While there are lots of places on the Internet that it’s wise to avoid, there are many other sites that are well worth a visit. One of those sites that I’ve been having lots of fun with during the past several months is the “Oswego Then and Now” page on Facebook.
The site is a haven for those nostalgic for the Oswego that was, especially those who’ve moved away, as well as a fun and friendly place for current residents to reconnect with old friends, reminisce about the village’s past, and—even for us natives—learn new things about the area. It’s networking at its very best.
The east side of Main between Washington and Jackson streets in 1958 just as Oswego was beginning its first major growth spurt since the 1830s and changing from catering to the surrounding agricultural area to becoming an ever-expanding suburban community. (Little White School Museum collection)
A recurring theme for many posters is alarm and, often, dismay and even anger at the profound changes the community has undergone, especially during the past 60 years or so. Which is understandable, given Oswego’s population has multiplied 20 times during that period, irrevocably turning the community from the small farm town it was to the still-growing suburban community it is today.
For those of us who have continually lived in the community longer than that 50-year time period, however, the growth has definitely been surprising, but is only truly new in the shear amount of it recently.
Because Oswego, its surrounding township, and Kendall County itself actually began a radical change from its former overwhelmingly rural character to a fast-growing urbanizing area soon after World War II ended.
The era of rapid change developed due to a few factors, the first three of which, as real estate dealers always insist on putting it, were location, location, location. The city of Chicago is the engine that powers growth in northern Illinois, especially the extreme post-World War II urbanization that quickly spread to the six collar counties surrounding the city and its county of Cook.
Kendall County is the only non-Collar County that borders on three of the Collar Counties surrounding Chicago and Cook County. This made it a target for profound growth and change after World War II.
Kendall, you see, is the only non-collar county that borders three—Kane, DuPage, and Will—of those fast-growing areas.
Couple Kendall County’s location, location, location with the modernization of the region’s road system that began after World War I and the advent and perfection of economical, dependable motor vehicles from cars to buses to trucks, plus the technological agricultural advances that meant fewer farmers and less farmland were required to produce ever-increasing amounts of crops and livestock on less and less land, and you’ve created a recipe for profound change. And keep in mind that change doesn’t always lead to growth.
All it needed was a kick to get our small corner of Illinois’ growth started, and that was provided by the post-World War II economic boom of the 1950s. That was fueled by the largest governmental aid programs in history, known as the G.I. Bills. The young men and women returning home after the war were hungry to start their own families and buy their own homes. Also, many of them looked to further their educations in order to get ahead in increasingly corporate America. And the G.I. Bills funded both of those things, at least for most of those who had served.
The county’s population boom started here in northeastern Kendall County with the sprawling Boulder Hill Subdivision, a planned community fueled mainly by low-interest G.I. loans and supported by industrial expansion by giant manufacturing firms ranging from Caterpillar, Inc. to AT&T, not to mention long-established area firms from All-Steel to Equipto to Lyon Metal to Barber-Greene.
Model homes on Briarcliff Road in Boulder Hill in September 1958 appealed to those eligible for G.I. Loans, with no money down and low interest rates. (Photo by Bev Skaggs in the collections of the Little White School Museum)
That first tranche of growth from the mid-1950s through the 1970s created the first major change as the Oswego area saw itself change from dependent on providing agricultural support services to becoming a bedroom community, the vast majority of whose residents had no connection with farming at all. Instead, they commuted not just out of Oswego but also north and east out of Kendall County to staff the Fox Valley’s surging industrial base.
And that was about the time I got into the local journalism business, first as a historical columnist for the old Fox Valley Sentinel and then in 1980 becoming the editor of the Ledger-Sentinel after the Sentinel and Oswego Ledger merged.
In fact, the single biggest news story we covered for the next several decades after the Ledger-Sentinel was established was growth and the profound changes it wrought in Oswego and the rest of Kendall County and the Fox Valley.
My interest in how local history dovetailed with what was happening in the rest of North America and the world gave me, I think, a useful perspective on what was happening here in the Fox Valley.
Change, it was clear, was the most important governing historical factor and had been for centuries. The cultures of the region’s indigenous people had constantly undergone change since they had arrived as the last Ice Age ended. Their descendants, then, were forcibly displaced by the White descendants of European colonists who had arrived on the Atlantic coast in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.
In the Treaty of Chicago, signed in 1833, the indegenous people of northern Illinois signed away the rest of their rights to their lands. It would lead, in three years, to the tribes being forced to remove west of the Mississippi River to secure the region for White settlement. (“The Last Council of the Pottawatomies, 1833,” by Lawrence C. Earle, 1902)
Illinois’ inclusion in the new United States was partially confirmed as the result of the Revolutionary War, and was finally assured by the treaty ending the War of 1812. The various wars with the region’s indigenous people that finally ended in northern Illinois in 1832 resulted in their forcible expulsion to areas west of the Mississippi River. And that, in turn, opened the region to the flood of White settlement that forever changed the area’s very landscape.
The U.S. Civil War of the 1860s also had a profound effect on the Fox Valley. Even though fighting took place hundreds of miles away, nearly 10 percent of the county’s entire population served, and more than 200 died. The end of the war saw Kendall County’s population steadily decline during the next century due to a number of factors. Among those factors was the 1862 Homestead Act that used the lure of free land to persuade farmers to head west to try their luck on the trans-Mississippi shortgrass prairies.
Not until the next historical inflection point was reached after World War II did the character of the county and, especially, our corner of it begin to profoundly change once again.
Downtown Oswego immediately after World War II, where businesses primarily catered to the surrounding agricultural area was about to begin an era of change that is still taking place today. (Little White School Museum collection)
And so here we find ourselves looking back on what proved to be a period of extraordinary, sometimes chaotic social, economic, and population change as what so many of us remember as the unchanging halcyon days of our youth. Because Oswego’s always been a great place for kids to grow up; it’s still one of the safest towns in Illinois. And besides, when we were kids, our parents were the ones who did the worrying.
These days, Oswego’s Little White School Museum has become the main repository where as many pieces of the area’s history and heritage as possible are being collected, safely stored, and interpreted before they’re lost forever. The collection keeps growing as us volunteers frantically work to save as much Oswego history as we can before it’s either paved over or pitched into a Dumpster.
So with those aims in view, at noon this coming Saturday, May 4, the museum—located at 72 Polk Street in Oswego—will host another program dedicated to chronicling some of that disappearing history. As its title suggests, “Lost Oswego” will be look at the community landmarks that have been lost through the years, losses that in many cases are far from recent. In addition, the program will recount some of the community’s public and private preservation successes that are helping remind us of the Oswego area’s rich history and heritage.
The program’s sponsored by the museum and the Oswegoland Heritage Association. Admission will be $5, with proceeds going to benefit the museum’s operations. Reservations can be made by calling the Oswegoland Park District at 630-554-1010 or visiting the museum program page at bit.ly/LWSMPrograms—or you can walk in on Saturday and pay at the door.
Northern Illinois is beginning, believe it or not, to edge its way into true spring these days, which means the April showers we’ve been experiencing this past week will persuade all those May flowers to begin peaking out of the ground. Of course, the earliest spring flowers, hardy fellows that they are, have already been growing in the increasingly strong sunlight for several weeks now—especially with the unusually warm weather of the past few months.
Goose Lake Prairie south of Morris gives a hint of what Kendall County’s prairies looked like when their spring and early summer flowers bloomed.
Back in the 1820s and 1830s when the first hardy pioneers arrived in the area along both sides of the Fox River, from Waubonsie Creek to the north and south to the AuSable flowing on its way to the Illinois River, they found upland prairies dotted with open groves of hardwoods that sometimes merged with the belts to trees growing along the creeks that drained the area in what would one day become Kendall County.
Timber, scarce as it was, provided building materials for everything from homes, farm buildings, and fences. It was the settlers’ old and familiar friend. What was new to those new prairie farmers and other settlers, and sometimes not a little intimidating, was all that prairie land stretching sometimes to the horizon like an unbroken stretch of ocean—a sea of grass.
Virtually everyone who left an account of their first few years on the Illinois prairie provided a list of superlatives. And it’s fortunate we are that some of those accounts survive to let us glimpse what those early travelers and settlers found and felt.
Harriet Martineau, in an 1833 portrait. Three years later, she left a moving description of the Illinois prairie outside Joliet.
The fascinating English author, abolitionist, and sociologist Harriet Martineau, visited northern Illinois in 1836, and left a vivid record of the beauty of the Illinois prairie she saw near Joliet. She told of the beauty of the American primroses and the “…difficulty in distinguishing distances on the prairie. The feeling is quite bewildering. A man walking near looked like a Goliath a mile off.”
Her dinner one evening consisted of tea, bread, potatoes, and wild strawberries, of which a whole pail-full had been gathered around the house in which she was staying in only an hour’s time. She remarked about the beauty of the blue spiderwort in full bloom, and of prairies being “perfectly level—a treeless expanse with groves like islands in the distance, and a line of wood on the verge.”
As the seasons progressed, the grasses and broad-leafed plants comprising the prairie ecology dried, providing plenty of fuel for autumn and spring prairie fires. In October 1835, Methodist circuit rider Alfred Brunsen wrote of northern Illinois prairie fires, noting that he had traveled by prairie fire light at night: “By the light of this fire we could read fine print for ½ a mile or more. And the light reflected from the cloud of smoke enlightened our road for miles after the blaze of the fire was out of sight.”
George M. Hollenback portrait from the 1914 history of Kendall County.
George Hollenback, one of the first two white children born in Kendall County (his twin sister Amelia was the other), left a description of prairie fires he recalled from his childhood. His memory of them was both exciting and alarming. He recalled seeing, as a child, as many as 50 fires burning at one time within sight of the Hollenback homestead near modern Newark in southern Kendall County, reflecting their light in the clouds on autumn evenings.
“Early settlers protected themselves by ploughing [sic] wide and numerous furrows around their fields and their stockyards,” wrote Hollenback.
Backfires were often started to protect houses and property as well as plowing furrows to create firebreaks. The band of blackened prairie grass burned in the backfire usually stopped the on-rushing prairie fire dead in its tracks.
Prairie fires like this controlled burn at the Nature Conservancy’s Nachusa Grasslands near Franklin Grove cleared out understory shrubs creating the open savanna-type groves the settlers found when they arrived. The fires were both set by natural causes–lightning strikes–or intentionally set by the area’s Native People to modify their environment.
Prairie fires were usually pushed along by the prevailing winds on the Illinois prairies. That meant prairie fires most often came out of the west, and traveled eastward on the front of westerly winds. Old maps of Kendall County show that the timber on the western edge of the Fox River and the creeks in the county was much less dense that on the eastern edge, the trees on the west side thinned by the annual fires driven by those westerlies. There were generally fewer species of trees on those fire-prone western edges, too, with white and burr oaks and other more fire-resistent kinds predominating. (For a more in-depth discussion of the impact prairie fires had in Illinois, click here.)
A number of early Kendall County settlers left accounts of what Kendall County looked like when they arrived, just before settlement changed the prairies forever by converting them into farmland. Mary Elizabeth Jeneson, a member of Oswego’s Nineteenth Century Club, read a paper to the club in 1906, in which she stated: “No words of mine can convey to you the vastness, the grandeur and beauty of the natural prairie in 1850 when I first came to Oswego. The music of the big frogs down in the slough and the drumming of prairie chickens must have been heard to be appreciated. The Fox River was pretty then. Its banks furnished attractions for those who liked a stroll—a sort of Lovers’ Lane, in fact.”
Avery Beebe portrait from the 1914 history of Kendall County.
In 1914, Avery N. Beebe, an early Kendall County resident and elected official, offered his recollections of of how the area appeared to county pioneers: “This little chosen spot of God’s heritage, selected by the sturdy old pioneers of Kendall County, has been richly blessed with all the advantages that kind nature ever bestows: with its clear silvery streams, the Blackberry, the Big Rock, the Little Rock, the Aux Sable, the Waubonsia, the Rob Roy, the Clark, the Hollenback, and the Morgan, that pour their pure crystal liquids into the placid Fox and Illinois Rivers. All of these were densely skirted with abundant timbers for the use of the early settlers to construct the primitive log cabin, supply it with fuel, and establish the forest home in the wilds of the West; as it was then called.”
Change has been ongoing in northern Illinois in general and Kendall County in particular since the first pioneer wagons pulled up along the banks of the Fox River in 1828. During the last 50 years, that change accelerated as the county’s farmland—which itself replaced the stunning prairies described by the pioneers—has disappeared in job lots, with housing developments and shopping centers crowding out more and more open land. But on the positive side of the ledger, organized, serious efforts to preserve the region’s prairie past and the region’s remaining natural areas are continuing to grow.
The fascinating thing about volunteering down at Oswego’s Little White School Museum is you just never know what interesting bit of local history will walk through the door to brighten your day. And if your family has been lurking around these parts as long as mine has, sometimes those bits have a family connection, too.
A few weeks ago, one of those bits arrived when the son of a childhood friend of mine and his wife poked their heads in my office and said they had something that might interest me. And it did, both historically and personally.
Tom Kelly’s snuffbox, now in the collections of Oswego’s Little White School Museum. Tom and his brother, John, were reportedly orphaned by the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, and were then raised by John Peter and Amelia (Minnich) Lantz.
The hinge was missing from the lid on the small, oval-shaped copper-colored tinned box—quite obviously a snuffbox—he showed me, but otherwise it was in pretty good condition. Smiling, he suggested I look closely at what was scratched in the metal box lid, and after turning it to catch the light I could make out “Tom Kelly.”
He’d found it while cleaning out his great-grandparents’ attic, did a little internet research on Tom Kelly, which pointed him to my interest in Tom and his twin brother, John. How the snuffbox got to the attic of Jim and Elizabeth “Bess” McMicken is a complete mystery.
Back in July of 2012, about five months after I started this blog, I published a post about twin boys, orphaned by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, that my great-grandparents raised.
John Peter Lantz and Amelia Minnich on their wedding day, Feb. 16, 1869.
The story has a couple parts.
First, the twins’ story as recounted via family oral history. My great-grandparents, John Peter and Amelia (Minnich) Lantz, were married in 1869 out east of Oswego in Will County’s Wheatland Township and began farming out on the rich prairie on the family home place. In March 1871, their first child, a boy they named Isaac, was born.
Back in that day, farming was physically demanding for both the farmer and his wife, who had to work in a true partnership to make a go of the operation. Those farm wives, especially, had a difficult life. Common household tasks we take for granted these days, such as washing clothes, were complicated and labor-intensive back then. As a result, most farm couples who lived on large acerages like my great-grandparents had not only hired men to help with farming but also hired girls to help in the house.
But my Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors on my mother’s side were a thrifty lot—cheap, according to my dad—and they were grimly determined to spend as little money as possible on just about everything. But with a new baby to take care of along with all her other regular chores, my great-grandmother began demanding help of some kind.
Along about 1872, my great-grandfather, prodded into eventual action by his increasingly adamant wife, headed off to Chicago. The Great Chicago Fire had swept through the city in the fall of the year their son was born, killing some 300 people and creating a number of new orphans who joined the growing number of parentless children in the city. My great-grandmother, hearing about the availability of orphans, sent her husband into Chicago with orders to bring back an orphan girl to help around the house.
Left to right, Tom Kelly, my great-uncle Isaac Lafayette Lantz, and John Kelly. Tintype in Amelia Minnich Lantz’s photo album.
My great-grandfather was a soft touch and a bit of a dreamer, the kind of guy who dabbled in gold mining stocks bought from ads in the back of magazines and newspapers with hopes of getting rich—hopes that were invariably dashed. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that instead of coming home with an orphan girl to help his wife around the house, he ended up bring home two six year-old orphan boys, Tom and John Kelly.
Whether they were even actually orphaned by the great fire isn’t part of family lore but they were welcomed as part of the family, although I imagine somewhat grudgingly on my great-grandmother’s part.
The Kelly boys not only lived with my great grandparents, but by all accounts were treated like their own children. In fact, in the 1880 U.S. Census of Wheatland Township, Will County, they are both listed as my great-grandparents’ sons.
During that era, farm children were expected to work hard, both helping on their own family farms and also by being hired out to other families. Their daughter, my grandmother, for instance, was hired out to nearby families when she reached the age of 14. She had graduated eighth grade with good marks and had looked forward to attending high school—and even found a well-off Aurora family willing to offer her board and room in return for help around the house while she went to school, but my great-grandparents refused the offer and insisted she work for wages. Women, their feeling was, didn’t need an education.
The Kelly Twins standing in back and John Peter and Amelia Lantz pose for a photo at the Kindig studio in Naperville. I suspect this photo was taken on the twins’ 20th birthday when they were each gifted with $1,200 and a new suit by the Lantzes.
So the Kelly boys, too, were hired out in their teens. The Sept. 20, 1883 Kendall County Record reported from Oswego that “Dr. Putt has gone to Nebraska; also John and Tom Kelly.” At that time they were 17 years old.
When they reached the age of 20, my great-grandparents gave each of them a new suit of clothes and $1,200—that’s nearly $40,000 in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars—in order to make their ways in the world. They apparently used the money to buy a farm out near Hastings in the southeastern corner of Nebraska where they’d gone with Dr. William T. Putt back in 1883.
John Kelly’s tombstone in the Scotch Church Cemetery. (Jim Seidelman photo)
Eventually, however, they came back to Illinois and worked on various farms around the Oswego and Wheatland Township areas, John dying in 1916 and Tom living until 1929. They’re both buried in the Wheatland United Presbyterian “Scotch” Church Cemetery out in Wheatland Township.
Tom Kelly’s Scotch Church Cemetery tombstone. (Jim Seidelman photo)
I’ve heard about the twins my entire life, as part of our family’s lore. Photos of the boys came down to me through my grandmother’s family, a couple tintypes and some cabinet photos. And their burial records are part of the collections at the Little White School Museum. But Tom Kelly’s snuffbox is the first tangible item I’ve ever seen that one of them actually owned and used.
Down at the museum, you just never know what interesting bit of local history will walk through the door to brighten your day.
Between 1840 and 1858 seven of the nine living children of Johann Leonhard Burkhart immigrated to the United States from Birkach, Bavaria
Initially settling in and near Little Falls, New York, the first to arrive, Johann’s daughter, Margaret, met and married John Hem, a farmer and stonemason. From there, Barbara and John sent money back to Bavaria to, one-by-one, bring six of her siblings across the Atlantic to join her.
Not finding New York to their liking, however, the growing German immigrant extended family looked west to Illinois where they heard rich land was available at affordable prices. So during the winter of 1843-44, a 12-member family group of Hems, Burkharts, Haags, and Fausts headed west to Chicago.
Georg Leonhard Burkhart’s 1843 sailing ticket to the U.S. English translation: Leonhard Burkhart, Birkach has paid the fare for passage and accompanying baggage in the middle deck on the ocean crossing aboard the ship Alwina under Captain Krensfeld for New York only for one adult and child [with space for number of accompanying child/ children lined through] Bremen, May 31, 1843. Fried. Jacob Hichelhausen. (Little White School Museum collection)
Fast-growing, boisterous, muddy, swampy Chicago was definitely not what these immigrant German farmers were looking for, so they moved farther west, arriving in Kendall County’s Oswego Township in 1844. The families chose to claim land east of the growing village of Oswego along what is now known as Wolf’s Crossing Road on what was known locally as the Oswego Prairie. The Hems started with an 80-acre farm.
George Leonard and Anna Margaret Brunnemeyer Burkhart. (Little White School Museum collection)
Margaret’s younger brother, Georg Leonhard Burkhart—who quickly shortened his name to Leonard—soon bought his own 80-acre farm bordering the Hems’ to the north. Marrying Anna Margaret Brunnemeyer on Christmas Day, 1848 in Naperville, the young couple set out farming and raising a family. They were extraordinarily successful at both, being able to eventually gifting each of their eight children with their own farms or the monetary equivalent on their wedding days.
Their son, Leonard Frederick Burkhart, born on the family farm in 1859, but apparently grew up looking to be something more than just a farmer like the rest of his siblings. In 1881, he married Otilda Philopena Lang. Like Leonard’s parents, the couple turned their energy towards farming and building a family—but only briefly.
Because, as it turned out, Leonard Fred (as he was known), despite the farming that had been in their parents’ blood for generations, would also figure prominently in Oswego’s in-town business community, including giving the family name to one of Oswego’s most familiar commercial buildings.
Leonard Frederick and Otilda’s son, Oliver Andrew Burkhart, read law, became an attorney, was elected Kendall County State’s Attorney and was a federal court commissioner, as well as being the long-time Oswego Village Attorney. Along with that, he also invested in Oswego’s business community and became an early adopter of automotive technology—he was one of Oswego’s first automobile dealers.
The Oswego Banking Company was established in the south storefront of the Schickler Block in 1904. (Little White School Museum collection)
Then in 1904, F.H. Earl and D.M. Jay of Plano announced plans to open a bank in Oswego. E.W. Bowman of the Bowman Bank in Kalamazoo, Michigan was also interested in the new firm, named the Oswego Banking Company. Floyd Phelps was hired to run the enterprise, which located in the Schickler Building at the northwest corner of Main and Washington streets in Oswego.
The new bank opened in January 1904.
During the summer of that same year, Leonard Fred Burkhart acquired the private bank, and installed his son, Oliver A. Burkhart as the banker replacing Phelps.
But the space in the Schickler building was limited and Leonard Fred had his eye on the lot kitty-corner from the bank’s location.
In January 1908, he bought what was known as “the Smith Corner” at the southeast corner of the Main and Washington intersection with the intent to build a new brick block to house the family’s bank as well as other businesses.
The storey and a half frame building that occupied the site was a venerable old structure dating back several decades. But to make room for his new commercial block, the old had to go.
To make way for his new brick commercial block, Leonard Fred Burkhart had to clear the corner site. By the time construction began only the Greek Revival frame building at the corner was still standing. (Little White School Museum collection)
As the Kendall County Record reported from Oswego on April 1, 1908: “Oswego village is to have a new bank and office building. It will be a brick block, situated on the corner where the electric cars turn to cross the trestle on the site formerly occupied by the waiting station. The old building has been torn down and with its razing one of the oldest landmarks of the village passes away. The new structure is being built by L.F. Burkhart, the Oswego banker; and the bank will be located in it, and the rest of the building will consist of offices for the professional men of Oswego.”
With construction underway, Leonard Fred began casting about for tenants, and instantly found one in his son, Oliver’s auto dealership partnership with his cousin, Charles Shoger. The pair had been selling autos to Oswego residents for some years, eventually dealing in cars manufactured by E.M.F., the Flanders (eventually bought out by Studebaker), Jackson, Empire, Olds, Carter, and Studebaker. A set of gasoline pumps was also considered for the future.
The completed Burkhart Block housed (left to right) the Burkhart & Shoger Garage, the Oswego State Bank, the Oswego Post Office, and the Oswego telephone exchange. This photo of the building was taken about 1913 by Dwight Young. Little White School Museum collection)
But with the auto dealership facing Washington Street and his bank in the corner suite with its unique corner doorway, Burkhart needed more businesses to fill out the block’s two storefronts that would face South Main Street. In business, timing is often the most crucial factor leading to success, and that was certainly the case with Burkhart’s new building.
The Burkhart & Shoger Garage, owned by Oliver A. Burkhart (left) and Charles Shoger (right) on Washington Street just east of Main, in 1914. Burkhart and Shoger were dealers for EMF and Studebaker autos with four new ones parked in front in this photo. Little White School Museum collection)
The Oswego Post Office, which had been located in the false-front frame building across the alley from the Union Block on the east side of Main Street since the 1870s, was becoming cramped and the postmaster was looking for a new home, one that Burkhart was happy to offer to him.
The Chicago Telephone Company’s new switchboard in the Burkhart Block in March 1911. Above, Orma Young Shoger connects a caller while Ina Huntoon handles other calls. (Little White School Museum collection)
Further, the Chicago Telephone Company’s Oswego switchboard (later Illinois Bell Telephone) had outgrown its home on the second floor above Cutter’s Drug Store and was looking for a new, larger, location. Burkhart suggested he had just the spot for them, and they quickly took him up on the idea.
By the end of January 1912, all the businesses had moved into the new Burkhart Block, where they were all slated to remain for the next several decades—with a few changes.
Oliver’s brother, Clinton, joined the banking business early on, and continued as the bank president for many years. He was also elected Oswego Village President for several terms. He continued with the bank until it closed due to the combined effects of the Great Depression and a daring 1932 daylight robbery. After the Oswego State Bank was forced to close, Oswego didn’t become home to another bank until the Oswego Community Bank was established in 1958.
Interior shot of the Oswego State Bank, probably taken in 1913 shortly after it opened at the corner of Main and Washington streets. (Mark Harrington collection)
In 1925, Oliver Burkhart’s younger brother, Ralph M. “Burkie” Burkhart, bought the car business, renaming it the R.M. Burkhart Garage. He became a Pontiac dealer in 1934 and operated the business there until he retired in 1971, selling the business to Jim Detzler, who maintained the “Ugly Little Showroom” until moving out of downtown to larger quarters at Zero Boulder Hill Pass. When Detzler assumed ownership of the dealership, it was the first time since the Burkhart Block was built that a Burkhart wasn’t involved in a business located in it.
The Oswego Post Office continued in the Burkhart Block until the Postmaster George Bartholomew decided to move it to larger quarters in the Schickler Block across the intersection due to the community’s accelerating population growth. The facility moved in late March 1958 and remained there for a decade until Oswego’s “new” post office—the current, badly cramped facility at Madison and Jackson—opened in 1969.
Burkhart’s Garage, with gas pumps, during World War II in 1942. (Little White School Museum collection)
And while Illinois Bell’s old Oswego switchboard was replaced by automatic dial equipment in 1939, the storefront they occupied in 1911 continued to be their Oswego home until 1969 when the new automated switching station opened at Washington Street and Ill. Route 71. In 1971, the new facility allowed Illinois Bell’s Oswego customers to be the first in Illinois to receive speed dialing, conference calling, call forwarding, and call waiting services.
The Burkhart Block, with businesses (left to right) Burkhart Pontiac, the Kopper Kettle, the Jacqueline Shop, and Illinois Bell Telephone’s switching station. Photo by Homer Durand in the collections of the Little White School Museum.
With the departure of its core occupants, the Burkhart Block became the home of many other enterprises over the years. For instance, the old post office storefront became the location of the first Jacqueline Shop women’s clothing store when Jackie and Ken Pickerill opened it in 1957. The upscale store moved to the historic A.O. Parke Building at Main and Jackson in 1960.
Other businesses in the Burkhart Block have ranged through the years from the Kopper Kettle restaurant to the Elmer Fudge candy store to the Booze Bin liquor store. Today, the building is still a popular location for a variety of retail businesses.
As we witness the tide of development currently flowing across what was once some of the nation’s most productive farmland, many of us can’t help but be saddened by the obliteration of whole farmsteads.
On almost a daily basis, barns, silos, corn cribs, and houses that were once—and not all that long ago, either—the hearts of working farms are bulldozed or burned to make way for new housing and commercial developments.
Even on the shrinking number of working farms still left in the Fox Valley many of those familiar farm buildings are being torn down or torched because they’re obsolete. With dairying and livestock raising left to ever-bigger agribusiness specialists, the dairy barns, cattle sheds, and hog and chicken houses that were once vital to the region’s diversified farm operations are about as useful as buggy whips for area commuters. Even so, many of those no longer useful buildings are still maintained by some farmers because they hold fond memories of the past.
This tendency of farmers to hold on to buildings and even farm equipment long after their usefulness has passed is not a new thing. It’s been going on for decades—probably centuries—and will likely continue until the last farmer is finally ousted by some robotic creation that will automatically till, plant, and harvest fields in the distant future.
When I was a youngster, for instance, pyramidal-shaped steel windmill towers still stood in many a farm yard, even though rural electrification had brought the wonders of water systems pressurized by electrical pumps to farms a decade or two earlier. A few of those old windmills still had the actual wind engines mounted atop them, with pump rods still attached to the well pumps at their base. And a few farmers still used the old windmills to pump water up out of farm wells to keep stock tanks full, saving a few dollars on electricity in doing so.
The windmill tower on the Minkler farm out of Minkler Road south of Oswego, was brand new and built of wood when this photo was taken in 1895. (Little White School Museum collection)
In fact, windmills were the way water was provided in town and country for almost a century, and windmill manufacture provided jobs for thousands. Batavia’s current self-description as the “Windmill City” offers modern evidence of that, although it’s safe to say few of the city’s residents realize how important windmills were to the economic development of Illinois and the rest of the Midwest.
1875 Marshall Wind Engine Manufacturing Company advertisement from the Kendall County Record.
While Batavia is best-known locally for its windmill manufacturers, the truth is that most towns boasted a windmill factory at one time or another, even my one-time small farming community of Oswego here in northern Illinois. In the summer of 1870, a group of local businessmen formed the Oswego Manufacturing Company to manufacture, under license, the Marshall Wind Engine Company’s windmills. It took a few years to get underway but by the early 1870s was manufacturing windmills in a small building on the north bank of Waubonsie Creek owned by Asahel Newton. The Marshall Wind Engines were unusual in that they featured a solid wheel, and not one with separate vanes. Soon after, another company, Armstrong & Buchanan, also began manufacturing wind engines in Oswego.
The idea behind water pumping windmills was pretty simple. The wind engine was mounted atop a tall tower. On the engine itself, a large fan-shaped blade, called the wheel, was turned by the wind. The rotary motion of the fan was turned into angular up-and-down energy through a gearbox called the motor. That up-and-down motion was harnessed by attaching a long shaft, the pump rod, to a regular water pump whose handle had been replaced by a pump jack. By that means, wind power instead of human muscle power pumped water.
Not that windmills were all that simple as machines, of course. They were quite ingenious, in fact. For instance, the motor and fan also had a tail and vane that kept the wheel headed directly into the wind thanks to the turntable on the mast post. But you don’t necessarily always want the wheel facing the wind. During a windstorm, for instance, the wheel and attached machinery could be damaged by turning too fast. So a method was provided via a cable and crank mounted near the ground that allowed the tail and fan to be folded together so that the fan blade could be turned into a giant windvane and kept parallel instead of perpendicular to the wind. Many wheels also were equipped with brakes that could be applied from the ground to regulate the speed. The gearing of the wheel and the way the rotary energy it produced was turned into angular motion required to operate the pump was also clever and was patented by a variety of wind engine manufacturers.
Water pumped by windmills was generally channeled into an outdoor tank for livestock or pumped a bit higher up into an elevated water tank to provide water pressure for farm homes. Sometimes, farms had more than one well, a shallow one for livestock and a deeper one for the house, both with their own windmills.
By the early 20th Century, windmill towers were being manufactured of steel members, which were stronger and far less maintenance-intensive. This photo was taken about 1910 on one of the farms in the Harvey Threshing Ring east of Oswego. (Little White School Museum collection)
On the farm my father grew up on in Kansas, the well to provide water for the farm was located a long distance from the house because that’s where the best site for the well was located. Drinkable water in that region where alkali water is most common is hard to come by. The well water was pumped into an elevated tank at the well and then piped the fairly long distance to the farmstead.
In the era before electric pumps became commonly available, windmills were also erected in town, often on building roofs where they’d pump water up to tanks where pipes would then feed the buildings below by gravity flow.
Old abandoned grain binders were still common on farms 60 years ago even though their tasks had been taken over by combined harvesters in the 1940s and 1950s.
When I was a youngster back in the 1950s, windmills weren’t the only obsolete items sitting around farms. Many farms still retained their old outhouses despite having indoor plumbing, while smokehouses with their wonderful aromas were also fairly common throughout the countryside—as well as in town. With the advent of cheaper store-bought food, home smoking went the way of home canning meat, but the smokehouses remained as reminders of that earlier, more self-sufficient era.
Obsolete farm equipment, too, dotted area farmsteads. Rare was the farm that didn’t have an old binder sitting out behind the barn, overgrown with morning glory vines. Binders had been used in the harvest of small grains such as oats and barley before combine harvesters came on the scene. They provided wonderful climbing toys for us farm kids.
For years old windmill towers stood, many minus their wind engines. The angle iron that made up the towers was used by thrifty farmers for a variety of projects, including farm equipment repairs. Some of those towers are still standing today, but they, along with the other trappings of farming’s “old” days, are now disappearing forever as rural ways and days are replaced by suburbia.
Back in the 1960s, some young German relatives of good friends of ours came to visit the U.S. They flew into California and then said they wanted to travel from there to my (then) small northern Illinois hometown to visit their American relatives.
Which was fine, but when they told our friends they planned to take neither a train nor a plane, but a bus from California to northern Illinois our friends tried really hard to talk them out of it, attempting to stress just how much space separates California and Illinois. But the German visitors were adamant. After all, they said, they’d taken buses all the way across Germany, and California to Illinois was only about two-thirds of the way across the U.S.
Three days later, they arrived in Chicago, thoroughly tired of being jounced around in uncomfortable bus seats, astounded by the size of the fraction of the U.S. they’d just traveled across—and having gained a new appreciation for the shear size of North America.
I thought about those two German girls as I recently read Ian Frazier’s Great Plains, a book recommended to me by my friend Judy Wheeler. “It reads like fiction,” she said, and I did find it really entertaining. Although first published 34 years ago, Frazier’s book holds up extremely well as he weaves stories of the Great Plains’ residents and ecology, their Native People, White traders and trappers, military personnel, and pioneers who arrived with great hopes that so many of them saw dashed in the end.
As Frazier notes, no state lies entirely in the region officially termed the Great Plains. Instead, the area includes eastern portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Texas; and western portions of North and South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma and all the way north into three Canadian provences.
The Great Plains are drier than their neighbors to the east, and are often sometimes called the shortgrass prairie to describe the former dominant plant life that grew there. That differentiates them from the tallgrass prairie, called the Prairie Peninsula by geographers, that starts in the eastern portions of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas and then extends east in a rough triangle that includes western Minnesota, nearly all of Iowa and northeastern Missouri, almost all of Illinois north of the state’s heavily forested southern tip, and a small triangular point reaching into northwestern Indiana.
The Great Plains and the Prairie Peninsula share something in common—besides almost limitless grasslands—and that’s the awe they inspired with the pioneers and often continue to inspire today.
In Frazier’s book, he recounts taking a friend visiting him in the mountains of Montana east to see and experience the Great Plains, something she was entirely unprepared for.
“We left the park [Glacier National Park] and turned onto U.S. Highway 89. A driver coming down this road gets the most dramatic first glimpse of the Great Plains I’ve ever seen,” he wrote. “For some miles, pine trees and foothills are all around; then, suddenly, there is nothing across the road but sky, and a sign says HILL, Trucks Gear Down, and you come over a little rise, and the horizon jumps a hundred miles away in an instant. My friend’s jaw—her whole face, really—fell, and she said, “I had no idea!”
The earliest pioneers had pretty much the same reaction to the Prairie Peninsula when they emerged onto the Grand Prairie from the Eastern Deciduous Forest of huge hardwoods in western Indiana. For some, it was a vision of farming without the intense labor of cutting timber and laboriously removing stumps before crops could be planted. Others, meanwhile, worried about where they’d find the trees to cut to supply the vast amounts of timber pioneering technology in the first half of the 19th Century required. Still others were nearly overcome by the shear amount of open space, their vision extending to the far horizon, interrupted only by a few tree-lined creeks and isolated hardwood groves.
One of the earliest accounts by folks leaving the eastern forest and emerging on the Illinois prairie was left in 1817 by Englishman George Flower. He and his partner Morris Birkbeck established a British colony in southeast Illinois. His account was included in The Early Illinois Prairie by William Roger Harshbarger, written for the Douglas County, Illinois Historical Society in 2016: “Bruised by the brushwood and exhausted by the extreme heat we almost despaired, when a small cabin and a low fence greeted our eyes. A few steps more and a beautiful prairie suddenly opened to our view. At first, we only received the impressions of its general beauty. With longer gaze, all its distinctive features were revealed, lying in profound repose under the warm light of an afternoon’s summer sun. Its indented and irregular outline of wood, its varied surface interspersed with clumps of oaks of centuries’ growth, its tall grass, with seed stalks from six to ten feet high, like tall and slender reeds waving in a gentle breeze, the whole presenting a magnificence of park-scenery, complete from the hand of Nature, and unrivalled by the same sort of scenery by European art. For once, the reality came up to the picture of imagination.”
Ferdinand Ernst, an early German traveler in Indiana and Illinois was similarly bowled over: “On the 11th of July [1819], I, in company with ten travelers on horse, crossed the Wabash and entered the State of Illinois. If the traveler from the coast of the Atlantic Ocean to this point has grown weary of the endless journey in the forests, then he believes himself transferred to another region of the world as soon as he crosses the Wabash and beholds those great prairies alternating with little wooded districts.”
The prairie vistas here in Kendall County also drew approval from early visitors. In his 1877 county history, the Rev. E.W. Hicks writes of two of the county’s early settlers: “Among those who came out prospecting in the spring of 1831 were Earl Adams and Ebenezer Morgan from New York. They descended the Ohio to the Mississippi, and then up to St. Louis, where buying ponies, they followed the banks of the Illinois river to Ottawa, and up the Fox to Yorkville. Reining up their horses on the present Court House Hill, they gazed on the lovely stream below them, the wide, beautiful prairies beyond them, and the timber behind them. The green was dotted with flowers, the birds sang in the branches, and a group of deer stood gazing at the strangers from the edge of a hazel thicket some distance away. ‘Here,’ thought Mr. Adams, ‘is my home,’ and dismounting he drove his stake in the soil and took possession. Following up the river about two miles farther, they came to a creek, where Mr. Morgan halted and made his own claim. This done, they passed up to Chicago, sold their ponies, and returned home by way of the lakes.”
It would be a few years before the two men were able to return to take possession of their claims. Morgan would not only claim land along the small creek, but also give his name to it as a lasting reminder of the county’s pioneer era.
In 1834, Morris Sleight, an ex-sea captain from Hyde Park, New York, traveled west to prospect for a likely place to settle, eventually winding up at Capt. Joseph Naper’s settlement about 12 miles east of Oswego on the DuPage River that became modern Naperville. In a letter to his wife, he explained how the surrounding prairies entranced him: “…the first view of an Illinois Prairie is Sublime, I may almost say awfully Grand, as a person needs a compass to keep his course—but the more I travel over them the better I like them. There is a great variety of Flowers now on the Prairies, but they tell me in a month from this time they will be much prettier.”
“The farm of Seymour Sloan,” painted in 1866 by Junius Sloan (1828- 1900) gives an idea of what the tallgrass prairie in north central Illinois looked like in the mid-19th Century. The 500-acre Sloan farm, purchased in 1853, was located near Kewanee in Henry County, Illinois. This wonderful painting is owned by the Kewanee Historical Society.
British writer Harriet Martineau visited northern Illinois in 1836. She was invited on a short trip from Chicago to Joliet, encountering her first prairie just west of the growing city on the lake. She described how the open prairie easily caused disorientation among the uninitiated: “I now found the truth of what I had read about the difficulty of distinguishing distances on a prairie. The feeling is quite bewildering. A man walking near looks like a Goliath a mile off. I mistook a covered wagon with out horses, at a distance of fifty yards, for a white house near the horizon; and so on.”
Orlando Walker had arrived here in Oswego by wagon train from Smyrna, New York in 1843. In 1906 his granddaughter, Helen McKinney Pogue, recounted how the rest of the Walker family made it to Oswego and why: “Orlando Walker wrote such glowing accounts of this beautiful prairie country to his brothers Seth and Lauriston Walker in Belchertown, Mass. that they packed their belongings and came to Illinois. Seth, by public conveyance and Lauriston all the way by ‘prairie schooner.’ When these people who had come from New England, saw the beautiful, smooth prairies covered with thick grass and a sprinkling of wild flowers, with the woodland in the distance, they thought it a paradise compared with the rocky country they had left.”
Mrs. M.E. Jeneson, writing in the 1906 Oswego Herald, noted of her family’s mid-19th Century move to Oswego: “My introduction to prairie life was like getting into paradise. No words of mine could convey to you the vastness, the grandeur and beauty of the natural prairie. It was in the fall of 1850 that the Jolly family left their old home and friends at Hillsboro, Highland county, Ohio, and traveled west by team, destined for Oswego, then the county seat of Kendall county, Illinois.”
Goose Lake Prairie State Natural Area, County Road 5000 E, Morris, Illinois.
These days, the Prairie Peninsula seems to be sprouting more homes, businesses, and paved roads than wildflowers, but interested folks can still get some idea of why those early settlers and travelers expressed so much awe at the tallgrass prairie by visiting area restorations at the 20,000 acre Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie at Ellwood; the 2,700-acre Goose Lake Prairie State Natural Area; or even the smaller 30-acre prairie restoration here in Kendall County at Silver Springs State Fish and Wildlife Area between Plano and Yorkville.
And even though the prairies are now covered with corn and soybean fields, you can get an idea of what the land looked like by driving south on I-55 into the flatlands from the Des Plaines River all the way to the Mississippi River Valley—in fact, there are probably more trees in that region these days than back in Morris Birkbeck’s or Ferdinand Ernst’s day.
Putting ourselves in their shoes for a moment, it’s easy to understand the feelings of shear astonishment of those folks, born and raised in densely forested areas, when they finally emerged from the trees onto those open prairies some two centuries ago.
Until we run into one of our area’s seemingly never-ending detours or other serious road construction projects, most of us continue to take fast and easy road transportation for granted. These days, we think nothing of jumping into our autos and cruising 50 miles or more to shop in some specialty store or to eat in a fancy restaurant.
It wasn’t always so. In fact, it wasn’t that many years ago that getting from place to place out here in once overwhelmingly rural Kendall County and the rest of northern Illinois was a real—often literal—pain.
The earliest White settlers who started arriving in the late 1820s had two choices. They could ride a horse from place to place or they could walk. As for shopping in fancy stores or eating in exclusive restaurants, well, those things just didn’t exist.
Back in the days of horse travel, 20 miles was about the limit of a day’s journey. A man, back in those hardy days, could also walk about 20 miles a day without too much trouble. When the Kendall County was established in 1841, the county seat was centrally located at Yorkville. But when voters moved it from Yorkville to Oswego, those folks down in the southern part of the county were obliged to stay overnight if they had some county business to transact, since a round trip of 20 miles (I0 each way) was about the limit of a day’s travel. That’s one of the main reasons the county seat was moved back to centrally-located Yorkville by vote of the county’s taxpayers in I859.
The Fox River Valley in northern Illinois was close enough to Chicago for farmers to drive livestock directly to market there, a market that exploded in size when U.S. Army engineers opened a channel through the sandbar at the mouth of the Chicago River. That created a safe harbor for ships and immediately made Chicago one of the nation’s busiest port cities.
If you were in a big hurry to go a long distance in the 1830s, you took a stagecoach, in which your journey was completed in stages. At each stop (10-20 miles apart) the horses on the stagecoach were exchanged for fresh ones so the trip could be completed as soon as possible. In Kendall County, there were a number of stage stops, some owned by the Frink and Walker Stage Coach Company, and others owned by private parties.
But those early roads in the 1830s were little more than dirt tracks across the prairie, most of which had originally been Indian trails. Even calling them trails might not be quite accurate.
In March 1831, Juliette M. Kinzie traveled with her husband John and a small party from Prairie du Chien in modern Wisconsin to Chicago. The travelers, with someone described as an experienced guide, planned to take what was then known as the Great Sauk Trail east to the Fox River of Illinois, where they planned to then turn north-northeast to Chicago. But as she reported in her book Wau-Bun: The Early Day in the North-West, the supposedly experienced guide could not find the reportedly well-traveled Sauk Trail, and the party was forced to make its way as best it could across the rolling prairies of northwest Illinois. Fortunately for them, the Fox River’s pretty hard to miss and they did reach it, although some miles north of where they’d expected to.
Native People here in northern Illinois usually walked from place to place. They weren’t the horse-riding war-bonneted Western types seen in movies. And they walked astonishing distances. Once a year, most of the Sauk and Fox tribes of western Illinois hiked all the way to Canada and back to trade furs for guns, jewelry, axes, and other items with British traders on the afore-mentioned Great Sauk Trail.
Given the difficulty in getting through them, roads bypassed Specie and Au Sable groves and the Big Slough that divided them. Grove Road, at the right in this clip from an 1876 map, made a sweeping curve around AuSable Grove, and it still does to this day
Since the trails were used by people walking afoot, they took the route of least effort, going around sloughs, swamps and other impediments and using the best fording places across the regions numerous rivers and creeks. A modern remnant of this early travel history is Grove Road south of Oswego, where motorists may note it takes a big sweeping curve for no apparent reason. Back in the 1830s though, there was a dense wooded area there surrounding a large wetland—which the settlers called the Big Slough—that had to be bypassed. And so it went.
But as soon as settlers began arriving, though, formal roadways began to be laid out. These included roads from Chicago to Ottawa at the head of navigation on the Illinois River that boasted three separate branches and the two branches of roads from Chicago to the rich lead-mining Galena region.
The road to Ottawa was the first one laid out, connecting Chicago at the foot of Lake Michigan to the Illinois River and thence down to the Mississippi.
In the summer of 1831, the Cook County Board formally established the first county road west of the growing village, leading to Ottawa. According to the county board of commissioners’ minutes, that earliest branch of the Ottawa road was to run “from the town of Chicago to the house of B. Lawton, [Bernard Laughton’s tavern at modern Riverside] from thence to the house of James Walker on the DuPage River [at Plainfield] and so on to the west line of the county.”
The road began on the lakefront at Chicago and headed west across what travelers and city residents alike described as the “Nine-Mile Swamp” on modern Madison Street to Western Avenue where it became known as the Barry Point Trail and then southwest to Laughton’s Tavern.
Barry’s Point was a patch of timber that extended east from the Des Plaines River named for an early settler. By the time the road was officially laid out from Chicago, Mr. Barry had died and his widow, the Widow Barry, was living there.
Realizing steamboats could speed both passengers and mail during the Illinois Rivers’ three ice-free seasons, Frink purchased the small steamboat Frontier to connect with his stages at either Ottawa or Peru, depending on the depth of the river. (Illustration from By Trace & Trail, Oswegoland Heritage Association, 2010)
The purpose of the road was to regularize the northern portion of the already well-used and familiar trail known as the Potowatomi Trace. By the 1830s the trace was more often called the High Prairie Trail, leading from the lakeshore at Chicago to the head of navigation on the Illinois River. During most of the year, that point was at Peru, although during periods of sufficiently high water on the Illinois River, steamboats could make it to the docks of the larger town, Ottawa.
Plank roads were the first real transportation improvements in Illinois as roads were paved with planks sawn or split from oak, walnut, or other hardwood trees. As you can imagine, such a road would use a tremendous amount of wood. And since wood rots, plank roads weren’t very durable. But in a time that considered forests as inexhaustible, plank roads were a very sensible way to weather-proof major highways. All the plank roads in the Illinois-Indiana area were toll roads. While one was planned to extend from Indiana through Plainfield to Oswego, no plank roads were ever built in Kendall County.
The Illinois and Michigan Canal was the first real economically feasible mass passenger and freight transportation system proposed for northern Illinois. The canal was designed to link the Illinois River with Lake Michigan, funneling everything from grain and livestock to lumber from northern forests down the Illinois and Mississippi River systems to the seaport of New Orleans—-and allowed international trade to flow the other way as well. The I&M Canal produced an economic miracle as the swampy little town of Chicago suddenly exploded into an economic giant.
Railroads soon followed the canal, and eventually led to its downfall as the prime transportation artery of our area. The Chicago and Northwestern, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, the Illinois Central, and other railroad companies all sprouted to meet need for efficient transportation. The first railroad (the Burlington) ran through Kendall County in 1853, bypassing Oswego, which still favored plank roads. The Fox River Valley Railroad was constructed through Oswego in 1870, finally giving Oswego a transportation window on the rest of the U.S.
And at the turn of the century, interurban trolley lines began running, with one line running from Aurora to Yorkville through Oswego, and another running south from Yorkville to Morris, the Fox and Illinois Union Electric Railway.
But farmers still had to get their crops and livestock to market and farm and town families alike had to get to places—school, shopping, church—that weren’t necessarily convenient to either rail or trolley lines. It was far from easy.
When this photo was taken at the Robert Johnston farm on the west side of the Fox River near Oswego, the dirt road was still frozen. But when the annual spring thaw came, getting to town would be a challenge. (Little White School Museum collection)
On March 12, 1890, the Joliet News had observed: “The farmers of Will and Kendall counties are just now realizing what public road economy means. Only those living on gravel roads have been in Joliet since before Christmas. Hay, butter, eggs, poultry, and onions have been commanding good prices in this market, and just a few farmers could avail themselves of this condition. The buyer and seller might as well be a thousand miles apart.”
Until 1913, Illinois townships were responsible for financing road construction and for their maintenance outside municipal limits. The system barely worked even while most travel was by horse-drawn vehicles. By the time the 20th Century dawned and growing numbers of autos and (as they were called at the time) auto trucks, were traveling the roads, the system was at the breaking point.
The financing method put unfair burdens on sparsely populated townships. Road mileage might be the same as in heavily populated townships, but in less populated areas of Illinois, fewer taxpayers were available to shoulder the burden.
Then in 1911, a new state law allowed collection of motor license fees, with the money earmarked for road construction and maintenance. As soon as the state was involved in road financing, they began investigating better construction techniques. A major benefit of good roads, it turned out, was because it was much cheaper to drive a vehicle on a hard-surfaced road than on one with a dirt surface.
Well bundled against the cold, Mr. Bower, one of Oswego’s mail carriers around the turn of the 20th Century, pauses with his mud-spattered carriage. Bad roads made getting the mail through a challenge. (Little White School Museum collection)
During tests in Cleveland, Ohio, five two-ton White trucks with full loads were driven over various road surfaces. They averaged nearly 12 miles per gallon on concrete roads, but less than six miles per gallon on dirt roads. Concrete also beat the asphalt roads of the era (nine miles per gallon). Brick roads were nearly as good as concrete, but were labor-intensive to build. Gravel roads, too, were much better than dirt, with a fair gravel surface allowing the trucks to average about seven mpg, and a good gravel surface giving 9.4 mpg.
So if motorists, those driving autos as well as commercial trucks, could save so much gasoline, state officials figured part of that savings could be used to build the better roads so many seemed to be demanding. The calculation went as follows: Assuming the average motorist drove 8,000 miles a year, half over medium to poor roads at eight miles per gallon, over hard roads the mileage would double, saving 250 gallons of gas a year, or $57.50 a year (at the then-current price of 23 cents a gallon). So any annual fee under $57.50 would save motorists money. In the event, auto taxes were figured not to rise to more than $12 a year to fund good roads.
With the advocacy of several groups, and spearheaded by William G. Edens (namesake of today’s Edens Expressway in Chicago and several northwest suburbs), a statewide organization was formed to lobby for hard roads, and to draw up specifications for them. Edens, a born organizer, had started out as a railroad brakeman and conductor who rose to organize the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen. Then in 1897, he was tapped by President William McKinley to organize the post office department’s new Rural Free Delivery system. Leaving government, he became a successful Chicago banker, active in Chicago’s social and political scene.
Edens, with the support of Illinois Gov. Edward F. Dunne, helped organize the Illinois Highway Improvement Association, including the association’s first convention in Peoria on Sept. 27, 1912. Each member of the General Assembly was invited, and was also asked to appoint three residents of each legislative district as delegates. Also invited were the state’s agricultural, commercial, labor, banking, real estate, automobile, good roads, medical, rural letter carrier, central women’s club, highway commissioner, teacher, and lawyers’ organizations.
Advertising postcard by the Portland Cement Association, 1916, touting the book “Concrete Facts About Concrete Roads” by C.M. Powell illustrating the first concrete highway in Kendall County. The road was built from Aurora’s municipal boundary to Waubonsie Creek in Oswego in 1914. (Little White School Museum collection)
Attending the convention from Kendall County were George S. Faxon of Plano, representing the Illinois Postmasters’ Association; and Dr. R.A. McClelland of Yorkville, representing the Kendall County Automobile Club.
The convention’s platform urged state officials to mandate state and county cooperation in the construction of main highways and bridges, establish a “non political” state highway commission, use state funds to improve main highways connecting county seats and other principal cities, improve other roads controlled by township and county officials, use state prison inmates “when practicable” for road building, and use state automobile taxes to finance the system.
Gov. Dunne, in his 1913 message to the General Assembly, contended: “The loss to farmers, because of inaccessible primary markets, and the abnormal expense of transportation due to bad roads, must be considered as a contributing cause of the high cost of living. In some Illinois counties, highways are impassable to ordinary loads for a full third of the year.”
As indeed they were. On March 11, 1903, the Kendall County Record reported from Yorkville that: “It took Harry Leifheit, [mail] carrier on Route 2, two days to make his trip to Plattville and return. Left Yorkville at 7:30 Monday morning and got back at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday. No mail taken out Tuesday–the roads are about impassable.”
Not that the effort was entirely clear sailing, since township officials opposed loss of their traditional control. But James F. Donovan of Niantic, president of the State Association of Highway Commissioners and Town Clerks, managed to persuade a majority of his group’s members to get on board.
Farmers protested the cost and wondered whether better roads would benefit them. Skillful political work at the state, county, and township level blunted their objections. Eventually, the Illinois State Farmer’s Institute, precursor of today’s Farm Bureau, came out foursquare in favor of good roads, tipping the balance in favor of support.
Later in 1913, a bill featuring many of the good roads convention’s recommendations passed with the support of dozens of organizations. Prominent among them was the Kendall County Automobile Club.
John D. Russell was appointed Kendall County’s first superintendent of highways in 1913. Little White School Museum collection)
Locally, the biggest change following the law’s passage was creating a county superintendent of highways. John D. Russell of Oswego, a well-known local politician and farmer, was appointed in Kendall County. Russell served as Oswego Township Road Commissioner from 1887-93. In 1896, Gov. John Peter Altgeld appointed Russell his military aide-de-camp, with the rank of colonel—although he had no military experience. He went on to serve as Oswego Township Supervisor from 1897-1907 and was always a strong good roads supporter.
The new legislation made state funds available for hard roads, but there was no overall transportation plan. In 1914, a short demonstration stretch of 15-foot wide concrete roadway was built along the Fox River south of Montgomery past the site of what would one day become the Boulder Hill Subdivision. Another stretch, financed by Kendall County, was begun from Yorkville along Van Emmon Road towards Oswego on the east side of the Fox River. But without a plan to link these isolated stretches, their economic impact was diluted. It would take another governor and more public pressure to create a viable hard road program.
In November 1916, Democrat Frank O. Lowden was elected governor and immediately pushed the good roads program begun by his predecessor.
“Good roads are a good investment,” Lowden told the General Assembly in January 1917. “Motor vehicles are rapidly supplanting horse-drawn vehicles. When good roads have become the rule, and not the exception as now, auto trucks will likely take the place of horses and wagons in the transportation of the products of the farm.”
Lowden, like Dunne, tapped William G. Edens to organize the statewide good roads effort. Unfortunately, just as pressure mounted for good roads, the nation plunged into World War I.
But On Nov. 5, 1918, while fighting still raged in France, a statewide referendum was held on a $60 million bond issue to build thousands of miles of all-weather concrete roads in Illinois. Led by Edens’ “Pull Illinois Out of the Mud” campaign, the measure easily passed. The vote in Kendall County was overwhelming, 1,532 yes to 90 no.
The measure called for improving 800 miles of roads at state and federal expense; improving 4,800 miles of roads with the bond money to be maintained by auto and truck license fees; using joint state-county funding to improve another 11,200 miles of local roads selected by county boards with approval of the state highway commission; and improving 80,000 miles of township roads with counties providing 25 percent of the cost.
The plan called for bond issue concrete roads to pass through all 102 Illinois counties. In Kendall County, Route 18 was to be our hard road. It was to head south out of Aurora on Lincoln Avenue, along the east side of the Fox River through Montgomery to Oswego on that existing stretch of road laid down in 1914, then south to Yorkville, across the Fox River to Plano on to Sandwich and, eventually, Princeton—the route championed for years by the Cannon Ball Trail Association.
Car westbound from Oswego on the Cannon Ball Trail, soon to become first Ill. Route 18 and eventually U.S. Route 34 in a photo taken on Oct 27, 1912 by photographer Dwight S. Young. (Little White School Museum collection)
But after the referendum passed, Gov. Len Small, a Republican, replaced Lowden. Small turned out to be one of Illinois’ more corrupt governors, who was politically beholden to the motor transportation industry. So when engineers for the Illinois Department of Public Works and Buildings laid out Route 18’s actual right-of-way, a roar of protest went up. Instead of following the route promised during the referendum campaign, the engineers proposed running Route 18 down the west side of the Fox River as an extension of River Street, past the sheep yards in Montgomery, across the Chicago Burlington & Quincy mainline at the Wormley crossing north of Oswego. From there the route headed southwesterly, bypassing Yorkville to the north and Plano’s business district slightly to the south on a rough airline through Sandwich and on to Princeton. It was the route today of River Street, Ill. Route 31 south to the junction with Route 34 at Oswego, and then on west. Paved spurs were to connect Route 18 with downtowns in Yorkville and Oswego.
The route, the Kendall County Record charged in December 1920, violated several of the requirements laid out in the bond issue legislation. The new route was longer and didn’t use two sections of concrete road already laid in the county along what would become Ill. Route 25 and Van Emmon Road. Further, a costly viaduct over the CB& Q mainline at the Wormley Crossing was required.
“In consideration of Route 18, which the state engineers have so arbitrarily placed as to miss Oswego and Yorkville entirely and to abandon a route which was built with the sanction of the state and was to be eventually taken over as Route 18, the question arises as to whether or not the law is being lived up to,” Record Publisher Hugh Marshall contended on Jan. 26, 1921.
Local consensus was that the new route was picked thanks to the meatpacking and other commercial interests with undue influence on Small to create a direct route from Aurora and Chicago west rather than one that passed through and benefiting local communities.
Newly paved Route 18—later to become U.S. Route 34—looking east towards the west end of the Oswego Bridge across the Fox River in 1923. (Little White School Museum collection)
Despite the protests and the loyal Republicans who predominated in the counties Route 18 would pass through, state officials refused to consider the old route. In fact, by the end of September 1921, all the right-of-way for the new route had been purchased. The final surveys of the right-of-way and design started in 1921, with actual construction starting later that year. By late May 1924, the 18-foot wide concrete highway had been completely laid from Chicago to Princeton and was curing.
Meanwhile in Oswego, state officials approved connecting the concrete section of modern Ill. Route 25 with the Route 18 concrete spur across the Oswego Bridge. In July a new concrete bridge was built across Waubonsie Creek. The old iron bridge it replaced was moved to the Pearce Cemetery entrance road. The connection was finished and opened to traffic in early December.
The section of modern Route 34 from Oswego to Naperville had to wait; work didn’t start until the fall of 1932. By October 1933, the road was paved along its entire length, with the exception of the intersection with the Lincoln Highway, today’s U.S. Route 30, and the Elgin Joliet & Eastern Railroad overpass. Not until May 1934 were plans finished to bridge the tracks and to cross under Route 30. The railroad bridge and the highway interchange were not finished until another year had passed.
With the end of the project, Route 34‘s course as we now know it was finished. Eventually the other hard road links, Ill. Route 71, Ill. Route 126, Ill. Route 25, Ill. Route 47, U.S. Route 30, and U.S. Route 52 were finished and Kendall County was linked directly with Chicago and the rest of Illinois via a system of all-weather concrete roads that’s still serving the county to this day.
Today, with traffic on the roads in Kendall County and the rest of Illinois west of Chicago heavier than anyone in 1919 could have conceived, we’re still dealing with the effects those transportation design decisions made so many years ago have on our daily lives.
Humorist Charles Dudley Warner once quipped “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” And during Warner’s lifetime (1829-1900), that was mostly true—though not entirely.
For instance, the amount of coal smoke from tens of thousands of stoves and fireplaces created sometimes deadly weather conditions in London, England. But the feeling at the time was that humans really couldn’t affect nature, especially the weather.
Nevertheless, in 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius proposed the hypothesis that massive amounts of human instigated fossil-fuel burning and other combustion that produced carbon dioxide was enough to cause global warming. His suggestion was met with general derision. But then in 1938, Guy Stewart Callendar, a British steam engineer, mathematician, and amateur climatologist gathered actual temperature records from the late 19th Century onward. When analyzed, his data showed that during the preceding 50 years, global land temperatures had increased. In other words, he proved global climate change was happening. In 1938. Something some still refuse to believe.
The heavy smogs in London during the 19th Century not only required carriages and wagons be guided by torch-bearers during daylight hours, but also killed people. That continued into the 20th Century with the notorious London Fog of 1952 that lasted for days and killed several people. (Illustrated London News)
But back to Charles Dudley Warner and his quip about the weather. There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that the weather has had a relatively huge effect on world history. From the 16th Century Kamikaze “Divine Wind” that supposedly disrupted a Mongol invasion of Japan to the 1588 storm that scattered the Spanish Armada, to Napoleon’s disastrous winter retreat from Moscow in 1812, weather’s effects keep turning up in the historical record.
Here in North America—the New World to Europeans but the same old place to the Native People who had been living here for thousands of years—weather began playing an important role as soon as those Europeans mentioned above arrived.
For instance, in 1620, a group of disgruntled British religious separatists left the Netherlands bound for what they hoped would be their very own New World utopia across the Atlantic. Earlier, they’d left England for the Netherlands because their brand of Protestantism was actively suppressed. But they found the religious tolerance of the Dutch intolerable and so decided to make a truly clean break and a new start in the New World, where they hoped to have the religious freedom to oppress other faiths.
They aimed to land in Virginia when they sailed from Plymouth, England on Sept. 16, 1620, but the iffy navigation of their ship’s captain instead landed them on the coast of modern Massachusetts, hundreds of miles north of where they planned to take up their new homes. During their first winter in North America, the unplanned-for cold weather nearly killed the lot of them, but they managed to survive, and then eventually prosper.
Meanwhile even farther to the north, the French were settling Canada, eventually creating a string of settlements along the St. Lawrence River from its mouth upstream to the La Chine rapids, so named because the first explorers hoped China was just beyond them. Although they kept expecting to run across Chinese officials as they continued ever farther west, they were, disappointed when they found the Pacific Ocean in the way of extending their travels.
The weather in Canada was even more brutal than that experienced by the English Separatists settled in Massachusetts. But intrepid French explorers and rapacious businessmen—usually one in the same—kept pushing farther and farther into the interior in their search for China and the East Indies. Among them was René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who managed to obtain the royal trade cession for what is now most of the upper Midwest. LaSalle pushed as far west as the thundering falls on the Niagara River between Lakes Erie and Ontario and in 1679, built the first large sailing ship on the western Great Lakes, the Griffin.
LaSalle’s expedition on its way south on the upper Illinois River looking for open water. They didn’t find any until they got down to modern Peoria.
There, weather again came into play when the Griffin, loaded with valuable furs collected from tribes from the western lakes, disappeared, likely sinking during one of the Great Lakes’ frequent and violent storms. The loss threatened to bankrupt LaSalle, but he managed to talk his way out of the problem and mounted yet another expedition in the spring of 1682.
Setting off from Fort St. Joseph on the St. Joseph River, a Lake Michigan tributary, the LaSalle expedition had to haul their canoes downstream on improvised sledges because the St. Joseph was frozen solid, as was the Kankakee when they portaged into it, as was the Illinois River as they traveled downstream from the Kankakee’s mouth on the Des Plaines. Not until they reached Peoria did they find open water. That allowed them to paddle down the Illinois to the Mississippi, and then down to the Mississippi’s mouth on the Gulf of Mexico. There, in an elaborate ceremony (he’d brought along his royal court clothes in case he met some of those long-sought Chinese officials) LaSalle claimed the entire Mississippi watershed for France, something that must have, at the least, bemused the tens of thousands of Native People who’d been living there for the past several centuries.
Weather continued to have its affects on history as the thin line of European colonies that stretched along the Atlantic seaboard grew and prospered. The frontier moved ever farther west as White settlement pushed the resident Native People ever farther west. By 1830, settlement had begun in what geographers eventually called the Prairie Peninsula, a generally open, huge, roughly triangular-shaped tallgrass prairie with its apex in northwestern Indiana and extending northwest all the way to the eastern Dakotas and southwest into eastern Kansas. It must have been quite a sight for those early pioneers when they emerged from the familiar dense timber that stretched behind them east all the way to the Appalachian Mountains and saw a seemingly endless sea of 6-foot tall Big Bluestem grass extending all the way to the horizon.
Pioneer farmers had to change their techniques when they reached the tallgrass prairie. Instead of clearing timber to plant their fields they had to “break,” or plow, the prairie, an expensive, time-consuming task.
All that open grassland was a great boon for those frontier farmers because they didn’t have to laboriously cut down towering old-growth hardwoods before they could farm the land. But the lack of timber also threw a wrench into traditional frontier farming techniques. While groves of hardwoods spotted the prairie and timber did grow on the east side of prairie water courses, the old ways of depending on logs for cabins and farm buildings, as well as to split into fence rails had to be modified.
The earliest prairie settlers here in northern Illinois staked their claims on the east side of groves and streamside woods in order to assure enough timber for building as well as for firewood. Because prairie pioneering required a LOT of timber for both. For instance, the rule of thumb for firewood was that it took about 30 cords to make it through a northern Illinois winter, a cord being a stack of wood 4 feet wide, 4 feet high, and 8 feet long.
The 1870 plat map of Big Grove in Kendall County’s Big Grove Township illustrates how the county’s groves were subdivided into smaller timber plots for sale by earlier arrivals to later arrivals who needed timber to build farmsteads and put up rail fences.
The earliest settlers who had vision and business sense quickly snapped up those isolated groves and other patches of timber out on the prairie, subdivided them into 10-acre plots, and sold them to later arrivals.
One of the other reasons early settlers preferred to locate their farmsteads on the east side of timber patches was to shelter against the prairie winds that came howling out of the west. In winter, especially, those winds could be brutal, as the early pioneers found out during the fierce winter of 1830-31. Forever after known as the Winter of the Deep Snow, the series of storms led to the deaths of countless settlers as well as many of the Native People who lived here. The weather that winter may even have created conditions that led to the Black Hawk War of 1832, Illinois’ last Indian war.
The 1838 U.S. Survey map of Oswego Township nicely illustrates how the earliest pioneer farmers staked claims hugging the sheltered east side of the region’s patches of timber. The area shaded in green shows the southern-most lobe of the Big Woods, a huge patch of timber that stretched from Oswego north to Batavia and east to Naperville.
But while the Winter of the Deep Snow put a damper on things, and 1832 saw war across northern Illinois, just a year later, the Year of the Early Spring led, at least in percentage terms, to the biggest population explosion in northern Illinois history. As described by Kendall County’s first historian in his 1877 history: “The year 1833 opened out splendidly, as if to make amends for the hardships of the year before. The snow went away in February, and early in March the sheltered valleys and nooks by the groves were beautifully green, and by the end of the month, stock could live on the prairies anywhere. It was an exceedingly favoring Providence for the few pioneers who remained on their claims; for had the spring been cold and backward, much more suffering must have followed. The tide of emigration set in early, and in one summer more than trebled the population of the county. This was partly because the emigration of the summer preceding had been held back by the [Black Hawk] war.”
And weather has continued to have more or less serious effects on our little corner of the world ever since. Annual spring floods—called “freshets” back in the day—regularly washed out the numerous dams and bridges on the Fox River, costing the dam owners and taxpayers substantial amounts of money to repair and replace. And weather’s effect on farming is well-known, from drought conditions to years that proved too wet. Townsfolk were also affected, from winters so cold they froze preserved food in area residents’ basements to summers so hot and dry the mills that depended on the Fox River’s waterpower had to temporarily close.
The old Parker Gristmill on the west bank of the Fox River just above Oswego during a spring freshet (flood) around 1910. The flood waters have completely covered the mill dam. (Little White School Museum collection)
The drought and destructive dust storms of the Great Depression years didn’t just affect the Great Plains—they had severe economic effects here, in Kendall County too, with dust storms carrying away tons of topsoil and dry conditions encouraging insect infestations that destroyed thousands of acres of crops.
The blizzards that swept down across the Great Plains east across the Mississippi didn’t stop with the Winter of the Deep Snow, but created both economic and political problems right up to modern times. The winter of 1978-1979 brought parts of northern Illinois to a halt. And when two January storms dropped heavy snow on Chicago, voters showed their displeasure with how the city handled snow removal by kicking Mayor Michael Bilandic out of office and electing Jane Byrne, the city’s first female mayor.
Unfortunately, the snow from the brutal winter of 1978-1979 didn’t only fall on Chicago. A good bit of it fell out here in the Fox River Valley, too. We were able to keep a walking path to the garage clear, though.
Most recently, on-going global climate change has created a confused weather situation not only here in the Fox Valley but across the nation. Far western states have lately been toggling between extreme drought and record floods and snowfall. The fragile electrical grid in Texas gets regular stress tests that it partially fails due to colder than expected winters and hotter than anticipated summers.
Meanwhile here in northern Illinois, winters have become increasingly mild, creating year round open water on the Fox River and the numerous water detention ponds created to control stormwater runoff that has attracted tens of thousands of once extremely rare Canada geese and various duck species.
And from what we see on the news these days, warmer weather is not only encouraging the northward march of such pests as fire ants, but the climate change causing it seems to be pushing the old Tornado Alley of the Great Plains eastward across the Mississippi River into more densely populated areas.
Even with climate change driven weather causing so many problems, though, we’re still only taking baby steps to try to do something about it. While weather has always had major effects on history, and while we do have the technical ability to do something about it these days, it looks as if Charles Dudley Warner’s quip is likely to continue to describe the situation for the foreseeable future.
I was born in 1946 with the first tranche of the Baby Boom generation that’s been distorting the nation’s demographics and economics for the past 70 years. But beyond that, the immediate post-World War II era was an interesting one because of the great changes it both caused and experienced.
Millions of service men and women were released from military service and headed home to try to pick up the lives the war had disrupted. Congress helped by passing the various G.I. Bills and that allowed many of those ex-soldiers, sailors, and marines to buy homes and to go to college as well.
Unless they were Black, of course. Those new laws were cleverly written to make sure most Black veterans would be prohibited from buying homes with no down payment or getting college degrees. The resulting loss of accumulated wealth has been a continual drain on Black advancement for the last 70 years.
In the rural area of northern Illinois where I grew up, agriculture was undergoing change even before the war. Everything seemed to take a pause during the war years before getting back into gear when the war ended.
Lyle Shoger picking corn by hand near the end of the era of farming with horses about 1930 just off Route 34 west of Oswego. (Little White School Museum collection)
Change and progress had to wait a few years after the fighting ended because there were still major shortages of all kinds of mundane things from tires to farm equipment as industry shifted gears from war production to serving the nation’s civilian customer base.
One of the biggest changes in agriculture was the move from actual flesh-and-blood horse power to mechanical horsepower. The change started in the 1920, and accelerated even during the dark economic times of the Great Depression. By 1930, Kendall County farmers reported on the U.S. Census of Agriculture that just under half the county’s farms boasted some sort of internal combustion machine, from trucks and cars to tractors.
In the 1945 Ag Census, however, nearly all of the county’s 1,145 farms reported having at least one tractor and close to 1,100 of them reported having either a truck, a car, or both.
The author test-drives a new IH Farmall tractor at the Wheatland Plowing Match about 1950.
I got to thinking about that the other day when we were having breakfast with one of my nephews, and he asked about the kinds of work horses my dad favored. By the time I came along, the working horses on our farm were long gone, replaced by a bright orange Allis-Chalmers W-D tractor and an older 1930s model Case tractor.
But when he had farmed with horses, my father favored Percherons. He said he liked them for their intelligence and strength, although he said you always had to be on your toes around them because they were far from the most docile breed.
But while the working horses were gone from the farm—my sisters always managed to talk my dad into keeping at least one riding horse around the place—the evidence of them remained, from the wooden-floored stalls and tack room in the barn with the wooden pegs that once held their complicated harnesses to the odd wooden single or double-tree to the steel driver’s seats remaining on some of the older farm equipment.
The farm equipment itself was in transition during that era. Storing loose hay in the barn’s haymow had given way to having hay crops bailed and then stacking the bales in the mow. But I remember my dad and Frank, our hired man, still used the old hay fork system built into the barn to lift the bales up into the mow for a few years, at least. The forks were huge things designed to grab onto a big bunch of loose hay. They used the old Case tractor to pull the lifting rope that raised the forks up to the track that ran the length of the barn. When the forks reached the track, a lever automatically tripped and the forks with their load of loose hay—or carefully stacked bales—traveled into the barn on the track until it reached the stop, which caused the forks to open up and drop their load. The stop could be adjusted along the track so that the hay could be dropped progressively closer to the giant haymow door in front of the barn.
It was a fascinating process that I could only watch until my latest asthma attack began—I was allergic to just about everything on the farm, from the crops to the livestock.
The author, co-piloting the Matile Farm Case tractor with his father at the controls, about 1949.
Eventually, the hay forks were replaced by a tall portable elevator that was belt-powered from the old Case tractor, something that was a bit more efficient—and faster—than the old method. Hay bales could be pitched onto the elevator, raised up to the haymow opening, and dumped in an endless stream keeping the guys stacking them in the mow moving fast.
We needed that hay because diversified farming was still very much a thing in the early 1950s. My parents’ farm not only grew corn and soybeans, but also plenty of livestock. My dad fed cattle every winter and raised hogs as well. Along with the grain crops, my dad also grew alfalfa and timothy, which was baled for fodder for those feeder cattle. When my sisters prevailed upon him to keep a horse—and later when I was gifted with a particularly mean-spirited Shetland pony—he also raised a few acres of oats for their food.
Farming during that era was a true partnership. My mother didn’t work off the farm—she had way too much to do on it. She raised chickens and traded the eggs as well as the dressed chickens for groceries in town. She also kept a huge garden, and also harvested fruit from our farm’s small orchard, canning cherries, apples, apricots, plums, and peaches.
In fact, we grew a LOT of what we ate on the farm, from that garden produce to the hogs and steers the grown-ups butchered every year. Originally, before I came along, the beef was taken to the Farm Bureau building in Yorkville where it was further cut up, wrapped, and stored in the freezer locker my folks rented. But in 1951 or 1952, my grandparents bought all their kids gigantic International Harvester deepfreezes and after that we kept our own frozen food at home.
We also usually had our own cow, always a Guernsey because my dad thought they produced milk with the most butterfat. The cow had to be milked twice a day in one of the old workhorse stalls in the barn. I remember watching him milking and occasionally giving one of the barn cats a squirt of fresh milk straight from the cow. He was a good shot, and they soon learned that when the cow arrived, a treat for them wasn’t far behind. The milk was run through the milk separator down the basement to separate out most of the cream, which was either sold at the cream station in downtown Yorkville or given to my grandmother, who churned it into butter. What milk we didn’t need for our own consumption either went to my Aunt Bess McMicken for her to make cottage cheese or was fed to the hogs with coarse oat flour mixed in to create “slop.” You’ve heard about slopping the hogs? Well, that’s what THAT was all about.
But the times, they really were a-changin’, as the poet later said. Farmers had already begun to specialize in either grain or livestock farming instead of the diversified farming that had been a feature of American agriculture since the first colonists arrived. It became clear soon enough that farming wasn’t necessarily a small-time thing any more. Where my dad made a fairly decent living off 180 acres, the changes in farming meant more and more land was needed by each farmer. That led to much bigger equipment and much larger farms. But since there’s a finite amount of land there also relatively quickly became many fewer, larger farms, a trend that continues to this day.
Remember those 1,145 Kendall County farms back in 1945? Today there are a little over 300 farms in the county, but they average much, much more in acreage.
During the 1970s, the changeover from diversified to specialized grain or livestock farming culminated. Grain prices soared due to bad weather overseas and a new grain purchasing deal with the old Soviet Union. Government agricultural policy encouraged farmers to assume more and more debt to buy more and more land and the equipment to farm it.
As Earl Butz, Richard Nixon’s Agriculture Secretary urged in 1973, American farmers were supposed to plant “fencerow to fencerow,” and “get big or get out.”
A size comparison: My nephew poses with his classic old Farmall tractor and with one of the kinds of giant machines they use these days that dwarf anything used back in the heyday of diversified farming.
That caused both land values and prices of equipment to spike. And inflation wasn’t just affecting the farm sector, either—it was a nationwide problem. At which point the Federal Reserve System started raising interest rates to unprecedented levels to cool off the economy meaning all those farm loans were suddenly almost exponentially more expensive to service. And then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and President Jimmy Carter instituted a grain embargo in retaliation, choking off one of the farmers’ biggest markets.
The result was a rolling tide of farm bankruptcies that was particularly severe among family farmers. Which led to more consolidation and to ever fewer farmers as farms kept getting bigger. But even so, productivity soared as new crop varieties and steadily bigger farm equipment meant a single farmer could do the work that it took several to do just years before.
And the dominoes just kept falling. Fewer farmers meant thousands of families left already sparsely populated rural areas and that meant whole towns nearly disappearing along with institutions that once held those communities together, from churches and schools to locally-owned stores to civic organizations. The effects have been disastrously cumulative. For instance, largely rural Clinton County, Iowa’s population declined by nearly 19 percent between 1980 and 2020.
Meanwhile, here in Kendall County, Illinois, we’ve been experiencing a veritable population explosion as Chicago metro region growth has moved steadily west along the U.S. Route 34 corridor. During the last 43 years, thousands of acres of prime farmland were lost, not to farm consolidation but to development as we changed from an overwhelmingly rural county to one that is firmly suburban. Between 1980 and 2020, Kendall’s population more than doubled from 37,202 to 131,969, an increase of 254 percent.
Subdivision under construction in Oswego just as the housing bust hit in 2009. In the early 2000’s Kendall County, partly driven by Oswego’s growth, was the fastest growing county in the nation. The pause in construction caused by the lending crisis in 2009 has now largely disappeared and construction in the area is again booming. (Ledger-Sentinel photo by John Etheredge)
That growth has led to a number of challenges, but on the whole they’ve been easier to deal with than experiencing population declines and the severe strain that puts on communities and their institutions. The Biden administration is promising to try to help rural areas deal with the problems the last four decades of cultural and economic changes have created. But rural areas already receive significant federal assistance through a web of financial aid programs, so exactly what else can be done doesn’t seem clear to me. Hopefully, somebody far above my pay grade has some good ideas about what to do.
Time was, most of the nation was rural and much of our national mindset still drifts that way, even though the vast majority of the population no longer maintains any sort of rural lifestyle. And, oddly enough, because so few farmers are needed these days, even most rural residents don’t know much about farming these days.
I’ve always counted myself lucky to be born when I was. I got to experience the era of diversified farming and understand how it worked. I was able to go to a one-room rural school and experience the last vestiges of the kinds of schools that had educated so many Americans starting in colonial times. I saw my mother trade produce for groceries and experienced the monthly visits from the Raleigh man with his fascinating sample case full of ointment, and nostrums and spices. And I was able to enjoy the last of the great era of radio entertainment, listening to the soap operas my mother adored and the westerns my dad favored along with such rural standards as “The National Barn Dance” every Saturday night on WLS out of downtown Chicago and the “Dinner Bell Time” noon farm market reports every day.
Though fondly remembered, it’s an era as far gone as horse-and-buggy days.
It’s really no longer realistic to deny that climate change and the weather it’s causing are having major geopolitical effects.
Back in the early 2000’s, Syrian drought may have contributed to the start of the Syrian civil war that further destabilized the Middle East. And now, much warmer than usual winter temperatures in Europe are blunting Vladimir Putin’s attempt to blackmail NATO into stopping their support of Ukraine by cutting off natural gas supplies. Thanks to those warmer temperatures, Europe’s natural gas usage is so much lower than usual that its price is actually declining.
Meanwhile here in the U.S., climate change is creating extreme weather events that are happening far more often and that are far more destructive than in the past. And those of us old enough are watching the actual change in climate. Those snowy, sub-zero northern Illinois winters of our past have gradually given way to winters that feature some early low temperatures and snowfalls followed by generally milder late winters than in the past.
As you might think, then, climate also had some major effects on northern Illinois during the settlement era when the warming of the globe had started but wasn’t really noticeable, not to mention the lack of our modern cold weather gear, from Thinsulate gloves to comfy coats and insulated boots.
The 1830-1831 Winter of the Deep Snow plagued everyone in the Old Northwest, from the region’s Native People to the newly arrived White settlers then starting to move into the area. The aftermath of the privations the winter caused the region’s Native People may have even been one of the causes of 1832’s Black Hawk War. And while the following winter of 1832-1833 was not as hard, it was also a difficult one for the new arrivals out here on the northern Illinois prairies.
The grueling Winter of the Deep Snow led to privation and death for White settlers and Native People alike. Fireplaces consumed between 11 and 17 cords of firewood during a regular winter, each cord a stack of logs measuring 4 feet wide, 4 feet high, and 8 feet long, all of which had to be cut, stacked, and split by hand.
But Mother Nature wasn’t always trying to thrust misery on us humans. Sometimes the weather offered an unexpected boost. And that was the case in the new year of 1833.
As the county’s first historian, the Rev. E.W. Hicks, reported in his 1877 history of Kendall County: “The year 1833 opened out splendidly, as if to make amends for the hardships of the year before. The snow went away in February, and early in March the sheltered valleys and nooks by the groves were beautifully green, and by the end of the month, stock could live on the prairies anywhere. It was an exceedingly favoring Providence for the few pioneers who remained on their claims; for had the spring been cold and backward, much more suffering must have followed. The tide of emigration set in early, and in one summer more than trebled the population of the county.”
The extended Pearce family was among the first to arrive, rolling up on June 1 to the claims they’d staked the year before. The party consisted of Daniel, John, Walter, and Elijah Pearce and their brother-in-law, William Smith Wilson. Elijah and wife settled north a bit, on the east side of the Fox at what’s now Montgomery and so did their son-in-law, Jacob Carpenter. Daniel and his wife and children chose land along Waubonsie Creek where Fox Bend Golf Course and Windcrest Subdivision are now located in Oswego. Wilson, their brother-in-law built his cabin at what is now the busy “Five Corners” intersection in downtown Oswego where modern Ill. Route 25 and U.S. Route 34 meet. John and Walter, meanwhile, settled on the west side of the river.
Earl Adams and Ebenezer Morgan had staked their claims in what eventually became Kendall County in 1831, but were prevented from settling here in 1832 by the Black Hawk War. The two men and their families arrived in 1833, Adams at his claim on what is now Courthouse Hill in Yorkville and Morgan along the creek near Oswego bears his name.
Many of the earliest settlers who had been uprooted by the Black Hawk War also decided to return in 1833, setting back in their former homes, if they were still standing. George B. Hollenback moved from the site of his old store to a site not far away, thus becoming the first settler in what became Newark after being known for several years as Georgetown. John Doughtery and Walter Selvey came back to their claims, too.
In 1833, John Schneider chose a spot at the mouth of Blackberry Creek across the Fox River from Yorkville as the site of his new sawmill. Here’s what the area looked like when U.S. Government surveyors mapped it in 1837.
Millwright John Schneider had helped Joseph Naper build his mill on the DuPage River at what eventually became Naperville. In 1833 he came farther west to the Fox Valley looking for a likely mill site. He found it at Blackberry Creek’s mouth on the Fox, and staked his claim with the intention of building a mill the next year.
New Yorkers John and William Wormley walked west from the Empire State and made their claims on the west side of the Fox River just above where Oswego would one day be located.
In May, a wagon train with Joel Alvard, William and Joseph Groom, Madison Goisline and Goisline’s brother-in-law, Peter Minkler, and their, families, along with Polly Alvard, a widow with two children, and two unmarried men, Edward Alvard and Jacob Bare, headed west from Albany County, N. Y., with the goal of settling in Tazewell County here in Illinois. It was an arduous journey as they battled through the infamous Black Swamp bordering Lake Erie to the south and then making the numerous river and wetland crossings here in Illinois. In the end, Peter Minkler decided to settle not far from what would become the Village of Oswego along the trail that today is a busy road carrying his family’s name.
Thanks to Peter Specie, Smith Minkler, Peter Minkler’s son, obtained seedlings that he used to breed the famed Minkler Apple, a commercial favorite during the era when cider and cider vinegar were big business.
Shortly after arriving, two of the Minkler party—Peter Minkler’s mother and his brother-in-law—both died. Old Mrs. Minkler’s death was blamed on the rigors of the trip west from New York, while his brother-in-law Madison Goisline accidentally shot himself in the shoulder while pulling his rifle out of his wagon, and soon died of infection.
Out in North Carolina, David Evans heard about the richness of northern Illinois from a friend who served with the U.S. Army during the Black Hawk War. Evans apparently came by river, down the Ohio and then up the Mississippi to the Illinois where he followed his friend’s directions up to Ottawa. From there, he followed the Fox River up to Big Rock Creek, and walked up the creek for a couple miles where he staked his claim, becoming the first settler in Little Rock Township. He built his cabin there and the next year brought his family west.
John Darnell, another North Carolinian, had settled with his parents and brothers in Marshall County, located about midway between LaSalle-Peru and Peoria in 1829. In 1833, hearing good things about the Fox River Valley, he came north and staked a claim in the timber along Little Rock Creek. The word he sent back to Marshall County was so enthusiastic that in 1834, his parents and five brothers all decided to settle here as well.
Meanwhile down in modern Seward Township, Hugh Walker had staked a claim, broke 10 acres of prairie sod and planted wheat in the spring of 1832, only to be run off by the Black Hawk War. He sold his claim to Chester House in 1833. The grove on the claim was soon named for the House family—the location of today’s House’s Grove Forest Preserve. Mrs. House was well-known for keeping a candle burning at night in their cabin’s west window as a guidepost for prairie travelers. “So level was the prairie, and so clear from underbrush and trees, that the feeble ‘light in the window’ could be seen for six or eight miles,” Hicks reported in 1877.
Former French-Canadian fur trader Peter Specie earned money by renting his yokes of oxen and prairie breaking plow to newly arrived Kendall County settlers. It cost nearly as much to break the tough prairie sod as it did to buy the land.
Vermonter John Shurtliff had arrived at Plainfield in 1831. In 1833, he moved west out onto the prairie about a mile from House’s claim, settling along AuSable Creek. Shurtliff hired early entrepreneur Peter Specie to break seven acres of prairie as a start, repaying Specie by driving his breaking team for a month.
Arriving around the same time was Daniel Platt, another New Yorker. In 1785, his family had established Plattsburgh in that state. He, however, decided to try his luck in the west, arriving in 1833. For $80, he bought “The Springs” from the Rev. William See—today’s Plattville—and thereby the Platts became the first settlers in Lisbon Township.
Meanwhile in today’s Big Grove Township, more New Yorkers arrived, this time from the hotbed of anti-slavery agitation, Oneida County. Brothers Eben and Levi Hills along with William Perkins and their families all arrived in 1833, Eben coming by wagon with the families and Levi and William came west via the lakes. It was still rare for lakes shipping traffic to arrive at Chicago in 1833 because the harbor wouldn’t be completed for another year. In 1833, in fact, only four ships arrived at Chicago. In 1834, however, the Federal Government financed digging a channel through the sandbar at the mouth of the Chicago River to create a safe harbor for ships. That led to an explosion of ship arrivals at Chicago, 250 in 1835, 456 in 1836 and the number continued to grow every year.
The year 1833 wasn’t memorable simply for all the families who arrived to settle out here on the prairies near the Fox River, however. The final treaty with the region’s Native People was signed in Chicago in 1833 that ceded their land east of the Mississippi River—and some west of the river, too—to the U.S. Government. Three years later, government officials backed by the U.S. Army moved the region’s Native Americans west and away from their ancestral lands.
And as the year came to a close, Mother Nature put on an astonishing light display for all the new settlers to look on with awe. On the Nov. 10, 1833, a huge meteor storm lit up the night sky in spectacular fashion the settlers named “The Night of the Falling Stars.”
“Those who saw it never forgot it to their dying day,” historian Hicks reported.
This year, we’re celebrating the 190th anniversary of that momentous “Year of the Early Spring” that brought so many of the Fox Valley’s first settlers west to Illinois. And interestingly enough, there are still plenty of descendants around these parts of some of the enterprising, intrepid folks who ventured out of the Eastern forests onto the tallgrass prairies of northern Illinois to make a better life for their families.
The saga of Roger Matile attempting to track down local history, one blog post at a time, while avoiding the French. Although they do make good fries and toast.
historyonthefox 