computer server (on the wall) our large format printer in foreground–and still featuring the used cabinets installed 30 years ago. (Little White School Museum collection)

And to keep track of all those items we were looking at we knew from the beginning we were going to need some sort of computerized database system. We’d dabbled with creating card files of artifacts at random periods earlier on, but couldn’t really make them work.

There were commercially available museum cataloging systems available, but at that early time, many of them insisted in treating photos, artifacts, and documents differently, which we didn’t want to do. Further, there were no Macintosh-based cataloging applications available. We’d decided to use Macs because we also wanted to create our own graphics—signs, labels, document and photo scans—and newsletters, and Macs were the gold standard for doing those things.

So, we ended up creating our own cataloging database using the Mac-compatible FileMaker Pro application. We wrote to more than a dozen area museums requesting copies of their accession sheets—accessioning is the formal, legal process of taking ownership of items donated to a museum or library—so we could figure out which fields we wanted to make sure we had in our own database.

The basement archives work and research area with the Equipto flat files to the left and the mobile unit to the right in a photo taken a few years ago. (Little White School Museum collection)

In the early spring of 1994, I’d taken a course out at Waubonsee Community College on museum planning that Keith Coryell had given. And in that course, he strongly recommended that a museum needs a director to oversee the technical aspects of cataloging and storage of donated items. I took that lesson and the data backing it up back to the board and in August 1994 they appointed me museum director with the task of coordinating and overseeing the Little White School Museum’s collections management.

Because the main volunteer emphasis was still on the main room restoration project, we solicited other volunteers to help clean up the basement area, get the floor and walls painted, and staple Tyvek fabric to the ceiling to stop 140 years worth of dust accumulated in the floorboards from sifting down into the basement and onto the artifacts and other materials being stored there. Fortunately, within a couple years, the park district agreed to finance installation of a new drop ceiling (we were able to find a bunch of used light fixtures for the project) that eliminated the sifting dust problem and brightened up the area considerably.

The old textile shelving with non-acid free boxes served well until we could find a better solution. (Little White School Museum collection)

By the autumn of 1994, we were finally ready to begin seriously addressing the collection. Stevie, Keith, and I began showing up at the museum on Thursdays to work on the collection, beginning with a “macro sort,” which left me free to help with the main room restoration project on Saturday mornings. Keith explained the macro sort  consisted, basically, of putting like items in piles—textiles, documents, 3-dimensional artifacts, and photogrsphs and negatives.

We also assembled used shelving we’d acquired in the building’s old basement coal room, which we’d painted as a spot where we could temporarily store our sorted piles.

One of the two racks of textile shelving loaded with acid free textile boxes that now store the museum’s collection of everything from military uniforms to wedding dresses. (Little White School Museum collection)

Keith explained the need for acid-free storage media—folders, envelopes, and boxes—as well as acid-free paper with which to make photo copies and so off went our first orders to Hollinger, Inc. and Gaylord, Inc. for the necessary materials. Full-sized and half-sixed record storage boxes from Hollinger, it turned out, were the museum industry standard, and no matter from which manufacturer they were acquired, they were called Hollinger boxes. We were going to need a LOT of both sizes of Hollinger boxes.

The seemingly little things we decided then have stood us in good stead. For instance, when we were planning our needs, we decided that all our file cabinets should be legal and not letter sized. That’s because legal documents are, naturally, legal sized. Documents, Keith, explained, need to be stored flat and unfolded. And while letter sized documents fit in legal sized folders, they don’t fit in letter sized folders.

Another important decision we made was to store our photos—including postcards—in correct archivally-safe pocket pages in three-ring binders. We decided that would allow easy and safe access to the photos, which, 30 years later, it certainly has.

But what about over-sized documents and photos that wouldn’t fit, unfolded and flat, into legal file folders? For that, we needed flat files. And like the helpful Caterpillar strike back in ’83, fate stepped in once again. The venerable Equipto manufacturing company in Aurora was closing its plant, including its showroom. Mark Campbell used his connections to broker a donation from Equipto of a large set of flat files and a unit of rolling shelving that had been on display in their show room. Mark was also able to figure out how to get the storage equipment moved to Oswego and into the museum’s basement storage area. Oversized documents and photos required oversized folders for storage, and fortunately we found all kinds of those in the Gaylord, Inc. catalog.

By 2007 when this photo was snapped in the museum’s archives storage room, the shelves Glenn Young custom made to fit Hollinger records storage boxes was already rapidly filling up. (Oswegoland Heritage Association collection)

Remember all those Hollinger boxes we had on order? We needed someplace to safely and efficiently store them, so we checked with Glenn Young. He agreed to take time out from the main room restoration project to build custom wooden shelving perfectly sized so each shelf would hold six full size Hollinger boxes. We also got the donation of some surplus bookshelves from the Oswego Public Library.

We’d decided to make the basement’s old furnace room, which had been separately walled off sometime in the 1950s, our archival storage area. Its walls were all concrete blocks and it had a fire-proof steel security door, making it the most secure room in the whole building. After we put a couple coats of acid-free paint on the wooden shelving Glenn had made, he installed them and the four steel bookshelves in the archives storage room.

So as 1994 turned into 1995 while sorting and storing the results of the macro sort continued, we were finally ready to start formally accessioning and cataloging all those items that had arrived during previous quarter century. The first really new item was added to our new database on Feb. 14, 1995 while we started work on the backlog, including Dick Young’s extensive collection of Native American stone projectile points and tools collected in the Oswego area.

If the dates donated items had arrived were still with them along with the donors’ names and (hopefully) addresses, we used those to formally accession the items. If we didn’t know when and who donated an item, it was given an “X” instead of a date leading number, denoting “Found in Collections.”

As it turned out, Dick’s collection was the first one we had complete provenance on–a fancy word meaning we definitely knew where and when it came from—and so it got the first verifiable number, 1983-1, with the first point, numbered 1983-1-1, a Snyder projectile point dated to 500 BCE.

And from there over the years, a changing, but always dedicated core of volunteers, and lately paid part-time park district staff, have kept at cataloging and adding capabilities to the collection and to the process of managing it. Keith Coryell got a permanent job, Stevie Todd moved on to other projects, and Bob Stekl and Stephanie Just came aboard for a few decades. The OHA bought a large format scanner, updated its computer equipment, bought a used large format copier, and began a collection of microfilmed documents. The park district bought a used microfilm reader/copier.

Volunteer Bob Stekl works cataloging a collection of small items at the Little White School Museum in 2014. (Little White School Museum collection)

We’d bought a bale of non-archival cardboard boxes to store textiles in during the macro sort, planning to eventually transfer over to acid-free boxes. two successive matching grants from the Illinois Association of Museum’s helped fund two new shelving racks and sufficient archival quality boxes to fill them.

We kept adding shelving and storage cabinets wherever we could find a bit of space in our basement storage area, always managing to keep a bit ahead of the steady stream of new materials that always kept arriving while also slowly but surely whittling down that huge backlog that had built up. Museum Collections Assistant Noah Beckman, one of the part-time staffers provided by the park district, finally finished up the last of the initial backlog a year or so ago, completing cataloging a collection of items donated by Evelyn Heap several years before he was born! Without the OHA’s continued partnership with the Oswegoland Park District, in fact, the museum simply would not exist.

From that initial item entered into the database 29 years ago, the museum’s collection has now grown to more than 37,000 entries ranging from prehistoric stone tools made by the area’s Indigenous residents to modern high school yearbooks to photographs and documents that chronicle the Oswego community’s history from the pioneer era to the present day.

The collection continues to grow at about 1,000 items per year, each item having some direct connection to the 68 square mile area inside the bounds of the Oswego School District, saved so future generations will be able to appreciate and learn about the community’s rich history and heritage.

On Sunday, March 10, starting at noon in the museum’s restored main room, I’ll present a history of the Little White School Museum, including the building itself, the restoration project, and its current uses, and members of the heritage association board will give tours showing off some of the latest upgrades, including a new accessibility ramp and a remodeled main entrance hallway. You’re all invited. Admission is $5 for park district residents and $10 for non-residents, money that will go towards helping us protect and preserve all that irreplaceable history we’ve collected since 1976.

For more information on the museum, visit their web site at http://www.littlewhiteschoolmuseum.org.

Lorenzo Rank and his landmark downtown Oswego building

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.

Annual back-to-school rituals still mark the start of autumn

While it’s not officially fall yet, you can certainly see it from here. For instance, during the past couple of weeks, students have been getting settled down as a new school year began in Kendall County.

Acceptable backpacks were bought, required school supply lists checked and complied with, inoculations brought up to date, and new clothes purchased, including new—and astonishingly expensive—shoes.

And then on the appointed day, children left home to either make the walk to school or to the stop to wait for the big yellow school buses that had earlier headed out on their appointed rounds, picking up and depositing students at their respective buildings.

Oswego grade school kids at the Red Brick School climb aboard their bus in the spring of 1957 for a ride home. (Little White School Museum collection; image by Everett Hafenrichter)

There were likely a few problems, of course. A few first graders probably got on the wrong buses here and there. A bus driver or two probably got confused on new routes or held up in our increasingly clogged traffic and left students waiting. Some parents failed to fill out the right forms and watched with dismay as their children were left standing at the ends of their driveways.

And at the buildings, a few kindergarten students almost certainly decided school was NOT the place they wanted to be, no matter how sweetly the teachers and their parents explained how much fun the whole thing was going to be, and their anguished screams could be heard echoing up and down some hallways. Other kids could barely contain their glee at FINALLY getting to go to REAL SCHOOL.

Which reminds me of the story of the two sons of friends. When it was time for the oldest boy to go to school, getting him into the building and persuading him to stay there was a major undertaking. When they took the younger boy to school for his first day, they were, of course apprehensive. But instead of the struggle they feared, the little guy ran up the building steps, through the doors, threw his arms open wide and joyfully shouted “I’M HERE!”

Altogether, though, I suspect this year was a fairly routine, even traditional, opening day such as we’ve experienced for many, many decades. Which might seem odd, given how far we’ve come in this modern computerized, jet propelled, satellite orbiting, multi-media, cell phone, social media era.

Believe it or not, back in the days of one-room schools, the back-to-school ritual was pretty much the same.

Come August, the shopping trips began, or the orders that were carefully copied out of the Sears or Montgomery Wards catalogs were put in the mailbox.

My favorite lunchbox hero was Hopalong Cassidy.

Had to have a lunch box, of course. Home-packed lunches were the only food available in country schools: There were no cafeterias and no fast food restaurants nearby. In fact, there were no fast food restaurants at all.

Lunch boxes were metal in the 1950s before advances in plastic made PVC lunch boxes hardier than their metal ancestors. Boys’ lunch boxes had pictures of our favorite cowboy heroes like Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Wild Bill Hickok, Gene Autry and the like on them. Girls seemed to favor Dale Evans, as I recall, although a lot liked horses and dogs (like Rogers‘ Bullet).

No matter what they had painted on them, though, most of them were shaped like flat, miniature briefcases and included an incredibly fragile glass-lined Thermos bottle. Usually, all it took was dropping the lunch box on the ground once to shatter the glass liner of a Thermos bottle. We soon learned to shake our Thermos to listen for pieces of the broken thermal liner clinking around inside before pouring the contents out in the combination top/drinking cup.

Some of the vintage school lunch buckets in the collections of the Little White School Museum here in Oswego.

During my mother’s school days, lunch pails were literally just that—small, covered buckets. Molasses and some other products came in small tin buckets a little larger than a quart can of paint with tight covers. When cleaned out, they made good lunch buckets—we have a few of those in our collections at the Little White School Museum in Oswego.

Our lunches consisted of sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, some kind of fruit, and dessert—I don’t recall eating salty things like potato chips for lunch until we moved into town, although I suppose we might have. Bologna and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches seemed to predominate at lunchtime, but I always favored a more eclectic mix that didn’t much interest my classmates when sandwich trades were in the wind. I liked liver sausage, pickled tongue, and head cheese, any one of which was a sandwich trade killer.

Speaking of non-traditional sandwiches, my mother once recalled that some of the kids at Tamarack School she went to school with back in the 1920s brought lard sandwiches, which, taste aside, I suspect definitely wouldn’t pass nutritional muster today.

Church School, Wheatland Township, 1952. That’s me at lower left. You will note that plaid shirts were favored by both sexes, and both also mostly wore trousers to school.

Finally, as noted above, the other back-to-school ritual usually involved new clothes, top to bottom, shirts to shoes. Including underwear because god forbid we’d be in a fatal accident and the ambulance people would catch us wearing old, ratty underpants.

For serious new clothes buying, we’d head to downtown Aurora and shop for overalls (that’s what we called Levis back then) and plaid shirts, whether we were male or female. Out at our country school, the teacher, the wonderful Dorothy Comerford, decreed we all wear pants to school, and that was in the days before it became fashionable, or even allowed, at most schools—especially for girls. Things were different out there in the country than in town, she once told us, and so it made a lot more sense for girls to wear pants just like us boys. I can still clearly remember the feeling of walking to school in brand new stiff, blue overalls, with my legs making a “throop, throop, throop“ sound as the new denim rubbed against itself.

1950s shoe store fluoresope

New shoes were also a must for starting school, at least in our family. Back in my mother’s day, new shoes were bought from the Sears catalog, and if they didn’t quite fit, it was just too bad. My mother had bad feet to the end of her days because of ill-fitting shoes during her growth years and she was determined that wouldn’t happen to HER kids.

So we were luckier than she was. We were taken to the shoe store where we tried on a new pair and then stuck our feet under the fluoroscope X-ray machine over in the comer so our mothers could see exactly how the shoes fit. With today’s (admittedly justifiable) radiation phobia, it’s hard to believe that many shoe stores had an X-ray machines causally sitting in the comer just waiting around to irradiate their customers.

A new pencil box, a box of Crayola crayons (the giant multi-tiered size if we were either very lucky or very rich), new pencils, a plastic ruler, and a writing tablet completed our equipment.

Like today’s reluctant youngsters, there was usually at least one neighborhood kid who didn’t want to go to his or her first day of school. And sometimes the bus left us waiting—after a bus finally started picking us up out in the country, that is.

Multiplication relay races and playing Crack the Whip in the schoolyard may now have given way to computer math games and safety-approved playground equipment. But in late summer, when the big yellow buses begin their runs, the adventure of education still begins again for each new generation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Are there any Sears catalog homes in Oswego?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Borderers and Yankees and Midlanders, oh my!

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.

The next group that arrived were Yankees from New England and New York who arrived mostly in northern Illinois largely via the Great Lakes. Once the Erie Canal opened and connected the Hudson River with Lake Erie, Yankees flooded into the northern part of the state.

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, 146^th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment in September 1864. The 146^th 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.

One-room schools were the foundation for today’s public education system

School kids’ summer vacation isn’t here yet, but if my grandchildren are any indication, students have begun counting the weeks and days until the last day of classes for the current school year.

During “The Year of the Early Spring” in 1833—exactly 190 years ago—settlement in the Fox River Valley boomed, drawing pioneer families from settled Eastern states to the prairies of northern Illinois.

Some of the first institutions these new arrivals established were churches and schools. And kids back then looked forward to summer vacation as much as their modern descendants do.

While a few of those early settlers were from southern states, most were from what our school history books called the old Middle and New England colonies—mostly New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts—joined by other families, like the Pearces who settled at Oswego in June 1833, most recently from Ohio but from farther east before that.

Those Eastern settlers brought their view that both religion and education were required to produce solid informed citizenry in a thriving democracy, a view sharply at odds with their southern countrymen. Public education already had a long history in the northeast by the era of heavy Illinois settlement—public education was mandated in Massachusetts as early as 1647—but it was a rare, virtually nonexistent thing in the South. The Southern planter class who ran the region like their own private fiefdoms felt, not without some justification, that an educated population tended to ask uncomfortable questions, including demanding rights the planters wanted to keep for themselves. And, of course, it was flatly illegal to educate a large percentage of the South’s population, the Black slaves who produced most of its wealth., suggesting just how dangerous the southern upper crust knew education could be to the established order.

In fact, public education didn’t become the law in Southern states until after they lost the Civil War when establishing systems of public schools was one of the requirements to be readmitted to the Union.

Here in Illinois, where the earliest settlers in southern Illinois were from Southern states, tax support for public schools wasn’t available until the early 1850s. But that didn’t keep the new arrivals here in northern Illinois from establishing schools funded by subscriptions collected from students’ parents.

The interior of this preserved log school in Winterset, IA is typical of those found all over the Midwest during the early 19th Century. (Madison County Historical Society photo)

According to the county’s first historian, Rev. E.W. Hicks, the first school in the county was built in what soon became the thriving settlement of Pavilion on one of the busy trails from Chicago to Ottawa—now Ill. Route 71. According to Hicks, “It was a log house, with slabs for benches.”

Our neighbors to the north in Aurora managed to organize their school a couple years after Pavilion’s school started. Wrote Hicks: “The first school was begun in Aurora that season, 1836, in a log school house covered with bark. Mrs. Spaulding was the first teacher.”

Meanwhile here in my hometown of Oswego, the folks didn’t get their act together to establish a school until 1837. Probably because it was free, the subscribers picked for their school a vacant log building along what is now Ill. Route 25, about a city block north of modern North Street. Tradition had it the building was constructed by missionaries to the resident Potawatomi Indians, but despite checking with the Catholic and Protestant religious organizations that were active in the area during that era, researchers at Oswego’s Little White School Museum have not been able to find any proof of that. It seems more likely the cabin was a temporary trading post abandoned when the U.S. Government removed the local tribes people in 1836, forcing them west of the Mississippi River.

But in any case, classes were held there in the fall of that year with young George Washington Kellogg hired as the teacher. Interestingly enough, his family is still prominent in Kendall County politics and social life after all these years—one descendant was just elected Kendall County Board Chairman—suggesting a certain stability for these parts that belies the constant hurly-burly of modern life.

The old log cabin only served for a year—we can only imagine how decrepit it must have been—before it was replaced. Explained Hicks: “The next season a frame building was put up on the same lot with the store [64 Main Street in downtown Oswego]. The studdings were hewed out of rails. It was the first frame in Oswego, and is now a part of Albert Snook’s residence. It was made for a store, but school was held in it. Adaline Warner, sister of Mrs. George Parker, was the first teacher.”

A few years later, a purpose-built one-room school was built about where Madison Street crosses Bartlett Creek, and that served until the two-story Old Stone School was built about the time state law was passed permitting levying property taxes to support public schools.

And speaking of those one-room schools, they popped up all over Kendall County, the goal being to keep students from having to walk no farther than a mile and a half to two miles to get to class. Which sort of explodes our grandparents’ boasts that unlike us pampered younglings, they had to walk 10 miles to school, uphill both directions.

The teacher and student body of the Minkler School, NaAuSay Township, Kendall County, in 1893. (Little White School Museum collection)

By the middle of the 19th Century, the educational year had been somewhat standardized into two terms, usually called the summer and winter terms. The summer term was often taught by a woman because the bigger, usually rowdier, boys were hard at work with farm work instead of attending classes at that time of the year. Men were often sought to teach the winter term when the rowdies were in attendance, if somewhat unwillingly.

The differences in the pay scales of male and female teachers reflected those seasonal differences. At the Kendall School, built in 1855 at the corner of Ashley and Ament roads in Kendall Township, Margaret Leith received $15 a month for teaching the four-month summer term in 1858, while George Bishop was paid $30 a month to teach the succeeding winter term.

Starting with those first subscription schools, some 125 rural schools operated in Kendall County over the years. But early in the 20th Century, the State of Illinois began urging consolidating small rural schools with in-town schools to save money. Noted the Kendall County Record on April 11, 1923: “It costs more per capita to meet the running expenses of rural schools of Illinois than in the cities and incorporated villages, according to figures compiled by public school officials in the state. Five pupils in a country school cost not less than $1,000 per year or $200 for each pupil while in cities and large units the cost is about $40 each. Figures compiled show that 165 school districts of Illinois have fewer than five pupils attending school, while in 1,581 there is an average daily attendance of fewer than 9 pupils.”

Education quality also suffered when a school had few students, and the costs to supply a quality junior high education in a one-room school were out of reach for most of those districts.

The teacher (standing at left rear) and student body of the Grove School on Grove Road south of Oswego enjoyed an 1894 dress-up day with a Mother Goose theme. Integration was the rule here in northern Illinois from the time schools were established. The Black children are from the Lucas family, a local farming family. (Little White School Museum collection)

It’s not that Illinois didn’t continually try to upgrade the educational experience of rural school students. Such efforts as the Country Life movement were dedicated to trying to keep young rural people from moving on into towns, strongly supporting improvements in rural schools as a major method of achieving that. The movement advocated improving both rural schools’ curricula as well as the facilities themselves. And thus was born the Standard School movement.

At this same time, our familiar system of standardized grade levels, from kindergarten through high school, was almost universally adopted across the nation. While kindergarten was vanishingly rare outside of large cities, rural schools began offering a standard course of study for grades 1-8. Students who graduated from eighth grade were eligible to attend high school. Before high school districts were established throughout the state in the 1930s, students could attend whichever high school would accept them, with their home one-room districts paying the tuition.

Of course during that era, not a whole lot of eighth graders went on to high school. According to the May 25, 1938 Kendall County Record, only 115 rural school students graduated from eighth grade in the county that year.

Right around the turn of the 20th Century, Illinois State Superintendent of Public Instruction Alfred Bayliss decided to institute a series of standards to improve rural school education. State inspectors began visiting rural schools all over the state, no small task since by 1908 there were 10,638 rural schools in Illinois.

In 1909, the Standard School movement in Illinois set initial minimum standards in the general areas of grounds, schoolhouse, furnishings and supplies, organization, and the teacher.

Standards were gradually increased, clarified and tightened. According to Illinois’ 1910 requirements, a Standard School was required to have “a capable, well prepared and efficient teacher; good organization, discipline and teaching; a comfortable and sanitary [school]house; proper equipment, including a library suitable for the children, dictionaries, maps, and globes.” The earlier category of “grounds” was incorporated into the “comfortable and sanitary [school]house requirement. State School Superintendent Francis Blair warned, “Wanting any of these, no school can be as good as it ought to be.”

By 1913, it was the turn of rural schools here in Kendall County to be visited. As the Kendall County Record reported on Oct. 15 that year: “[County School] Superintendent A.D. Curran and U.J. Hoffman, state supervisor of rural schools, are making a tour of Kendall county. They will visit every rural school and Mr. Hoffman has the power to place these schools on what is known as the ‘standardized list’ if they come up to the requirements. There is no doubt but that the schools of Kendall county are up to the standard of any in the state and that Mr. Hoffman will be pleased with his visit.”

Harvey School, organized by the Scots farmers owning the surrounding land in 1854, was built at the northwest corner of the intersection of modern Harvey and Wolf’s Crossing roads in Oswego Township. The Harvey family owned the land on which the school was built. (Little White School Museum collection)

A well-lit classroom was deemed especially valuable for both students and teachers. Minimum square footage of window area based on the schoolroom’s area were set. If you’ve visited any restored one-room schools in Illinois or you’ve seen early 20th Century photos of them, you will notice that they have large windows, but on only one side of the building. That’s due to A.D.F. Hamlin’s 1910 manual, Modern School Houses; Being A Series of Authoritative Articles on Planning, Sanitation, Heating and Ventilation.

According to Hamlin, “Light should come over the left shoulder of each pupil,” suggesting all students should be writing right-handed to assure good light on what they were doing—whether they were naturally right-handed or not.

Further, the amount of window area and its placement in the building were also critical, Hamlin contended: “The total window area should equal from 40 to 50 percent of the total wall area of the long side of the room, and in general, one-quarter the floor area of the classroom. The windows should extend up to within 6 inches of the ceiling; the window stools should be from 3 to 3 1/2 feet from the floor. Light from below that level is useless; it is the height of the top of the window that determines its lighting efficiency. The sill should, however, not be higher than 3 1/2 feet from the floor, as it is desirable that the pupils should be able to rest their eyes at times by looking out at more or less distant objects, which is impossible for many with a sill 4 1/2 or even 4 feet high.”

In 1941, Kendall County had 54 rural school districts. Two decades later, almost all of them had consolidated with in-town districts with students riding those bright yellow buses to class instead of trudging the one to two miles down a country road to class.

School today would be almost unimaginable to those rural school students of the past in terms of size if nothing else. The enrollment of the Oswego School District this year is about equal to the entire 1960 population of Kendall County. Even so, students and teachers alike are engaged in learning just as they have since C.B. Alvord called that first class to order back in 1834.

Avoiding research rabbit holes sometimes a museum person’s most challenging challenge

Family historians are familiar with the problem. You have set aside a day for research and are eagerly looking forward to accomplishing great things. Then you get sidetracked on the family of an obscure spouse of your fourth cousin twice removed and hours later you finally come to and realize you’ve spent your valuable time and resources researching a family to which you’re not even related.

It’s the same, I’ve found, with museum work, at least at the local level.

I’ve been the volunteer director of the Little White School Museum here in Oswego since the Oswegoland Heritage Association Board of Directors appointed me to the position back in 1994. As part of the job, I help all sorts of people out with research, either directly using our collections at the museum or offering recommendations where they can hopefully find what they’re looking for elsewhere.

So when a local reporter called the other day wondering what the story was behind Wolf’s Crossing Road’s name, I was happy to help. The road, once a country byway, has become a busy suburban alternative route to even busier U.S. Route 34, which it roughly parallels a bit to the south.

The road name’s tie to the Wolf family (it wasn’t named for the animal) stretches back to the late 1800s with the construction of the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway. The rail line’s right-of-way looped from Indiana around Chicago to the south and west. Thus its nickname, the Outer Belt Line.

As built, the line ran from Indiana to Joliet here in Illinois and then west northwest to Plainfield where it took a more straight northerly to Normantown, named after one of the sons of an EJ&E executive. According to the lore of the King family who owned farmland there, Normantown was supposed to have been named King’s Crossing, but the railroad brass later decided otherwise. Even so, the Normantown Station’s code remained “K.”

At Normantown, a branch line switched off the mainline and ran to Aurora, crossing what had been once called the Old Naperville Road and also known in Oswego as the Wheatland Road because it ran from the village mostly straight east to the rich farming community in Will County’s Wheatland Township.

Wolf Crossing, 1903, on the Oswego Township side of the Kendall-Will County line

The rail line crossed the existing country road right at the border between Kendall County’s Oswego Township and Will County’s Wheatland Township at the adjoining farms of Leonard John Wolf and that of either his father, John Ulrich Wolf or his brother, John Wolf Jr. That was the first rabbit hole I went down.

The Wolfs were one of the many German farming families that had immigrated to the fertile Oswego Prairie between Oswego and Naperville from Bavaria, Germany in the 1840s and 1850s. The family patriarch was John Leonard Wolf, who was accompanied by his son, John Ulrich Wolf when they came to Illinois. But John Ulrich Wolf also had a son, known as John Wolf Jr., plus the other son, Leonard John Wolf. By the time the railroad was built the Wolfs owned four farms, one of abut 74 acres in Oswego Township on the line with Wheatland Township owned by just plain John Wolf; and three adjoining it right across the Wheatland Township line, stacked one above the other. The first one of 130 acres was owned by Leonard Wolf, the second adjoining it to the south of 115 acres owned by John Wolf Sr. and the third adjoining it owned by John Wolf Jr. The question then became which John Wolf was which, something I’m still not entirely sure about.

The EJ&E built grain elevators and stations at both the Normantown switch and where the road between Oswego and Naperville crossed the right-of-way of the branch line to Aurora. While towns didn’t grow up around either grain elevator, each did eventually get its own rural post office, important in the years before Rural Free Delivery was introduced by the U.S. Postal service in 1893 and finally standardized across the country in 1902. The post office was located in John Wolf’s home at the crossing. Which John Wolf, you ask? Good question, say I.

The elevator where the Wheatland Road crossed the tracks was named Wolf’s and the road itself quickly became known as Wolf’s Crossing Road. When a post office was granted to serve the neighborhood on Oct. 9, 1890, the post office was also named Wolf’s Crossing. That post office served the community for about 10 years before it was closed in August 1900.

Wolf’s Crossing, 1903, on the Wheatland Township side of the Kendall-Will County line.

So anyway, back to the call from the Ledger reporter. He noted that Oswego is coordinating the widening of Wolf’s Crossing Road plus other improvements including a traffic circle at the Harvey Road intersection and another at the Douglas Road intersections. As part of the improvements, Oswego is planning to change the name of the road to Wolfs Crossing Road—no apostrophe. He was wondering if the road had ever been called Wolfs Crossing Road, and I said I’d look into it.

So down I went into rabbit hole number two.

The thing is, of course, most rural roads in the county were not officially named for many years. Most were numbered but no formal names were given them until relatively late in the 20th Century. Locals all identified them by the names of the farm families that lived along them. So my quest was to find out what Wolf’s Crossing itself was named over the years.

I went first to the museum’s county atlas collection, which includes large format hardcovered atlases that would include that information from 1903, 1922, and 1941. I found that in the 1903 Kendall County atlas, the name was given as Wolf Crossing Station. The 1922 atlas listed it as simply Wolf Crossing, while the 1940 atlas had it as simply Wolfs—no apostrophe, no “Crossing.”

So nothing definitive. Next, I thought I’d try our collection of plat books, booklets with cardboard covers that were issued by the Kendall County Farm Bureau over the years, and see how the name was listed.

In the 1935 plat book, it’s listed as simply Wolfs, no apostrophe. In the 1947 and 1951 plat books it’s listed as Wolf’s Crossing, apostrophe and “Crossing” firmly in place. But in 1959, it was back to just Wolfs, no apostrophe and no “Crossing.” In 1965, it was Wolf’s, getting its apostrophe back although the “Crossing” remained absent, and the 1970 plat book was the same. But after that, the 1974 through the 1987 plat books all listed it as simply Wolfs, no apostrophe and no “Crossing.”

The plat books I was looking at were all duplicates we keep available for researchers. The others in the collection are all safely stored where they’re only accessed at need. When I reached the last plat book in the file folder, I noticed a piece of folded paper loose in the folder. And so down rabbit hole number three I went.

When unfolded, the paper proved to be a 22×15.5” highway map of Kendall County dated 1947. It had no accession number on it and no apparent reason to be loose in the plat book file. I turned it over and noted it looked as if it had been glued to something green—the same color as the 1947 Kendall County plat book I’d examined. I looked at both covers of the 1947 plat book I’d just looked through, and inside the back cover was an exact match for the glue remains on the folded map. So the map belonged to the plat book.

There were two other copies of that year’s plat book in the file I hadn’t bothered with—a person can only read one book at a time after all—so I looked through them and found both had accession numbers. One also still had its large fold-out map attached inside the back cover as well, while the map was missing from the other, just leaving a bit of glue behind.

Which got me to wondering how many copies of the 1947 plat book we had, so I looked it up in the museum database and found we’d catalogued five copies. Three of them—two with intact maps and one with the map missing—were in secure plat book storage, while two were in the duplicates-for-research folder. The one that had held the map that got my attention had apparently never been catalogued.

The 1947 Kendall County highway map snug in its acid-free folder in the Little White School Museum’s Maps, Plats & Surveys flat file cabinet.

So I decided to catalog it, and since its fold-out map was already loose, I further decided to separately catalog the both of them. I put the newly catalogued plat book back in the research folder and then went to store the map flat—not folded—in our Maps, Plats & Surveys Collection, housed in one of our flat file drawers. Which is where I entered rabbit hole number four.

When I opened the drawer, I found two booklets there, one a copy of the Village of Oswego’s comprehensive plan for 1988 and the other titled Mapping the Metropolis: A Community History Using Old Maps and Aerial Photographs: Elk Grove Village & Township, a booklet published by Chicago’s Newberry Library and the Elk Grove Historical Society. Clearly they didn’t belong in the Maps, Plats & Surveys drawer, so I removed them and got the 1947 county highway map safely put in a nice acid-free folder.

I checked inside the covers of both the comp plan and the Elk Grove booklets and found only one, the Elk Grove booklet, had been catalogued. There was no accession number in the comp plan booklet anywhere I looked. So I checked the museum database and found no copies of the 1988 plan there, which seemed odd. The database reported all of our copies of Oswego’s comprehensive plans were handily stored all in one place, in our “Village of Oswego Collection, Box 3.” So, I thought, I’ll just check and make sure we haven’t missed something along the line.

Village of Oswego Box 3 in its place, now safely added to the museum’s Location Map so it can always be found again.

I checked our Location Inventory Map—actually a separate database that lists the location of every box and folder in the museum’s collections—and there was no “Village of Oswego Collection, Box 3.” listed. Boxes 1 and 2 where there right where they should have been. But no Box 3.

Now, the Little White School Museum is a small institution, an extremely local history museum, but even so, we have more than 36,000 items in our collections database, all stored…somewhere. When I give tours of our museum work areas I tell visitors that the trick isn’t cataloging artifacts and archival materials or safely storing them in the correct folders or boxes. That’s simple. There are hundreds of books about how to do that stuff. No, the REAL trick is finding something once you’ve catalogued it and put it on a shelf or in a cabinet or a file drawer somewhere. Lose something and it’s a problem you can’t solve by reading a book about it.

So I got out the only tool that works in a situation like I faced, the old Mark I Eyeball and started visually scanning all the shelves in our main archives storage room. I was going over the shelves for the second time when I remembered we had started storing a few file boxes in Artifacts Room II.

Back in 2010 when the Oswego Prairie Church congregation dissolved, we inherited their records collection spanning 1848 to 2010. We had purchased wire rack shelf units to store the record boxes on, but the shelves were just a bit wider than two standard Hollinger acid-free records cartons, leaving about a 9” or so space on each shelf. Always looking to maximize our extremely tight storage ability, we’d started putting flip-top acid-free storage boxes in those spaces.

So leaving off my second (and increasingly boring) visual scan in the Archives Room, I went back to good old Artifacts Room II, and there was Box 3, Oswego, Village of staring me right in the face. So I pulled it out went to the research area and pulled its contents and found a copy of Oswego’s comprehensive plan identical to the un-numbered and catalogued one I’d found in the Maps, Plats & Survey drawer. Why didn’t it show up in our database? Because there was a typo: the date in the database said it was from 1983, not 1988. And I couldn’t even yell at anybody because I was the moron who’d catalogued it back in 2009.

So I catalogued the 1988 comp plan I’d found in the flat file drawer, put it in Box 3 with all the others, put Box 3 back in its place, and added “Village of Oswego Collection, Box 3” to the Location Map.

Then I had to decide what to do with the Elk Grove Village booklet, and so went down the fifth and final rabbit hole of the day. Normally, we wouldn’t keep something concerning a town so far away (close to 40 miles) from us. But I have a super soft spot for northern Illinois transportation history during the 1830s. It’s really one of my favorite topics and this 9×12 booklet is just plain fascinating. And with the Newberry involved you know absolutely its information will be very accurate.

When I was looking for the booklet’s accession number, some papers fell out. One of them was a letter to me from the booklet’s donor who had read and enjoyed my By Trace and Trail monograph on stagecoach routes west of Chicago back in 2003 and who was a co-author of the Elk Grove booklet. The other nine stapled pages were an unpublished manuscript, Early Trails of Carroll County and Northwestern Illinois by John Faivre.

I scanned Mr. Faivre’s manuscript and created a searchable PDF for our Transportation History file, and also separately catalogued it so that it will show up in the database when researching early area trails. Then I went to put the two pieces in our Booklets collection.

We, like most museums, use Hollinger record storage boxes in our archives and artifacts storage areas. We mostly use full Hollingers (right), but also use half-Hollingers (left) to save shelf space.

We have two boxes of booklets. Box 1 proved to be not just filled but over-filled. Box 2, a half-Hollinger, was on its way to being full but could handle the Elk Grove booklet and accompanying Carroll County trails piece just fine. Even so, I found two Folder 11s, one of which was empty. In addition, there were a number of loose booklets in the box, most of which were the kind of tourist promotional literature you find at tourism bureaus. None of them were numbered, so I removed those, creating more space in the box. And then I went to the database to figure out what was going on with two folders numbered the same. Turned out, the empty one should have been numbered 10, and was supposed to contain a couple other loose booklets about military burials in the Oswego Township Cemetery I found in the box. There was still plenty of room so the Elk Grove booklet also found a home there.

I filed the tourism booklets in the appropriate folders in our vertical file on area towns. Then I checked out the over-full Box 1, which had way too many duplicate copies of the Lions Club’s old Oswegoland: Where the living is better! booklets. I culled, leaving only two of each year in the box, but that meant I had to update the collections database to reflect their new locations, which turned out to be on the local history research materials shelf. I printed out the accession forms with their new locations (we do hard copies because you never know if these snappy computer things will suddenly decide to go rogue), and decided to—finally—call it a day.

It hadn’t been an entirely unproductive day, but I didn’t get done a lot of the things I’d hoped to do. Nevertheless, our database now not only knows that we have a “Village of Oswego Box 3,” but also where it’s at. Our booklets collection can breathe a bit, and we’ve got a really nice 1947 highway map of Kendall County ready for some future researcher.

Oh yes, and as for the name of Wolf’s Crossing Road, as a former newspaper editor, I’d favor keeping the apostrophe in the name, but if, as I’ve heard, the state doesn’t like possessive names for streets and roads, I’d leave it at Wolf Crossing Road, no “s” and no apostrophe. Kendall County’s highway maps have shown the road’s name as simply Wolf Road for years, which has the advantage of being concise, I suppose. But it is—or was—the road to Wolf’s Crossing. It wasn’t their road, but it WAS their crossing since they owned the land before the railroad barged through without so much as a howdy-do. And finally, “Wolfs” isn’t even a decent word. Make it a single Wolf or no Wolf at all, please.

The end of two significant rural traditions reflected education, agriculture change in Illinois

We just opened a new seasonal exhibit down at the Little White School Museum here in Oswego, “Back to School.”

Museum manager Annie Jordan made a deep dive into our collections and retrieved a bunch of photos, documents, and three-dimensional artifacts, from 1950s letter sweaters to the kind of slates kids used to use in lieu of expensive paper to practice arithmetic and handwriting skills. The goal, which seems successful to me, was to put more flesh on the bones of the story of how public education has evolved over the decades as told in the museum gallery’s various core exhibit.

The Little White School Museum’s “Back to School” exhibit celebrates the start of another school year with artifacts, documents, and photographs from the museum’s collections normally not on exhibit. The museum is located at 72 Polk Street, Oswego. Admission is free.

Everyone’s invited to stop by and spend some quality time browsing the new exhibit as well as the exhibits in the gallery. Regular hours are Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Monday, 4 to 9 p.m.; and Thursdays and Fridays, 2 to 6:30 p.m. Admission is free.

When I was providing some research assistance to Annie and museum assistant Emily Dutton, who was working on the exhibit’s labels, it occurred to me that, being a member of the first of the Baby Boom generation as I am, I’d seen—and participated in—one of the most significant times of change in public education in Illinois history. That era of change also coincided with eras of massive change that began in other areas during my childhood and early adulthood. That included the biggest changes in agriculture in a century (or much more) and the introduction of and miniaturization of computers that had massive effects on every aspect of life.

Public education opportunities had been divided into two categories for a century by that time. Elementary school districts educated students from first through eighth grade. Until the early years of the 20th Century, it was felt by many that eight years of schooling was enough for most people. High schools were relatively rare, as were their students. In 1916, only 175 students from all the county’s rural school districts attended at least some high school.

Until the 20th Century dawned, high school graduates were considered qualified to teach in rural schools. Then qualifications began rising and two years of college began to be required.

Oswego High School’s first graduating class, the Class of 1887, left to right, back row, Addie Kimball (Curry), Mary Smith (Young.) Sitting, Bessie Armstrong (Long), Frank Lippold, Addie Wormley (Elliott). (Little White School Museum collection)

Here in Oswego, a two-year high school course—sufficient for rural school teachers—was offered with the first graduates matriculating in 1886. Those who wanted a full, four-year degree had to travel to nearby Aurora to finish. It wasn’t until the fall of 1928 that Oswego finally offered a fully accredited, four-year high school course of study.

High schools were expensive propositions with students’ tuitions originally paid for by rural districts. Finally, the state allowed the formation of property tax-supported high school districts and in December 1936 Oswego and Yorkville area voters created the Oswego and Yorkville community high school districts. Oswego High School District Superintendent John Clayton immediately set out to increase the geographical size of the district without adding too many potential students. The strategy made sense—farmland didn’t generate many students, but it did generate tax revenue. That worked until the 68 square miles of the once overwhelmingly rural district began growing more housing developments than crops.

Church School, Wheatland Township, student body, grades 1-6, 1952. The author is in the left foreground.

I started school at the age of 6 years in the fall of 1952, joining four classmates in the first grade at Church School in Wheatland Township, Will County, here in Illinois. No kindergarten then—we dove right into Dick, Jane, Sally, and Spot; metal lunch boxes with Thermos bottles whose glass lining broke if you looked at them wrong; recess; penmanship; and the rest with none of those half-day socialization preliminaries.

Officially considered a one-room rural school, Church School was a substantial brick building that actually boasted a large classroom, boys’ and girls’ indoor bathrooms, and a tiny library room, along with a high-ceilinged basement sufficient for indoor recess on rainy days. It was given its name because it was right across the road from the Wheatland United Presbyterian “Scotch” Church.

The church and school were established by the group of Scots immigrant families that arrived on the Wheatland prairie in the 1840s and 1850s, the descendants of which were, a century later, some of my schoolmates. In the fall of 1952, our teacher, Dorothy Comerford, drove out from Joliet every school day to instruct 23 students in six grades.

We didn’t know it—Mrs. Comerford probably did, and our parents surely did—but we were participating in the last years of one-room rural schools. Seventh and eighth graders who would normally have been attending classes at Church School had already been bused into town to attend school in Oswego and sixth graders would follow the next year.

The dedication of the new flagpole at Church School in 1944 during World War II, with the entire student body attending. My sister Eileen is fourth from the left. (Little White School Museum collection)

My mother, in fact, was one of the people making sure that junior high students would have the expanded educational opportunities available in town schools. That’s because my oldest sister, Eileen, 12 years my senior, had been the only student in her grade level during her eight pre-high school years attending a couple different one-room schools. She finished her last few years at Church School, which was about a mile down the road from our farm.

Eileen told me one time that during the era when she graduated from eighth grade, graduates from all over Will County, a huge county extending all the way to the Indiana border, assembled at Lockport High School to receive their diplomas. She said she had a slight panic attack seeing that many students her own age after having no classmates her own age for her recently-completed eight years of school.

That prompted my mother’s activism. She helped establish the Oswego Mother’s Club (it eventually became the Oswego Woman’s Civic Club) that began strongly lobbying local school districts to get junior high students out of one-room schools and into town schools so they’d have access to more educational opportunities. Her efforts dovetailed nicely with the accelerating pace of public school consolidation then taking place all across Illinois.

By the early 1950s, Illinois was strongly encouraging merging rural, single-school districts into larger consolidated elementary school districts. The consolidation movement had begun years before, touted as both a tax-saving measure as well as an improvement in educational opportunities. Moving kids into larger in-town schools saved money because rural schools often had such low enrollments, sometimes as few as five or six students, which made for a great, but expensive student:teacher ratio. Larger schools could also offer a far richer curriculum for junior high students, especially in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) areas where chemistry, biology, and physics labs were the kinds of things that would have benefited my sister, who was determined to be a nurse.

A few attempts at consolidating one-room school districts were made early on. Yorkville began considering consolidation in 1919. But efforts stalled during the Great Depression. As economic condition began to ease, consolidation efforts began again, this time out in rural areas. In June 1941, for instance, residents of the one-room Wilcox, Gaylord, and Walker schools voted to consolidate into a single district, with all students attending the Walker School at Plainfield and Simons roads southeast of Oswego.

The outbreak of World War II again stalled things, but after the war consolidation efforts, this time strongly encouraged by the State of Illinois, resumed. Teacher requirements were increased to require full four-year degrees, prompting dozens of Kendall County educators to go back to college if they wanted to keep teaching. Financial encouragement through the state aid to education formula also encouraged consolidation, not only of elementary districts with other elementary districts, but also the creation of unit districts that educated students from first grade through the senior year of high school.

Church School, Heggs at Ferguson Road, Wheatland Township, Will County, 1957. The Oswego School District’s last rural school, it closed at the end of the 1957-1958 school year. (Little White School Museum photo)

Here in the Oswego School District, it turned out that Church School, where I attended first through the first of half of third grade was one of the last three Oswego-affiliated one-room schools to operate. There had once been 11 one-room schools educating grade school students inside the bounds of the 68 square-mile area affiliated with Oswego through annexation to the high school district. Of the final three remaining schools, Willow Hill at the intersection of U.S. Route 30 and U.S. Route 34 and McCauley School on Caton Farm Road closed in the spring of 1957. Church School closed in the spring of 1958, ending the one-room country school era in the Oswego area.

(Fun fact: All three buildings are still standing, although poor Willow Hill gets more and more dilapidated every year. McCauley and Church schools have both been converted into single-family homes.)

Then in June 1961, voters in the Oswego Community Consolidated Grade School District 8 and Oswego Community Consolidated High School District 300 voted to create a new unit school district for students in first grade through high school, today’s Oswego Community Unit School District 308.

And that growth that was just getting a good start back in the late 1950s? Boy, did it keep going. One year old District 308 started the 1962-63 school year with 1,971 students. It started the current school year with just over 17,000.

So, I had the opportunity to attend a rural school very near the end of that era, and I have to say that for those first two and a half years, it provided me a very good, basic education, better than what I found when my parents moved into town. There were more students in my third grade classroom in town than had been in Church School in total, and I was in just one of three third grade classrooms, each with more than 30 students.

The thing was, the education you got in those one-room rural schools was hugely dependent on the skill of the teacher. A bad teacher could plague students through several years of school. But I, and my other Church School classmates were lucky; we had a great teacher.

Along with the end of the one-room school era, the end of diversified farming was also in sight when we moved off the farm in December 1954, soon to be replaced by specialization in grain, livestock, or dairy farming.

It was an interesting time, as two significant rural American eras came to an end.

Preserving some local history out on the Wheatland prairie…

So I went back to the old neighborhood last Saturday to help celebrate the new name of Tamarack Settlement Park.

Formerly carrying the anodyne name Northwest Community Park, the 30.4 acre site is located just down the road from my grandparents’ farm and a couple miles south of the farm my folks worked until I was eight years old.

Tina Beaird wears a big smile as her dream of commemorating the old Tamarack settlement created by 19th Century Scots immigrants in the mid-19th Century came true with the dedication of the park’s new name on April 23.

Thanks to the activism of my friend Tina Beaird, the Plainfield Park District agreed to rename the park to commemorate the Scots settlers who arrived in the late 1840s and early 1850s to settle the (literally) treeless prairie between Plainfield and Oswego. According to W.W. Stevens writing about the 36 square mile Wheatland Township in Past and Present of Will County, Illinois (1907), “It is wholly prairie, there never having been to exceed five acres of timber in the whole township.”

Stephen Findlay and family arrived in the area in 1844 and put down deep roots—his family still lives in the area. Other Scots including the Clow, McMicken, Gilmour, King, McLaren, and Stewart families soon joined them. Then in 1852, Thomas Burnett also arrived after a circuitous journey from his native Scotland.

Born in 1811 the son of a weaver, Burnett too took up the weaving trade until 1834 when he decided to try his luck across the Atlantic in the United States. According to his biography, he first stopped in Saratoga County, N.Y., then tried his luck west in Michigan before returning east to Connecticut and then New York again. But in 1852, he decided to try his luck prairie farming in Illinois, settling in the Findlays’ Scots settlement in which eventually became Will County’s Wheatland Township.

This 1873 plat map illustrates the heavy population of Scots settlers living around the old Tamarack Post Office. Modern Heggs Road runs due north and south past the post office, while modern 127th Street (Simons Road in Kendall County) runs east and west.

Sometime during his travels, Burnett had apparently become fond of tamarack trees. Although appearing to be evergreens, tamaracks lose their needles during the winter and regrow them each spring. They favor wetlands with plenty of sunshine—which really doesn’t describe Wheatland Township, but Burnett brought some along with him anyway and planted them near the intersection of modern 127^th Street and Heggs Road. And thus the intersection soon became known as Tamarack Corners and the surrounding area as the Tamarack neighborhood.

The area got it’s own post office soon after Burnett arrived with his tamarack trees. The Tamarack Post Office opened on Dec. 8, 1858 in a private residence at the northwest corner of the 127^th Street-Heggs Road intersection.

Then a couple years later, the Tamarack School was built at the southeast corner of the intersection on a small parcel owned by Scots farmer John Brown. The small frame building housed grades 1-8, and served an area a couple miles in diameter. The goal of rural school districts was to make sure students didn’t have to walk more than around a mile and a half to class. Generations of students went through Tamarack School for their first eight grades—and for most of them those were all the grades they finished.

Tamarack School as it looked in 1940

Eventually, blacksmith William Narin opened a shop a short distance east of the intersection on 127^th Street, next to the house of ditch digger James Narin.

Postmaster Hugh Allen not only managed the post office, but also maintained a small store as well, a common practice for the thousands of rural postmasters across the nation. And, in fact, Allen’s small store was the only store within the bounds of Wheatland Township for several years.

In May 1848, a group of Scots Presbyterians met at Stephen Findlay’s home and established the Wheatland Presbyterian Church. Their first church building was erected a mile north of Tamarack Corners at the intersection of Heggs and Scotch Church roads in 1856. The original church building was replaced by a much larger structure in 1906 that still stands, and which, as the Wheatland United “Scotch” Presbyterian Church, is still attended by some of the descendants of the congregation’s original founders.

The old neighborhood in its modern guise, with subdivisions popping up all around it.

While some small rural crossroads hamlets grew into legitimate villages, many, including Tamarack, did not. It’s possible that the decision to locate the Scotch Church a mile north of Tamarack inhibited its growth. Certainly, the advent of the U.S. Post Office’s Rural Free Delivery in 1896 led to a major change in rural lifestyles as many small country post offices closed. The Tamarack Post Office closed its doors on April 15, 1901. And without the post office revenue, Allen’s tiny store could not succeed. Instead, the store’s business moved a few miles away to Normantown on the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway’s line running from Plainfield to Aurora. While Normantown’s post office (1893-1903) was also a casualty of Rural Free Delivery, the small hamlet’s grain elevator proved a big enough draw to lure customers to the store there, which later also added gasoline to their product line to serve the growing number of automobiles. When the U.S. Route 30—the Lincoln Highway—was finally rerouted and paved from Plainfield to Aurora following the railroad right-of-way, the store became a forerunner of what we’d call a mini-mart these days.

Tamarack School also eventually closed in the late 1940s, consolidating with Church School a mile north just across Scotch Church Road from the Scotch Church.

By the time I was growing up a mile north of the Scotch Church in the late 1940s and early 1950s, only two private homes marked the former Tamarack intersection hamlet. All that remained of Tamarack School was the hand pump on the old well. The post office and blacksmith shop had disappeared without a trace.

Strangely enough, my grandparents’ small farmhouse about a quarter mile west of Tamarack Corners still stands, though surrounded by the Wheatland Plains Subdivision.

Nevertheless, I spent quite a bit of time in that neighborhood, staying with my grandparents just up the road a bit and visiting with the Bowers, who had remodeled one of the two remaining houses at the intersection. Their son, Bob, was three years older than I, but we still had a good time playing together, and would often walk down the road to where it crossed a small creek to play in the running water as I imagine boys had been doing since those first Scots settlers arrived.

“Weren’t your parents worried about the traffic as you walked down there?” my wife wondered as she watched cars and trucks whizzing by on now-paved 127^th Street. And I had to explain that other than the mail carrier, Ralton Sillers making his daily rounds, there wasn’t any traffic to speak of back in those days.

And that spot where we played so many years ago is now a naturalized wetland and part of Tamarack Settlement Park. It is kind of nice to know that as all the former farms that once surrounded Tamarack Corners develop and become covered with new homes that at least a piece of the old landscape will be preserved, even including some of the very native prairie plants the Findlays and Burnetts and those other families saw when they arrived all those many years ago.

It’s past time to recognize African Americans’ long history in Kendall County

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 County Record 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.