Columbus, genocide, and federal holidays: Trying to make sense of the Age of Exploration

Some historians like to bicker about whether the driving force in history is people or events, in other words, do individuals create historical events or do historical events create significant individuals through their reactions to those events?

Actually, when you get right down to it, history doesn’t seem to be much more than a series of accidents and mistakes that combine to form a historical context lurching from one catastrophe to another. If that might be a trend in history, then the history of North America has certainly seems to have followed it.

The New World’s accidental history began as soon as Christopher Columbus weighed anchor on the coast of Spain and headed west across the Atlantic. This week, we commemorated the results of that voyage, which proved catastrophic for millions of Indigenous people in North, Central, and South America while creating opportunities for downtrodden people elsewhere on earth for the next five centuries.

When Columbus finally sighted land at the end of his voyage 530 years ago this week, he was positive he had discovered either China or India. But as one historian noted, he hadn’t even discovered Indiana.

Much to their later chagrin, the Tainos people welcomed Christopher Columbus and his three ships loaded with European fortune hunters on Oct. 12, 1492. It didn’t take long for Columbus to set out on a program designed to enrich both his Spanish backers and him, personally. Outright theft, murder, rape, and genocide that wiped out most of the Indigenous People in the Caribbean followed.

Instead, Columbus landed on an island off the coast of what became known as the Americas but was so convinced he had reached the mysterious East that he named the inhabitants of his new discovery Indians, a name not a few of them have been trying to live down ever since.

It seems to have been, in fact, a fortunate thing that Columbus never actually found North, Central, or South America, given his murderous proclivities. The first people Columbus stumbled across were the Tainos, a peaceful bunch in which Columbus immediately saw possibilities. “They should be good servants,” he wrote in his journal. After which he instituted a brutal regime of torture, rape, and murder against them in order to steal whatever gold, silver, or other valuables that might have had.

After establishing a colony on the island of Hispaniola during his second voyage to the New World—and in direct violation of his orders from the Spanish monarchy—Columbus figured the numerous indigenous people living there would make fine slaves, and so he began shipping hundreds of them back to Spain, and enslaving thousands more on Hispaniola allowing Spaniards serving under him to rape, pillage, and murder.

As historian Samuel Elliott Morrison put it: “The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide.”

Alarmed by the reports they were receiving about the brutality of Columbus towards not only the Native People, but also Hispaniola’s European colonists after Columbus’s fourth voyage, the Spanish crown ordered an investigation. That led to Columbus’s arrest and return in chains to Spain where the authorities stripped him of his titles.

Despite Spain’s initial decision to treat Native People with respect and kindness, when it apparently occurred to them they didn’t have to worry about reciprocal attacks from organized Indian or Chinese armies, the ethical gloves came completely off. And the Spanish quickly came to consider all the Indigenous People as surplus population. Five hundred years before the Germans perfected the method, the Spanish practiced the Final Solution on entire peoples living in North, Central, and South America.

Although Columbus thought he’d found India or China (he remained convinced until his death), it quickly became apparent to others that a) there seemed to be a major error in their calculations of the diameter of the earth and b) there further seemed to be a large mass of land taking up all that space between Europe and Asia. Due to those miscalculations of the Earth’s diameter, those early explorers thought that what turned out to be North, Central, and South America was a narrow island. Stories of rich nations and cities just beyond the horizon, some undoubtedly concocted by Native People eager to see murderous, greedy Europeans go elsewhere, became a staple of the colonization of the New World.

So, when the French landed in Canada and began exploring to the west, they were sure they would soon reach China. In fact, a series of rapids on the St. Lawrence River was named La Chine because early colonists were sure China was just up the river a few miles beyond the rapids. With that as a precedent, every time a French adventurer took possession of land as the boundaries of exploration were pushed ever farther westward, it was with one eye on the Chinese. For instance, when the French seized the Sault Ste. Marie rapids leading from Lake Superior just before 1620, the official doing the taking had brought along rich robes for the ceremony because he was sure a few Chinese potentates would show up for the festivities.

Cartographer Louis Jolliet and linguist Father Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest, explored the Mississippi River in 1673, proving it didn’t empty into the Pacific Ocean.

The conviction that rich Asian markets lay just beyond next hill to the west drove two centuries’ worth of searches for the non-existent Northwest Passage. And unlike those homicidal Spanish conquistadors, the French generally tended to be more benign in their colonial treatment of Native People.

French geographer Louis Jolliet and Jesuit missionary and linguist Father Jacques Marquette, who were sent to discover whether the Mississippi River was a sort of Southwest Passage to the Pacific, both had high hopes of finding the long-sought route. Instead, they discovered the Mississippi didn’t flow southwest. Rather, they found, it headed pretty much directly south or slightly southeast to end up emptying into the Gulf of Mexico and not the Gulf of California as had been hoped.

The Jolliet-Marquette expedition had began in 1673 when Jolliet was commissioned to find out exactly where the Mississippi went given Native People insisted it led to a huge body of water. He and a few companions left Montreal and paddled up the Ottawa River following the old trade route the Chippewa and Ottawa people had blazed and perfected centuries before.

The party crossed Rainy Lake and portaged into Georgian Bay of Lake Huron, eventually arriving at the French post of St. Ignace. There they picked up Father Marquette, who was added to the expedition for his linguistic skills.

The party then paddled down the western shore of Lake Michigan to the Fox River of Wisconsin that emptied into Green Bay. Paddling up the Fox, they portaged to the Wisconsin River at the site of today’s Portage, Wis., and then followed the Wisconsin down to its mouth on the Mississippi.

During their voyage down the Mississippi, Jolliet made navigational observations until, upon reaching the mouth of the Arkansas River, he realized the Mississippi had to flow into the Gulf of Mexico not the Gulf of California. In addition, at the mouth of the Arkansas, they were welcomed by an Indian village whose residents were using Spanish trade goods. That was alarming because Spain and France were quarreling at the time, creating a potentially unhealthy atmosphere for the French explorers.

So the expedition turned around and paddled back north. Reaching the mouth of the Illinois River, they were advised by some helpful Native People the smaller river was a shortcut to the Great Lakes, so they became the first Europeans to explore the Illinois River Valley. Both Jolliet and Marquette commented on the rich prairie land they saw during their voyage north, and both correctly predicted the territory would prove to be a productive farming region.

Father Marquette lived just one more year before dying on the lonely Lake Michigan coastline near modern Marquette, Mich.

Nineteenth Century artist George Catlin’s depiction of René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle’s 1682 ceremony claiming the Mississippi River’s watershed for Louis XIV. LaSalle named the entire river basin La Louisiane in the Sun King’s honor. The thoughts of the resident Native People having their ancestral home renamed after a foreign monarch were not recorded.

Jolliet was within sight of Montreal when his canoe upset in some rapids and he lost all of the journals and maps he had made during the expedition. However, he reconstructed much of the information, and that eventually caught the attention of Robert René Cavalier, Seur de la Salle, who concocted a grand scheme for the settlement of the lands Jolliet and Marquette had first explored as well as lands along the south shore of Lake Michigan east of the Chicago River.

And so it came to pass that nearly 200 years after Columbus landed, LaSalle finally discovered Indiana.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The history of getting hitched around these parts has ranged from fleeing in terror to public entertainment

On May 1, 1831, young Edward G. Ament and Emily Ann Harris were married by pioneer Methodist Missionary Rev. Isaac Scarritt, and thereby became the first couple to be wed within the bounds of what eventually became Kendall County.

From that time on, weddings multiplied as the frontier first caught up to the lands along the Fox River here in northern Illinois, and then moved on ever farther west until the nation’s boundaries reached the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

Rev. Scarritt had arrived in Illinois from Connecticut in 1818—the year the state was officially established by an act of Congress—first setting in Edwardsville before being assigned to take over dissolving the Methodists’ Fox River Mission in 1828. The joint Methodist-U.S. Government mission had been established on the Fox River at the mouth of Mission Creek in modern LaSalle County just south of the current Kendall County line. After winding up the mission’s affairs, Scarritt moved with his family to what is today’s DuPage Township in Will County, building his cabin near the forks of the DuPage River.

Scarritt was appointed the first justice of the peace in the area and so was the closest legal authority to legally conduct the Ament-Harris marriage. The U.S. has always maintained a somewhat curious official attitude towards marriage. It has always been considered a binding legal contract between two people (and, by association, their families), and so unlike births and deaths records of them have always been carefully kept. A legal marriage conducted by a justice of the peace or other officer of the court does not need a religious blessing to be legal. Nor does a religious wedding conducted by a minister or briest need to be blessed by an officer of the government. But both are considered to be legal unions in the eyes of the law.

So with Edward and Emily Ann’s marriage conducted by Isaac Scarritt, who was both a Methodist minister of the gospel and a justice of the peace, their union was doubly safe.

Just a few days after the young couple was married, the Black Hawk War broke out, and all the White settlers in the Fox, DuPage, and Des Plaines valleys fled for their lives, those on the northern reaches of the streams heading first to the cabin of Stephen Beggs—another Methodist missionary making his home where Plainfield is located today—and those on the southern reaches of the rivers getting to Ottawa as quickly as possible.

In an interesting note on the living conditions of those early settlers on the Illinois prairie, Scarritt left his claim so quickly he didn’t have time to grab a pair of shoes, suggesting a lot of those settlers went barefoot in warmer weather to save expensive footwear. The tradition is that when he eventually got to Chicago’s Fort Dearborn and safety, he was asked to preach a Sunday sermon for which he had to borrow a pair of shoes to avoid the embarrassment of speaking to a crowd shoeless.

As for Edward and Emily Ann, early Kendall County historian the Rev. E.W. Hicks dryly reported “…they took their wedding trip two weeks afterward, when they fled from the Indians.”

And then there was the no less interesting wedding when early Montgomery settler William T. Elliott decided to marry the lovely Rebecca Pearce, daughter of Elijah Pearce, a member of the numerous extended Pearce family that also were the first settlers here in Oswego Township.

This plaque near the Dieterle Memorial Home in Montgomery marks Elliott Creek where William Elliott built the cabin he and Rebecca Pearce Elliott called home. (Montgomery Patch photo)

Seventeen year-old Rebecca was more than willing to marry Elliott, a 19 year-old go-getter. But her father, when asked, was not yet willing to let the young lady leave his household. At that time, 1834, neither Kane nor Kendall County had yet been established, and the nearest place to get legally married was Ottawa. So Elliott walked the roughly 40 miles where the county clerk told him that since Rebecca was only 17, the bans would have to be announced in a church for two weeks before a license could be issued.

With no churches yet established in the Fox Valley, Elliott despondently trudged back upriver to Montgomery. But shortly before he reached his cabin, he happened on the Rev. N.C. Clark, one of the region’s earliest Congregational ministers, known by one and all as “the kindly Father Clark.” After hearing Elliott’s story, Rev. Clark suggested that on Sunday Elliott come over to the Naperville cabin where Clark’s nascent congregation was meeting, and announce the bans. Rev. Clark said he’d take care of making sure the second announcement was made as well.

In the meantime, Elijah Pearce had heard that the bans had been announced over in Naperville, but was under the impression they’d only been announced once. Thinking he had an entire week to go over to Naperville to protest on the second reading—which had already taken place—Pearce headed into Chicago for supplies. Meanwhile Elliott had hustled back down to Ottawa, obtained, the marriage license from the LaSalle County Clerk, hustled back upriver to Montgomery where Rev. Clark happily married William and Rebecca.

Elijah was reportedly pretty upset when he got back from Chicago to find his daughter was now Mrs. Elliott, but after a night’s sleep decided maybe it wasn’t the worst thing in the world to happen. And thereby on Aug. 3, 1835, William and Rebecca’s marriage became the first in what eventually became Aurora Township.

Tom (Charles Sherwood Stratton) Thumb’s wedding to bride Lavinia Warren on Feb. 10, 1863 at Grace Episcopal Church in New York City proved a wild financial success for showman P.T. Barnum, Stratton’s boss. Eventually, Stratton financially bailed Barnum out and the two became partners. (Costume Cocktail image)

Over the next several decades, weddings became quite a bit less exciting, with no Indian wars to cope with and a much shorter walk to the county seat to get a license. Church weddings gradually more popular, although marriages at home and in church parsonages seem to have been more the rule than the exception until after World War II when more elaborate marriages became the norm.

And, in fact, weddings eventually became the basis for some popular—if fairly unusual—community fundraisers in the early years of the 20^th Century.

In the Feb. 25, 1914 Kendall County Record, the Oswego Parent-Teachers Club—ancestor of today’s PTAs and PTOs—announced plans to present a Tom Thumb Wedding fundraiser. Tom Thumb Weddings had been developed as comedic musical entertainment events with a community’s school children playing the parts of the groom and bride—based on the 1863 marriage of P.T. Barnum’s diminutive cast member, the wildly popular Tom Thumb (Charles Sherwood Stratton) and his real life bride Lavinia Warren—as well as a large cast of other members of the wedding party and guests.

Photographer Dwight Young snapped this photo of the 1914 “Tom Thumb Wedding” performance in downtown Oswego’s Woodmen’s Hall. (Little White School Museum collection)

Performances of Tom Thumb Wedding fundraisers began in the 1890s in Pennsylvania, but then gradually spread as their success began to become more widely known. As an indication of the productions’ rising popularity, Walter H. Baker & Co. of Boston, Massachusetts published “The Tom Thumb wedding” script in 1898. Concerning the cast according to the Baker script, “there should be a minister, bride and groom, maid of honor, groomsman, father and mother, bridesmaids, ushers, guests, and flower girls.”

A Tom Thumb Wedding script published in 1895 by Eldridge Entertainment House, Inc. of Franklin, Ohio and Denver, Colorado.

The Oswego performance was an apparent success, the next week’s Record reporting: “The Tom Thumb wedding at the Woodman Hall Tuesday evening was well attended and a pleasant affair. Clement Burkhart as groom and Gladys Parkhurst as the bride, with their attendants made an interesting bridal party. Too much credit cannot be given all those participating.”

Apparently adults couldn’t wait to get in on the mock wedding fun, and within a few years, “womanless weddings” became popular amateur fundraising events where prominent local business owners and other luminaries—all men—dressed in costume and participated in the all-male events. The events proved popular in the Midwest during the years of the Great Depression.

On Feb. 19, 1930, the Record announced that “The XIX Century club of Oswego have procured the services of the Sympson Levi Producing company of Bardstown, Ky. to stage “The Womanless Wedding,” which has been put on so successfully in our neighboring towns. The dates will be March 17 and 18.”

The all-male cast of the 1930 Oswego “Womanless Wedding” production performed twice on successive nights in March 1930 on stage in the Red Brick School gym. (Little White School Museum collection)

According one script, “As title indicates, no women are to be used in this play, unless desired. Special care should be exercised in the selection of the cast. Use prominent men. Men taking ladies’ parts should wear ladies’ shoes if possible.  A small groom and large bride will prove effective. Have costumes and stage effects as elaborate as possible. An altar draped in red, white and blue is appropriate.”

Unlike the Tom Thumb Weddings, a professional director came as part of the production and there was little music and much more dialog by the characters in Womanless Wedding scripts, including racist depiction in blackface by Black participants.

By all accounts, the community found the production highly entertaining, especially given the prominence of men portraying the cross-dressing “women” in the cast.

The cast of the 1930 “Womanless Wedding” presented on stage in the Red Brick School gym included about every prominent man and boy in Oswego, from schoolboys to bankers to doctors. (Little White School Museum collection)

Reported the March 26, 1930 Kendall County Record: “The Womanless Wedding” has passed into history. It was one of the most talked of and enjoyable events in Oswego for some time. Many were unable to obtain seats. The parts were very well taken.”

In fact, the community had such a good time, they decided to produce their own version of the production, although this time not a wedding spoof. The Record’s Oswego correspondent reported on Jan. 27, 1937 that “The womanless play, “Ladies for a Night,” given at the high school gym last Thursday and Friday, netted nearly $100 and everyone a lot of fun.” It doesn’t sound like a lot to us today, but back during the late Depression years, $100 was pretty big money—roughly $2,000 in 2022 dollars.

These days, although some communities still do produce variations on Tom Thumb Weddings, the political struggle over LGTBQ rights have pretty much put paid to womanless wedding productions. And when it comes to actual marriages, “destination weddings” seem to be all the rage nowadays, with people dragging friends and relatives all over the country and even off to foreign climes to witness two people getting hitched for better or worse. The good news is at least most of those newly married couples won’t spend their honeymoons fleeing to the nearest fort.

If you’re interested in chatting about some more entertaining Oswego wedding history, don’t miss Little White School Museum Manager Anne Jordan’s next History Happy Hour at the Fox Valley Winery (in the old Main Street fire station), set for 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 8. Residents of the Oswegoland Park District can register for $15 and non-residents for $25–registration includes one glass of wine to enjoy during the evening’s discussion about Oswego wedding history. Preregistration is required by calling the park district at 630-554-2999 or visit their web site at https://www.oswegolandparkdistrict.org/.

Modern Millerites are not swayed by facts, either

Anne Applebaum’s recent piece in The Atlantic, “The MyPillow Guy Really Could Destroy Democracy,” lays out, at least partially, the argument that predicting the second coming of Donald Trump seems to have replaced millennialism among right wing true believers.

And when discussions of millennialism get underway, the historian’s mind almost naturally moves right to the Millerites of 19th Century America.

Cultism is, in fact, about as American as you can get. And that, of course, includes the present day. One of the most modern enduring cults is that of the runaway inflation predictors. Nowadays, they’re led by economist Larry Summers, but their dire, never fulfilled predictions, date back quite a ways.

Back in 2014, for instance, economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote on his blog that voices, mostly on the right of the political spectrum, who kept wrongly predicting runaway inflation because of this or that government policy mostly resembled end-of-the-world religious cults.

And every once in a while, members of such religious cults do pop up in the news in this day and age. Besides the political cult of the Trump worshipers, one of the most recent religious cults (I’m leaving QAnon out of the religious equation here, although maybe I shouldn’t) that popped up predicting the end of the world as we know it, and which got a lot of coverage was when religious broadcaster Harold Camping decided that Jesus Christ would return to Earth on Saturday, May 21, 2011. The day came and went with nothing unusual, such as the end of the world, happening. That fazed Camping but it didn’t seriously deter him. In fact, Camping went back to his calculator. Or maybe it was his abacus. After all, he had already been unsuccessful in predicting the end of the world in 1994, but but previous failures didn’t seem to deter his followers much.

Harold Camping was convinced the world was going to end on May 21, 2011. It didn’t, nor did it end on Oct. 21, 2011. And it seems to still be going strong today.

And, in fact, Camping himself wasn’t much deterred, either. He regrouped, refigured, and announced the real day Jesus Christ would return and the world—plus the rest of the universe—would end was Friday, Oct. 21, 2011. The day came and went without much end-of-the-world stuff happening, or anything else either—except for the usual, ongoing run-of-the-mill global mayhem. In fact, Oct. 21, 2011 was remarkable for exactly how little happened that day.

After that, Camping’s ministry announced that he’d finally decided nobody could determine when the end of the world would arrive, which seemed sensible from his own point of view, because that’s exactly what the Bible reports Jesus warned his followers not to do.

As noted, Camping was far from unique. End-of-the-worlders are a historical tradition that extends back all the way to Biblical times when whoever it was who wrote the Book of Revelation recounted, with ill-disguised relish and in painful detail, what would happen to non-believers—defined as anyone who did not believe whatever the author believed—on Judgment Day.

By the 19th Century, predicting the end of the world was becoming almost a cottage industry, especially here in the United States, and so when our own, homegrown end-of-the-worlder, William Miller, predicted that 1843 was the year and April was the month the world would end, a lot of people took notice.

Miller was a Massachusetts man who volunteered to fight in the War of 1812, serving as a captain in the U.S. Army. A near-death experience in combat led to Miller’s fascination with death and the afterlife, not to mention his conversion from deism to evangelical Christianity.

Joining the Baptist Church, he closely studied the Bible, developing his own interpretations of the book. He eventually decided there were hidden facts to be excavated from the text.

In September 1822, he formally and publicly announced his findings: “I believe that the second coming of Jesus Christ is near, even at the door, even within twenty-one years,—on or before 1843.”

William Miller, about 1844

The deadlines Miller and his followers set for the end of the world, March and April of 1843, came and went, and were followed by what became known as “The Great Disappointment,” as thousands of his followers left their beliefs behind and tried to get back to their regular lives.

In Kendall County, there seem to have been quite a few Millerites, but they apparently mostly kept to themselves and were apparently not nearly as obnoxious as modern end-of-the-worlders seem to be.

The Rev. E.W. Hicks, one of Miller’s fellow Baptists, was not impressed by the Millerite craze. In his 1877 history of Kendall County, Hicks wrote: “During the early part of 1843 the Miller excitement in regard to the end of the world was at its height. William Miller had fixed on April, 1843, as the time of the end, and there were many believers in his arithmetic in this county. It is no doubt a fact that some of them had their white robes ready made for the occasion, from a wrong interpretation of Rev. 7:9. The clothing of heaven is holiness, spiritual in texture, and not cloth from the Georgia cotton fields. Christ is coming again, ‘in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven;’ but he, himself, was careful to teach us that ‘of that day and hour knoweth no man, no not the angels of heaven.’ And if still we are curious to know, we have his rebuke, that ‘it is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in His own power.’ ‘Watch, for ye know not when the Master cometh.’”

Millerites came in for more than their share of kidding after the world failed to end in 1843 or 1844. Miller’s movement resulted, however, in the formation of two new, uniquely American Christian sects.

George M. Hollenback, who was one of the first two White children born in Kendall County (his twin sister was the other) and so was a young eyewitness to the Millerite craze, wrote in the 1914 history of Kendall County that: “During the winter of 1843, the Millerites created excitement over the whole country and had much influence among the weak and superstitious and even extended far among the apparently well informed people. There was a good deal of anxiety until the time set for the great catastrophe of the end of the world had come and had happily passed. A few of the neighbors procured their ‘ascension robes’ in expectation of the day when the heavens were to open ‘and melt with fervent heat.’ As the weather was cold, the material from which the robes were constructed was white flannel. It is said of one woman that she gave out publicly that she would not believe in the Bible if the Savior did not appear. He did not appear, so the ascension robes of herself and husband were not used for the purpose for which they were constructed.”

Miller died in 1849, still eagerly looking towards Christ’s second coming. His legacy includes the Advent Christian Church with 61,000 members, and the Seventh-day Adventist Church with over 19 million members, both denominations having a direct historical connection to the Millerites and the Great Disappointment of 1844.

The craze William Miller started passed, but his ideas were not forgotten. Through the years, others have attempted to predict the end of the world, some based on supposed truths hidden in the Bible, others based on other ideas up to and including UFOs, with no notable success thus far. Some of these folks were true believers, like Harold Camping, who seemed genuinely perplexed why the world didn’t end when he was sure it was going to. And we can’t forget the Heaven’s Gate cult, 39 of whose members committed suicide in 1997 as they awaited the UFO that was supposed to carry them away. Others have proven to be pure charlatans, some who proved to be much worse than grifters aiming to separate the gullible believers from their cash.

As Applebaum noted in her piece in The Atlantic, “The apocalypse has been variously predicted for the year 500, based on the dimensions of Noah’s Ark; the year 1033, on the 1,000th anniversary of Jesus’s birth; and the year 1600, by Martin Luther no less; as well as variously by Jehovah’s Witnesses, Nostradamus, and Aum Shinrikyo, among many others. When nothing happened—the world did not end; the messiah did not arrive—did any of them throw in the towel and stop believing? Of course not.”

Like their religious cousins, the political and economic end-of-the-worlders aren’t fazed by facts proving their views wrong. Although unsuccessfully (but enthusiastically) predicting runaway inflation and devaluation of the dollar since 2008, they continue to do so, despite the actual data proving them to be in error. As Krugman continues to note, their continued popularity and hold on positions of authority is one of the mysteries of the 21st Century.

And likewise the My Pillow Guy and his accomplices continue to confidently predict Donald Trump’s second coming as President despite its legal and political impossibility—there’s simply no constitutional provision for a Presidential election do-over. That so many either believe or say they believe (which I suspect includes many complicit Republican Senators and House members) it will happen, though, illustrates that fervent wishes, no matter how outlandish and crazed, exert as powerful an effect on modern people as they did nearly 180 years ago. In fact, with crackpot ideas now being reinforced 24 hours a day, seven days a week by complicit, ubiquitous electronic media, the effects of those ideas on society as a whole may well be far more serious.

Covid and politics respite: Oswego as a mining and quarrying town

With all the turmoil driven by the Covid-19 pandemic and the nation’s political situation, let’s get our minds off today’s troubles by taking a microhistorical dive into Oswego’s past life as a quarrying and mining center.

Quarrying? Mining? Those who give our small corner of the Fox Valley’s geology any thought at all probably figure the gently rolling landscape left after the last glaciers retreated has always been primarily used by farmers, first Native People and then the White settlers that displaced them.

But while it hasn’t gotten as much attention as farming, mining has been a local pursuit since prehistoric times.

A few hundred million years ago, Oswego was at the bottom of a shallow sea. Over the eons, tiny marine creatures died and drifted to the bottom where their shells built up into substantial layers of limestone.

The Native People who arrived following the retreating glaciers found they could mine the limestone bluffs along Waubonsie Creek behind the modern Oswego Public Library for nodules of chert that could be easily fashioned into razor-sharp knives, scrapers, drills, and points for arrows and spears. And, in fact, back in the 1980s when we were permitted to do a little rescue archaeology, we found a chert-knapping workshop on the bluff overlooking the creek not far upstream from those chert veins. We retrieved somewhere around 50 pounds of chips (a tiny fraction of the total) those ancient workmen left behind as they fashioned their tools and weapons—and those chips were still razor-sharp.

When White settlers arrived in the 1830s, they soon discovered the limestone that underlays the Oswego area was relatively easy to access, especially along the creek where those ancient people had mined chert. And they didn’t waste much time in mining that limestone for a number of purposes.

Local quarries were established in several areas, including along the banks of the creek behind what is now the Oswego Public Library where those chert mines had been located. Unlike the Native Americans who mined chert veins layering the limestone, the settlers quarried the limestone itself for building materials. Evidence of these early quarrying operations is still visible today if you look hard enough.

A poor quality but interesting photograph taken from the Route 25 bridge looking downstream along Waubonsie Creek sometime during the first quarter of the 20th Century shows spoil heaps from the old Loucks Quarry. (Little White School Museum collection)

The Hopkins brothers established a limestone quarry along the creek early in the village’s history. Then in 1871, another quarry was opened a bit farther upstream. As the Kendall County Record reported on Oct. 5 of that year, “Ed. Richards and Chas. Mann have opened a quarry up the Wauponsie [sic] on the land of Mr. Loucks from which they are taking very nice building stone.”

Eventually, Loucks took over the quarry’s operation, as the Feb. 10, 1876 Record reported: “Walter Loucks Esq., one of Oswego’s oldest citizens, has the well-known stone quarry on the Wauponsie [sic] creek open for business again, and parties in want of good stone for building purposes or good sharp sand for mortar or cement should call at the Wauponsie quarry. Mr. Loucks expects to be able to furnish cut stone for all purposes in a few months.”

By June that year, the Record reported Loucks’ quarry was in full operation: “When you want stone for foundation or cellar walls, for well or cistern, you can get a first class article at Walter Loucks’ stone quarry at Oswego.”

The Loucks lime kiln on Waubonsie Creek. (Little White School Museum collection)

As the Record noted about the Loucks quarry, in addition to using limestone as a building material, early Oswego residents also baked the limestone in kilns to produce quicklime, which, in turn was mixed with sand to create lime mortar for stone and brick construction. There was once at least one lime kiln along the banks of Waubonsie Creek just upstream from the Ill. Route 25 bridge, probably operated by Loucks in conjunction with his cut limestone and sand quarrying operation.

Over on the west side of the Fox River a mile north of Oswego, the Wormley Quarry, operated by Civil War veteran George D. Wormley, produced both cut limestone and flagstone. The Wormleys used cut stone from their quarry to build two of their farmhouses adjacent to the quarry. In addition, large quantities of flagstone were mined from the Wormley quarry, some of it likely used as foundation stones for the grist and sawmills built by Nathaniel Rising at the Fox River dam just north of Oswego.

George Wormley built this elegant Second Empire house out of limestone quarried just down the hill from the house–which still stands along Ill. Route 31 north of Oswego. (Little White School Museum collection)

Flagstone’s name derives from Middle English flagge, meaning turf, or maybe from the Old Norse flaga meaning slab or chip—opinions appear to vary. Flagstone occurs in layers of varying thickness and is ideal for sidewalks and paving.

The Wormley quarry continued on for many years. In July 1881, the Kendall County Record ran an ad from George Wormley touting the quality of stone from his quarry: “Stone! Stone!” the advertisement announced. In the advertisement, Wormley stated: “I am getting out some very fine stone and will try and get enough to go around. Come and see for yourselves. Also flagging. Can get stone to cover culverts almost any time.”

Girls at the YWCA’s Camp Quarryledge enjoy swimming in George Wormley’s old limestone quarry in 1927. (Little White School Museum collection)

After its life as a stone quarry, the Wormley quarry property was sold to the YWCA for use as a summer camp and named Camp Quarryledge. Since those days, the parcel has had numerous owners but the old quarry, namesake of the camp, still exists, owned nowadays by the Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints.

The Hopkins Quarry, operated by Oswego farmer Elijah Hopkins, was situated on Wolf’s Crossing Road, just west of Oswego. Hopkins and his family emigrated to Oswego from Ohio in 1857, settling just east of the village on what was sometimes called the Old Naperville Road, which we call today Wolf’s Crossing Road.

Hopkins found the topsoil on his land was only about two feet deep atop the underlying limestone, providing easy access by the Hopkins family quarrymen. Hopkins eventually opened quarries on both sides of the road. Like the Wormley and Loucks quarries, Hopkins’ quarries produced both good quality building limestone and flagstone. As the Record’s Oswego correspondent reported on June 8, 1876, “Joseph Failing has laid down a very nice and substantial flagstone sidewalk in front of his residence. The stone came from the Hopkins quarry.”

The Hopkins quarries on both sides of Wolf’s Crossing Road a short distance east of the intersection of Ill. Route 71 and U.S. Route 34 in Oswego in a view from Google Earth. The quarries still exist, although they’re now often hidden from the road by trees and bushes. The Herren family built a house (to the right of the lower quarry) to take advantage of the view.

Today, the former quarries are serene lakes and wildlife sanctuaryies amidst the area’s hustle and bustle where evidence of mining is still clearly visible on the quarry walls.

Those glaciers didn’t only uncover and leave behind limestone, either. Glacial till in the form of gravel deposits underlay much of the Fox River Valley, and that includes the Oswego area.

In 1885, Kendall County’s Grand Army of the Republic posts held their sumer picnic at Cowdrey’s Woods. (Little White School Museum collection)

South of Oswego along the river the Cowdrey family farmed along with their neighbors, the Leighs and Parkhursts and Herrens. In the 1870s, the scenic wooded parcels of the Cowdrey farm became favored destinations of picnickers from Oswego and Yorkville. During the hot summers of the era, refugees from nearby cities came to the area to camp, some spending a month or more at Cowdrey’s Woods.

As the Record’s Oswego correspondent reported on Aug. 7, 1889, “A number from the cities of this region are now encamped in the Cowdrey park down the river.”

During that era, the railroads in the U.S. were undergoing explosive growth and every mile of rails required tons of gravel for the roadbed, including fill for depressions along the right-of-way. The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad knew there were extensive gravel beds underlaying Cowdrey’s farm (the railroad’s Fox River Branch was built right through the gravel beds), as well as the farms along the river all the way nearly to Oswego. And when the company’s other gravel beds began playing out, they started looking at the area along their Fox River Branch south of Oswego for a replacement.

In 1892, the CB&Q’s huge gravel mining operation at Montgomery had played out, and the company was ready to convert the property into a livestock yard to allow sheep being shipped to the Chicago market to rest and feed before being sent on to the Chicago Stockyards. As the Record reported on July 27, 1892: “These extensive gravel beds have been nearly exhausted and will not be worked any longer than another year at most. The big excavation made there will be leveled off, properly drained and converted into sheep yards. The engineering work has already been completed and work of building will commence at once. Sheep that are shipped over the Chicago Burlington & Quincy and the Chicago Burlington & Northern lines will be unloaded at Montgomery and there prepared for the market. They will then be shipped to Chicago in car load lots or several cars at a time as wanted.”

This 1944 U.S. Geological Survey map Shows the rail sidings and interior network that served the gravel mining operation south of Oswego.

In April 1893, the Record reported that George Cowdrey was negotiation with “Chicago parties” on selling his property for a gravel mine. And by August, the deal was done. On Oct. 11, the Record’s Oswego correspondent noted: “Operations in the gravel works down at Cowdrey’s have been commenced.”

The Elms was located on Van Emmon Road at the bend just before the junction with Route 71. According to Elmer Dickson in February 2010: “The Elms was a resort. You could board there for a weekend, week or what ever. People would come out from the Chicago area to picnic, play games on the grounds, swim, fish and boat in the Fox River, etc. Rumor has it that it was a speakeasy during prohibition.”

The far south end of Cowdrey’s land didn’t appeal to the gravel interests as much, and that remained a popular area for campers. Bought by Chicago parties and named “The Elms,” the place drew city folks for years. And under it’s current name of “Hide-A-Way Lakes,” it still does.

The effects of the financial Panic of 1893 temporarily closed the gravel mines, but as the economy got moving once again, gravel mining south of Oswego accelerated, too. Companies under various names—the Fox River Gravel Company, the Conkey Gravel Company, Chicago Sand and Gravel, and the CB&Q itself—operated portions of the pits up into the 1950s leaving behind a landscape of narrow lakes on land adjacent to the Fox River.

The mining operation was huge, and included its own rail sidings and huge processing plants along with its own small railroad that, in those pre-diesel hauler days, carried the gravel from the huge steam shovels and draglines to the processing plant on the site. From there, the Burlington’s rail cars carried it to where the railroad needed it. The pits closed during the Great Depression, but reopened during World War II and then continued on until about 1950 when the operation closed for good.

Steam dragline at the H.B. Conkey Sand & Gravel Company pit between Oswego and Yorkville loading gravel into the pit’s cars before being hauled to the crushers and sorted into grades. Note the pit’s narrow-gauge steam locomotive at left. (Little White School Museum collection)

The remaining lakes and spoil heaps from the old gravel mining operations remained, and provided some scenic areas for private homes and for organizations such as the Barber-Greene Hunting and Fishing Club. The State of Illinois bought a large parcel in the early 1950s when proposals were afoot to build a series of dams up and down the Fox River to make it navigable from the Chain of Lakes to Ottawa.

Part of the parcel was leased as a municipal dump for residents of Oswego and Oswego Township for several years. Then in the summer of 1963, the 160-acre parcel that included the dump was deeded over to the Oswego Park District (later renamed the Oswegoland Park District). Much to its future regret, the park district allowed dumping on the site to continue for a few years before closing the dump with the aim of turning the parcel into a natural area they named Saw Wee Kee Park.

Residents who lived on land adjacent to the park objected when the park district announced some modest development plans and a series of lawsuits was initiated against the park district alleging there was considerable contamination by hazardous materials on the old dump site. Years of litigation followed with the park district in the end forced to spend thousands of dollars to mitigate the contamination.

Today, Saw Wee Kee is one of the park district’s natural area gems, with a canoe launch on the river, hiking trails, and other facilities that mask the area’s one-time role as a vital cog in the expansion of the nation’s rail transportation network. It’s also a reminder of the era in which our little corner of the Fox River Valley not only produced agricultural products, but also turned out vital building materials that helped grow the community.

The Methodists’ Fox River Mission an early effort at Fox Valley settlement

When his secretary informed him the missionaries from the western frontier had arrived for their appointment during that summer of 1824, we can only guess what U.S. Secretary of War John C. Calhoun expected.

What Calhoun actually got when Jesse Walker strode into the room was a bluff, powerfully built man whose complexion had been weathered during a lifetime spent outdoors, both working at his trade as a tanner and hide dresser, as well as on horseback laboring at his vocation as one of the best-known itinerant frontier missionaries.

Secretary of War John C. Calhoun was just perfecting his destructive states’ rights theories when he met with Jesse Walker in 1824.

On a trip that spanned three months, Walker had ridden east on horseback from his post along the Mississippi River at St. Louis to the Methodist-Episcopal Church National Conference at Baltimore. On the journey, he’d been accompanied by another pioneer circuit rider, Thomas A. Morris, a delegate from the Kentucky Conference.

The man Calhoun greeted was plainly dressed in the manner of frontier missionaries of the era in plain, sturdy pants, coat and vest of wool with a white cravat at his neck, carrying his distinctive large light-colored beaver felt hat that was “nearly as large as a lady’s umbrella,” Morris recalled of his traveling companion.

Walker‘s proposition for Calhoun: If the government contributed part of the cost, the Methodists’ Illinois Conference would establish a school among the related members of the Pottawatomie, Ottawa, and Chippewa tribes living along the Illinois and Fox rivers of Illinois. The mission would include a blacksmith shop and a corn mill to grind grain into flour. Not only would Indian children be taught the English language, as well as the Methodist gospel, Walker said, but also their parents would be instructed in the “civilized arts” of farming.

Calhoun probably figured it was good bargain. With it, the government would obtain professional services that had been promised in various treaties for the tribes at little expense. Meanwhile the Methodists would get funding to establish a mission with the aim of converting Native Americans to Christianity in general and Methodism in particular.

Satisfied, Walker returned to Illinois where he set to work to create a permanent Illinois River Valley mission. His first attempt was at the old French village of Peoria near Fort Clark on the Illinois River. Walker and his wife, Susannah Webly Walker, opened a mission school that attracted only six Native American youngsters. Walker soon realized the Peoria mission was located too far south of the main population of the tribes he was trying to serve.

Methodist missionary Jesse Walker

So early in the spring of 1825, Walker, in the company of John Hamlin and six others, rowed their Mackinaw boat up the Illinois and then the DesPlaines River to Chicago to scout new mission locations. During the trip, Walker became the first Methodist to hold services at Chicago.

After returning, the Walkers and five other families traveled up the Illinois above Starved Rock to the mouth of the Fox River where they established a small settlement and mission school—the seed around which modern Ottawa would grow. Some 14 Native American students were soon attending classes at the new mission school. But that site, too, proved too distant from the bulk of the area’s Indian population which was living farther north. At that point, Chief Shabbona and a fur trader and interpreter of mixed Pottawatomie and French Canadian blood named George Forquier (also spelled Furkee), volunteered to help. Shabbona was born an Ottawa but had become an influential chief of the Potawatomi people living within the Three Fires Confederacy. The Confederacy was comprised of groups of Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi who shared both cultural and family ties.

Ambrotype was made of “Chief Shaubonee” on June 7, 1857 at Morris by image artist H.B. Field

Shabbona, Walker, and Forquier explored 20 miles up the east bank of the Fox River until they found a grove with a good spring. There, on the site of what soon became the Fox River Mission, Walker drove his claim stakes. It included all of Section 15 in Township 35, Range 5 of LaSalle County, later named Mission Township in honor of Walker’s activities.

That October in 1825, Walker reported about the proposed mission site: “The place is about one hundred miles above Fort Clark [at Peoria], about twenty miles north of the Illinois River, between it and Fox River. The soil is very good, timber plenty, and the spot well watered.”

The following year he reported to his superiors that work on the mission was proceeding: “I have built a house for the accommodation of the family, which consists of eighteen persons.” The large two-story log house measured 20 x 50 feet.

“A smith’s shop, a convenience that I could not dispense with, situated as I was, so remote from the settlements of the whites; a poultry house, springhouse, and other conveniences,” completed the mission, he reported. He said he had 40 acres in crops, seven in fenced pasture, and a one-acre garden.

“Hitherto everything has been attended with much hardship, hunger, cold and fatigue; and the distance which we have to transport everything has made it expensive; but with regard to the settlement, the greatest obstacles are overcome, and a few more years’ labour will furnish a comfortable home and plenty,” he told his Methodist superiors, adding, “The school consists of 15 Indian children, 7 males and 8 females, and two teachers. I am encouraged with the prospect of considerable acquisitions to the school this fall.”

In the missionary venture, Walker was assisted by his wife; his nephew who was also his son-in-law, James Walker, who brought along a horse-powered grain mill; James Walker’s wife, Jane, Jesse’s daughter, who became the teacher at the mission school, and all their children.

The lot of a circuit-riding minister in northern Illinois during the 1830s was a not for the faint of heart. One, the Rev. Mr. See, was killed during the Black Hawk War of 1832.

The missionaries’ spirits were more than willing, but the local Indians proved infertile ground for mission work—the idea of original sin was often a non-starter with Native People. And besides that, the promised government funding never arrived. Amid rumors the local tribes were to be removed west of the Mississippi, the Illinois Conference decided to close the mission down by 1829. Then to finish the venture off, all the buildings were burned by Indians in 1832 during the Black Hawk War.

Although its life was brief, the mission nevertheless was well-known among early Illinois settlers. When Galena businessman J.G. Stoddard decided to try shipping a ton and a half of lead overland to Chicago in 1829, the expedition aimed to cross the Fox River at Walker’s mission, probably hoping the blacksmith there could make any necessary repairs. Unfortunately, by the time Stoddard’s wagons got there, the mission had closed.

Then in 1831, John Kinzie and his wife, Juliette, traveled from Kinzie’s fur trade post at Prairie du Chien in Wisconsin across Illinois to Chicago. Kinzie’s party also aimed to strike the Fox River near Walker’s mission, but they never made it due to poor navigation by their supposedly experienced guide. Instead, the encountered the Fox River just below modern Oswego, well north of the old mission.

After closing down the mission, James and Jane Walker established Walker’s Grove along the DuPage River (the nucleus around which Plainfield eventually formed) while Jesse Walker continued riding his circuit.

Jesse Walker’s monument in the Plainfield Cemetery.

Walker’s wife, Susannah, died in 1832 and was buried at Plainfield. Mostly retired, Walker died in 1835 at his farm located where Grand Avenue crosses the DesPlaines River in modern River Grove.

In 1850, Walker’s remains were moved to the Plainfield Cemetery, where he was reburied in the same casket as Susannah. A fine monument that was dedicated there in 1911 gives a brief account of Walker’s fascinating career and hints at his importance in the settlement of northern Illinois.

Oswegoland’s Methodist roots run deep

Our little corner of Illinois has deep Methodist roots.

One of the first permanent settlers north of Peoria was Jesse Walker, a Methodist preacher who established a mission along the Fox River north of its mouth on the Illinois River in 1825.

Walker established the Fox River Mission in Section 15 of modern Mission Township, LaSalle County (T35N, R5E) on land purchased from the Potowatomi Tribe, on behalf of the Methodist Church. When the Illinois General Assembly approved allowing counties to establish the township form of government in 1850 and names were chosen for each, Mission was named after Walker’s enterprise a quarter of a century earlier.

The purpose of the mission was to teach the local Native Americans a variety of skills, including farming; educate Native American children at a mission-run school; and, of course, to spread the Gospel according to Methodist teachings.

Jesse Walker

In his 1825 report, Walker reported to the Rock River Conference of the Methodist Church in Illinois that he had established the mission, after some confusion about the proper location, and that it included a large, two story house, built of hewn logs, measuring 50×30 feet. The house was divided into apartments for the mission staff (which mostly consisted of Walker’s extended family). The mission campus also included a blacksmith shop, a poultry house, a spring house and “other conveniences.”

Walker’s son-in-law, James Walker, arrived in the Fox Valley that same year and brought with him a horse-powered corn grinding mill. Soon after, however, James Walker moved on to the DuPage River where he established a new settlement, first called Walker’s Grove, and later renamed Plainfield.

Jesse Walker reported that by 1826, the mission had 40 acres of land under cultivation, seven acres in pasture, and one acre planted in garden crops to provide food for the staff. The cost of the venture was $2,034, of which the U.S. Government had pledged to pay two-thirds, since the mission staff promised to use their blacksmith to service the needs of the local Native Americans.

But the mission turned out to be neither a financial nor a spiritual success. American Indians were always difficult to convert to Christianity, at least one source reporting that Native Americans thought the concept of original sin ridiculous. And while the government had pledged to subsidize the new mission—it would have been a relatively cheap way to provide services to local tribes required under various treaties—Walker and the Methodists learned the hard lesson that it’s best to get cash in hand when the government makes promises and not rely on anyone’s good will or intentions. The Methodists, in fact, never did get the money they were promised.

By 1829, when Galena merchant James Stoddard sent a small wagon train loaded with lead to Chicago from the mines located around the bustling northwestern Illinois town (the train crossed the Fox River at the mission, drawn by the promise of blacksmithing services there) they found the mission abandoned.

While Walker and the other Methodists in the Rock River Conference gave the mission up as a bad idea, they continued to spread the Gospel according to Methodism to the new settlers beginning to flood into northern Illinois. Another Methodist preacher, Stephen R. Beggs, settled at James Walker’s growing hamlet on the DuPage River.

In 1832, when the Black Hawk War broke out, settlers up and down the Fox River Valley fled their homes for safety. Those in the southern part of today’s Kendall County line ran south to Ottawa, where a fort was under construction. Those in the northern part of the modern county’s boundaries first fled to Walker’s Grove where they congregated at Beggs’ farm. The panicked pioneers tore down some of Beggs’ sheds and fences and built a rude fort designed to scare off any Indian attackers. And, indeed, it was pretty much a bluff, because as Beggs later recalled, while there were some 125 frightened refugees there, they only had four guns among them, “some of which,” he added, didn’t work.

The war proved to be brief and the next year, 1833, was dubbed “The Year of the Early Spring.” The prairie dried out and the grass greened up early, allowing a pent-up wave of settlers to begin flooding into the Fox Valley.

Daniel and Sarah Pearce (Little White School Museum collection)

Many of those early pioneers were Methodists, and Jesse Walker and Stephen Beggs lost no time in establishing Methodist meetings at several settlers’ cabins up and down the Fox Valley, the two of them servicing their respective circuits. Beggs, who established the first Methodist class at Walker’s Grove in 1829, was receptive when Daniel and Sarah Pearce and their extended family, who had settled at what eventually became Oswego in 1833, asked for a class to be established there. That year, the Oswego Class joined new classes at Ottawa and Princeton. By 1835, when the Rev. William Royal was the circuit rider, his route took him from Oswego northwest to Belvedere, south to Princeton, and back through Mission Township in LaSalle County as he visited the 19 charges in his circuit.

The Oswego Methodist-Episcopal Church, now the Little White School Museum, as it looked in 1901. (Little White School Museum collection)

The Methodist class meeting at the Pearce cabin eventually became a full-fledged congregation of the Methodist-Episcopal Church. The congregation began building a church in Oswego in 1848, finishing the building in 1850. It is today known as the Little White School Museum, and still stands on the site where those early Methodists erected it. The church was finally considered free of debt and eligible to be dedicated in 1854. The congregation met in the building until 1913,when they decided to merge with the German Methodists a few blocks away.

It was during the mid-19^th Century that another group of Methodist farmers, this time from Germany called Albright Methodists, began settling on the prairie east of Oswego. They built their first church about 1850 on a low-lying parcel just west of modern Roth Road. The church and cemetery were moved east to Roth Road in 1861. Eventually, this congregation became known as the Prairie Church.

The Albright Methodists’ second church on the Oswego Prairie built in 1871. (Little White School Museum collection)

Meanwhile in Oswego, a group of Albright Methodists, members of the Prairie Church, were beginning to wish they had their own church in town so they didn’t have to drive three miles out in the country every Sunday. In 1860, the group began meeting in a stone building at the corner of Washington and Madison called the French Castle.

The French Castle, built as a large home by some of Oswego’s early French-Canadian residents (thus the name) at Washington and Madison streets, had been used by the village’s Presbyterians until 1857 when they moved to their new church at Madison and Douglas streets.

The vacant building proved a suitable home for the new congregation.

The German Evangelical Church built by the Oswego’s Albright Methodists in 1894 on the site of the old “French Castle.” (Little White School Museum collection)

The Oswego congregation continued to grow, as more Germans immigrated to the area, along with Pennsylvania Germans, both drawn by the large population of German-speakers already in the area. Sermons and funerals at the new church were preached in German while the Methodist-Episcopal Church served the village’s English language population.

The town Methodists eventually built a new church in 1894 after tearing the old building down. So that year, Oswego boasted two Methodist churches, one German and one American, with services in English in the Methodist-Episcopal Church and services in German at the Albright Methodists’ new building.

The German Methodists’ new Prairie Church was built in 1910, replacing the old 1871 building. (Little White School Museum collection)

The German Methodists hired a single preacher who ministered to a circuit of four congregations that included the one in town, the Prairie Church, and the Lantz Church and the Copenhagen Church, both just over the line in Will County’s Wheatland Township. The four-church circuit was served by a single pastor, based in Oswego. The Copenhagen and Lantz congregations eventually merged, creating a new congregation called the Salem Church.

In 1870, Oswego had boasted Baptist, Lutheran, German Evangelical, Presbyterian, Congregational, and Methodist-Episcopal churches. But as the years passed, some of those congregations gradually dissolved. The Baptists were first to go, and their congregants spread themselves among the remaining churches. The Lutherans were next, with most of them joining their fellow

Today’s Church of the Good Shepherd United Methodist in Oswego. (Little White School Museum collection)

German-speakers at the Evangelical Church. The congregation at the Methodist-Episcopal Church—now the Little White School Museum—dissolved in 1913, and its members mostly transferred to the Evangelical Church. Possibly prompted by that union, services started being held in English in January of that year.

Finally, when the Congregational Church was destroyed by fire in 1920, its congregation also decided to join the Evangelical Church’s congregation, and a new church community, the Federated Church, was created. It’s a name by which some long-time Oswego residents still call the church.

Formerly the Oswego Methodist-Episcopal Church, the Little White School Museum is now the repository for Oswego area history and heritage. (Little White School Museum collection)

The Federated Church became affiliated with the Evangelical United Brethren denomination in 1947. It changed its name to the Church of the Good Shepherd EUB in 1957 in honor of the church building’s iconic stained glass window that faces Washington Street. In 1968, the EUB and Methodists merged, and the Church of the Good Shepherd added “United Methodist” to its name.

Today, the landmark Church of the Good Shepherd United Methodist is the direct descendant of those pioneer Methodists who gathered in Daniel Pearce’s log cabin in 1833 to establish the first Oswego Methodist Class and went on to build the historic Little White School Museum, and to play such an important part in Oswego area history.

 

 

 

 

 

Galena Road and its bridge are artifacts of the Fox Valley’s pioneer past

Busy Galena Road will be closed for a while this summer while contractors working for Kendall County replace the bridge across Blackberry Creek.

As it’s name suggests, Galena Road was one of the major routes to the lead mining region around the far northwestern Illinois boom town. Looking at a map, it might seem a bit odd to area residents that a road from Chicago to Galena headed west and a bit south from Chicago, then sharply dipped farther southwest across Blackberry Creek before finally turning northwest towards the lead mining region.

After all, why go southwest to get northwest? And therein lies a historical tale.

From the Aurora-Montgomery area, the old Chicago to Galena Road bent southwesterly to the ford across Blackberry Creek. The modern road still follows the same route.

Although the routes from Chicago to Ottawa were already major thoroughfares by the early 1830s, only sporadic—and difficult—travel was undertaken between Galena and Chicago. Granted, some commercial overland travel began as early as 1829, but there was no surveyed road until 1833.

Virtually all of Galena’s early transportation needs were met by steamboats and, much more laboriously, keelboats using the Mississippi River system. But shipping lead from the mines in the Galena region to market via the river system, and returning with food, clothing, and other necessities was an expensive and time-consuming process in those early years.

Galena, Illinois in the early 1840s was a bustling boom town built on lead mining. The illustration above shows lead smelters at work across the Galena River from the town.

Few steamboats of the era ran on regular schedules. Instead, they awaited full cargo holds and passenger cabins before sailing. In addition, low water levels, flood conditions, or winter ice could delay the shipment of goods, sometimes for months at a time. Keelboats were even worse in terms of time and expense. Although by the 1830s, steamboats were quickly replacing keelboats, they still made their slow ways up the Mississippi’s swift current.

Well aware of the limitations of river traffic, in August 1829 Galena businessman J.G. Stoddard decided to try to ship a ton and a half of lead overland from his growing, but relatively isolated, town to Chicago. On the return trip, the wagons would bring supplies Stoddard planned to sell to miners at a hefty profit. According to the Galena Advertiser of 1833, this was the first time an overland trip by wagon had been attempted from the Mississippi to Lake Michigan.

Milo M. Quaife, in Chicago Highways Old and New, reported that Stoddard’s wagons traveled overland using the following route, one that (with a few modifications) later became known as “The Southern Route” from Galena to Chicago: The route ran from Galena 80 miles south-southeast to Ogee’s (later Dixon’s) Ferry across the Rock River. After crossing the river, the route extended east-southeast 60 miles to the former site of the Fox River Mission on the Fox River, where the river was forded. From there, the wagons turned northeast to Capt. Joseph Naper’s settlement and the DuPage River ford, and then across the prairie to Laughton’s tavern and store on the Des Plaines River—modern Riverside—for the final ford before the last leg to Chicago.

Ogee’s Ferry was named for Joseph Ogee, the first ferry operator at the ford across the Rock River. Ogee, a Canadian, was allowed by the Winnebagoes to begin ferry operations in 1828, just a year before Stoddard’s wagons passed. Ogee also established a store and post office at the ferry, which was on the main road from Galena to Peoria. The ferry, tavern, and post office operation was purchased by John Dixon in 1830. The city of Dixon now stands on the spot.

Said to be an image of Methodist missionary and circuit riding preacher Jesse Walker. (Image via findagrave.com)

The Fox River Mission was established by the Rev. Jesse Walker on land purchased from the Potowatomi Tribe, on behalf of the Methodist Church, in Section 15 of Mission Township, LaSalle County (T35N, R5E). The purpose of the mission was to teach the local Native Americans a variety of skills, including farming, plus educating Native American children at a mission-run school.

Walker reported to the Rock River Conference of the Methodist Church in 1825 that he had established the mission, after some confusion about the proper location, and that it included a large, two story house, built of hewn logs, measuring 50×30 feet. The house was divided into apartments for the mission staff (which mostly consisted of Walker’s extended family). The mission also included a blacksmith shop, a poultry house, a spring house and “other conveniences.”

Walker’s son-in-law, James Walker, came that same year and brought with him a horse-powered corn grinding mill. Soon after, however, James Walker moved on to a patch of timber on the DuPage River where he established a new settlement, first called Walker’s Grove, and later renamed Plainfield.

Jesse Walker reported that by 1826, the mission had 40 acres of land under cultivation, seven acres in pasture, and one acre planted in garden crops to provide food for the staff. The cost of the venture was $2,034, of which the U.S. Government had pledged to pay two-thirds since the mission staff promised to use their blacksmith to service the needs of the local Native Americans.

Although by the time Stoddard’s journey took place, the Fox River Mission had been abandoned by the Methodists, the buildings were then still standing, and would have provided some welcomed shelter after a lonely trip across the rolling Illinois prairie.

Further, it is likely the Stoddard party’s route was also planned to take advantage of an already-familiar trace across the prairie (possibly a branch of the Great Sauk Trail). Juliette Kinzie described virtually the same route Stoddard’s party took in an account of an 1831 trip from Fort Winnebago near Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, to Chicago with her husband and a few others.

Kinzie described the route as south to Ogee’s Ferry, east-southeast to the Fox River, east-northeast to Naper’s settlement, and then on to Chicago. Unfortunately, the Kinzies’ guide, though claiming familiarity with the area, missed “The Great Sauk Trail,” and the party reached the Fox River well north of the old Fox River Mission. According to Kinzie’s narrative, the party crossed the Fox south of modern Oswego during a raging storm instead of using the good ford a mile or so to the north, and then went on to stay at Peter Specie’s cabin in Specie Grove. From there, they were guided to Chicago by John Dougherty, one of the area’s earliest settlers.

As Stoddard’s venture suggests, some overland travel did take place from Galena to Chicago in the 1820s, but there was no surveyed road until 1833. That year, surveyors working for the State of Illinois ran the line of what would become known as the southern route of the Chicago to Galena Road, the first government road connecting the two thriving towns.

The southern route to Galena followed virtually the same route as the High Prairie Trail to Ottawa until it crossed the Des Plaines River and passed Laughton’s tavern. The stretch from the lakefront at Chicago to Laughton’s was called the Berry Point Trail. The Laughtons’ tavern was probably located on or near the site of the modern Riverside Metra Station, 18 Bloomingbank Road, North Riverside. The inscribed granite boulder in the Ottawa Trail Woods Forest Preserve that supposedly marks the trading post site, about two miles away, was apparently placed in error according to researcher Philip Vierling. (See the EarlyChicago web site encyclopedia listings for “Laughton” for more information on this interesting early pioneer family.)

Then at Brush Hill just west of Laughton’s, the Galena Road branched off, turning more westerly towards Capt. Joseph Naper’s settlement on the DuPage River. Brush Hill (renamed Fullersburg in 1859) was located on what is today U.S. Route 34 at York Road just west of the DuPage-Cook County line. After crossing the DuPage at Naper’s, the road extended west across the Oswego Prairie to the Fox River ford, located about 200 feet north of the Kane–Kendall County line in present-day Montgomery, where it crossed the river.

According to the U.S. Government survey map of Aurora Township, the Fox River ford was located in the extreme southeast corner of Section 32, near the border with Oswego Township. After the road crossed the river, it continued west and then cut through the extreme northwest corner of Section 6 of Oswego Township.

The route then bore even farther southwesterly to the Blackberry Creek ford, which is where we pick up the story of the Blackberry Creek Bridge again.

The ford was located in the north half of the southeast quarter of Section 10, T37N, R7E. Blackberry Creek must have been difficult to ford, since the road ran so far south instead of crossing on a more direct line from the Fox River ford at Montgomery. The notes that U.S. Government Surveyor Eli Prescott took as he and his crew surveyed back and forth across the creek if October 1837 described the Blackberry as “Deep & sluggish,” suggesting fords suitable for wheeled vehicles were few and far between. As a result, the surveyors laying out the course of the Galena Road bent it southwest to access what appears to have been a rare ford across the Blackberry.

After the area had become sufficiently settled and bridges were built across the Fox Valley’s streams, local road commissioners decided to stick with the long-established route of the Galena Road. And to this day, Galena Road still bends far south to cross Blackberry on a bridge at the old ford, a route that has not changed for the past 185 years.

After crossing the creek, the Galena Road finally turned northwesterly through what would become the village of Little Rock before stretching across the prairies to John Dixon’s ferry on the Rock River and on north to Galena.

As surveyed, the distance was 102 miles, the survey crew describing the route from Chicago to Dixon as “high and dry prairie.” The only expense, they optimistically suggested, would be bridging occasional streams, adding they calculated the total cost would likely not exceed $500 for the entire 102-mile route.

It wasn’t long until the McCarty brothers managed to reroute the Galena Road through the new town they were building and which they called Aurora. Their actions, including wresting a post office from Montgomery, led directly to Aurora’s growth at the expense of Montgomery. (For more on this topic, see “U.S. Mail was the Internet of the 1830s.”)

But even so, the route of the road from Chicago to Galena was not changed, and its course—including the bridge across Blackberry Creek—still remains an artifact of the Fox Valley’s pioneer era.

Andrew Carnegie and the Oswego Presbyterians’ pipe organ…

Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie managed to amass a fortune that would be in the billions in today’s dollars after he arrived penniless in the United States. His great creation was the U.S. Steel Corporation.

Andrew Carnegie in 1913, the same year he agreed to pay half the cost of the Oswego Presbyterian Church’s new pipe organ.

But after making all that money he decided to give almost all of it away. During his last 18 years of life, Carnegie, through his private foundation, gave away some $350 million in those old dollars, which as a share of the nation’s modern gross domestic product would equal an nearly $78.6 billion.

Beneficiaries of Carnegie’s largess included universities and nearly 3,000 communities in the U.S. and a few other nations that received his iconic libraries.

Carnegie libraries are fairly well-known, but what isn’t so well known is that the old corporate buccaneer also helped finance more than 7,600 church organs. Carnegie wasn’t particularly religious, and at least one source suggests the reason for the organ donations was, in Carnegie’s own words, “To lessen the pain of the sermons.”

Here in Kendall County, the City of Plano was lucky enough to receive a Carnegie library grant. But Oswego also got a little of the Scottish immigrant’s money when he donated half the cost of a new pipe organ for the Oswego Presbyterian Church.

The Oswego Presbyterian Church about 1902 after its move to Madison and Benton streets. (Little White School Museum photo)

The Presbyterian congregation of Oswego built their first church in 1857. The timber-framed Greek Revival structure was built in a cluster of pines at the intersection of Madison and Douglas streets.

In 1901, the church building was jacked up, put on rollers, and moved three blocks north, down the hill to the intersection of Madison and Benton streets, the former site of the village’s Baptist church. In April 1928, the church’s former pastor, the Rev. W.A. Montgomery, recalled, “As I remember, I began my ministry in Oswego the first of September 1901. One of the first things the church undertook after our arrival was to move the church from its old location where it stood at the fork of the street…It was a very inspiring sight as I remember it in its old setting especially in the early evening, facing down the center of the street with an evergreen tree on either side…But the site was more picturesque than convenient and modern progress demanded a change to the present location.”

The Oswego Presbyterian Church in the midst of its ambitious 1913 metamorphosis from a clapboard Greek Revival building to a brick Romanesque-style structure. (Little White School Museum photo)

In the early spring of 1913, the congregation decided to extensive remodel the original 1857 structure. Well-known Oswego builder Lou C. Young won the contract to change the building from a timber-framed, clapboard-sided structure into a brick Romanesque-style building with corner bell tower. And fortunately for us, Young had his son, Dwight, a professional photographer as well as a carpenter, record the progress of the project for future generations and probably for marketing purposes as well.

The Kendall County Record’s “Oswego” news column reported on April 9, 1913: “The farewell banquet in the old Presbyterian church was held in their parlors last Thursday evening. Despite the extreme weather, about 60 enjoyed a delicious banquet served by the ladies. The program, though very good was shortened by talent unable to attend on account of the storm. Preparations are about completed for the new structure, which will be commenced very soon.”

The Oswego Presbyterian Church in 1914 after its ambitious transformation into a ‘modern’ Romanesque-style structure. (Little White School Museum photo)

With the new cornerstone laid in early August, construction continued throughout the rest of 1913. During the project, the Presbyterians were invited to meet at the German Evangelical Church just up the street at Madison and Washington.

As construction continued, the congregation’s pastor, the Rev. J. Turner Hood, resigned to take an administrative position with the Presbytery. But Hood had already contacted the Carnegie Foundation about obtaining a pipe organ for the renovated and remodeled church. Word was received late in 1913 that Carnegie had agreed to foot half the bill for the church’s new pipe organ, with was valued at $2,000.

The Oswego Presbyterian Church’s impressive pipe organ purchased in part with funds from philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1914. (Little White School Museum photo)

The organ was installed on the new church’s pulpit platform with its pipes forming the backdrop across the center front of the chancel. The choir seating was located between the organ and the pulpit.

As the Oswego correspondent for the Kendall County Record reported on Sept. 23, 1914 following the church’s dedication ceremony: “[T]he most impressive sight is the large pipe organ and pulpit at the west end of the building. This organ fills the place behind the pulpit and is one of which many city churches might well be proud. The woodwork matches the interior of the church and the immense pipes stand out in grandeur. Before it are the seats for the choir and a railing that divides the choir loft from the pulpit.”

A wooden E flue pipe from the Oswego Presbyterian Church Carnegie pipe organ.

The organ was a focal part of the church and community for nearly eight decades.

In 1966, the Presbyterians dedicated their new building on North Madison Street (Ill. Route 25), and sold their old church building to the new Oswego Baptist congregation. After nearly 70 years, the Baptists again owned the site at Madison and Benton.

The author and his bride in front of the Oswego Presbyterian Church Carnegie organ on Nov. 25, 1965, a couple months before the organ was dismantled.

In January 1966, after purchasing the building, the Oswego Baptist Church removed the pipe organ and disposed of it to make room for the new congregation’s baptismal font. Members of the Presbyterian Church were invited to take individual pipes from the organ as souvenirs of the church’s history. Along with other remodeling of the building, the old pipe organ was replaced by an electric organ.

In the late 1970s, the Baptists, at the urging of their pastor, decided to demolish the 1914 structure. Demolition took place during the summer of 1979, finishing up on July 25. While the impressive pipe organ had been discarded, the old church’s stained glass windows were saved from destruction. Some are already on display at the Harvest New Beginnings Baptist Church in rural Oswego, the successor congregation to the Oswego Baptist Church. Other of the windows are currently undergoing restoration, with plans in hand to eventually display them as well.

Today, all that remains of the grand old Oswego Carnegie organ are some of the souvenir pipes in basements and attics of former Presbyterian church members—and the numerous photos of couples who began their marriages at the church between 1914 and 1966.