On a cold February night in 1867, an overheated stove pipe in an Oswego store started a destructive fire that destroyed virtually every building on the east side of Main Street between Washington and Jefferson streets in the village’s downtown business district.
The blaze was considered one more severe blow to the community, which had sustained a severe economic disappointment three years earlier when the county seat was finally moved from Oswego to the new courthouse in Yorkville.
Although of poor quality, this is the only known photo of the east side of Oswego’s Main Street business district before the devastating 1867 fire. The white-columned landmark National Hotel is at left. (Little White School Museum collection)
But although they didn’t realize it in the immediate aftermath of the fire, what Providence accomplished that night would turn out to be in the best long-term interests of the town. A century or so later, what happened that night would be termed urban renewal as modern brick commercial buildings replaced existing old timber framed store buildings, some dating nearly to Oswego’s founding in the mid-1830s.
The new brick Union Block as it looked in 1870 after the cornices were added to the roofline of the buildings to enhance the structures’ Italianate architecture. Note the National Hotel lot is still vacant. (Little White School Museum collection)
During the next year, the “Union Block” rose on the ashes of the most of the buildings that burned, although the half of the block north of the alley that bisected it that had been occupied by the stately National Hotel would remain vacant for several more years.
The evolution of commercial buildings in downtown Oswego was chronicled in a series of photographs taken over the span of several years. Those images give us a look at the broad outlines of the way commercial architecture in small Illinois towns changed with building technology over the years. Many other small towns mirrored Oswego’s experience across the nation, including most of those right here in Kendall County.
The original buildings that went up in Oswego’s downtown were virtually identical to those built during the same era up and down the Fox River Valley. Using the abundant timber growing along both sides of the river, early merchants built timber framed stores and other commercial buildings. In the 1850s, with the invention of balloon framing—similar, but not identical, to the technique used to build homes today—some of the older timber framed buildings were moved out of the downtown to be replaced by newer structures.
For instance, the village’s first store, established about 1835 by Levi F. Arnold in the middle of what is today the downtown business district, was eventually moved near a home in the village where it soldiered on as a barn for many more years.
Oswego’s first store, built by one of the village’s founders, Levi F. Arnold, was moved from downtown when a new, larger structure was built to replace it. It soldiered on for years as an in-town barn. (Little White School Museum collection)
The stores built during that era were of the old style shops with small sash windows. Window-shopping during that era was virtually unknown; customers went to shops where they knew what goods were available and bought what they needed.
But by the 1860s, a retail revolution had already taken place, led by such visionaries as Alexander Turney Stewart. Stewart built his eight-story Cast Iron Palace in New York to market a huge variety of goods to the city’s residents, rich and not rich alike. The new use of cast iron framing allowed soaring windows and airy interiors. . The size of the windows was limited in width, but not in length after a process was invented to produce what was called cylinder glass that produced long, narrow sheets of glass. The tall windows allowed much more natural light into the buildings’ interiors than the old double-hung sashes, dramatically brightening the interiors and making them much more inviting for customers.
This portrait of the Funk & Schultz grocery store and meat market from about 1904 nicely illustrates the narrow, tall 1867-era windows in the store’s decorative cast iron front. The store, located in the brick Union Block on the east side of Main was eventually ‘modernized’ along with the other storefronts in the block of commercial buildings. (Little White School Museum collection)
The new buildings in downtown Oswego were designed in the then-fashionable Italianate architectural style using decorative cast iron fronts of the kind pioneered by Stewart that sported tall, narrow windows to let in light as well as to entice customers with the goods they could see from the street.
The west side of Main Street looking north from Washington Street about 1870 resembled a western cow town with it’s false-front buildings. All of the buildings in the photo were eventually demolished except the A.O. Parke Building–now The Prom Shoppe–at right. (Little White School Museum collection)
Although the east side of Main Street got its forced architectural facelift in 1867, throughout the rest of the 19th Century, the west side of Main Street was still dotted with old small-windowed frame buildings from the 1840s and 1850s. Then in the 1890s, things took a dramatic change in direction.
The Knapp Building under construction early in 1898 on the west side of Main Street opposite the Union Block. Like its neighbor next door to the north–the Oswego Saloon, built the year before–the Knapp Building featured large plate glass windows. (Little White School Museum collection)
The first of the modern all-brick buildings on the west side of Main between Jackson and Washington Street in the heart of Oswego’s downtown, was the ornate Oswego Saloon. Begun in the autumn of 1897 on the west side lot bordering the mid-block alley to the south, it was designed by its owners to be an architectural marvel. Reported the Kendall County Record’s Oswego correspondent on Nov. 3: “The new brick building, which is to be built of the most modern style of architecture and finish, will be the pride of the town. We folks who have been in the habit of saying that “saloons are no good” will have to dry up. The building is about ready for the roof.”
It made use of improvements in commercial building technologies—including glassmaking—that had been developed during the three decades since the Union Block had been built. As the Record reported on Dec. 22: “The large plate-glass was put in place in the new saloon building and the steel ceiling overhead has been put on by John Edwards.”
Then in 1898, Oswego businessman and livestock dealer Charles Knapp built his two storefront brick commercial building adjoining the Oswego Saloon to the south. The Record reported on April 20: “ The work on the Knapp new buildings is going forward very rapidly. The laying of the brick is expertly and expeditiously done. A few fair days would reach the putting on of the roof.” Like the Oswego Saloon, the Knapp Building was two storeys, with the second floor proposed for use either as apartments or a hotel.
By June 22, the Record’s Oswego correspondent could report: “The Knapp buildings are nearly completed and now receiving the finishing touches. The metallic ceiling of the hall and rooms connected with it are made dazzling by paint.”
The building’s first tenants were the Croushorn furniture store and funeral parlor and Knapp’s own meat market.
Then, finally, in 1899, Oswego businessman John Schickler built his new brick three storefront building at the northwest corner of Main and Washington across from the 1867 brick Union Block. Like the Oswego Saloon and the Knapp Building, Schickler’s two-storey building featured ornate cast iron fronts with much wider plate glass windows.
These new “show windows” (the term was an American invention) turned the buildings themselves into advertising media, keeping the goods—and the customers—inside on permanent display.
This 1904 photograph nicely illustrates the larger plate glass display windows the new (left to right) Schickler, Knapp, and Oswego Saloon buildings boasted on the west side of Main Street in downtown Oswego. All three structures were built in the then-popular Eastlake Style architecture. (Little White School Museum collection)
One-story buildings, primarily the all-brick Burkhart Block diagonally across the Main and Washington Street intersection from Schickler’s building following Schickler’s architectural lead were later built on South Main Street.
The next downtown building featuring then-new state-of-the-art commercial architecture wasn’t built until more than a half-century had passed. In 1954, Bohn’s Super Market rose at 60 Main Street on part of the east side site once occupied by the old National Hotel. A classic 1950s era commercial structure, Bohn’s had aisles wide enough to accommodate shopping carts. While self-service (“cash and carry”) was encouraged, Bohn’s still accommodated residents who called in their grocery orders and expected delivery.
Like commercial buildings in Kendall County’s other small towns, other retail innovations such as elevators were unnecessary, although downtowns in the larger nearby communities of Joliet and Aurora made full use of them and others, from chain stores to public transportation. But the economic impact of new commercial buildings making use of the technology available at the time had major impacts on the communities in which they were built, no matter how small.
Kendall County towns where growth continued in the late 1800s and early and mid 1900s all eventually sported buildings like those built in Oswego. Looking at commercial architectural styles in Yorkville, Plano, and Sandwich is a good way to tell when growth took place. Although most of the graceful old narrow-windowed cast iron front buildings have had their facades “modernized,” the discerning enthusiast can still track the evolution of commercial architecture in local towns. And as new growth begins to accelerate in the face of ever-increasing development, those remnants of the county’s commercial past provide a link with the area’s fast-disappearing history.
I admit I’m often a bit slow on uptake so I didn’t really occur to me until a couple weeks ago that this year will mark the 30th anniversary of the start of efforts to catalog and safely and properly store the mass of artifacts, photographs and negatives, and archival documents we’d collected at what had become Oswego’s Little White School Museum.
So after the thought occurred, it also occurred to me it might be valuable for others to learn the story of how today’s museum collections came to be created and managed. Before the colors fade, here’s a brief rundown of what took place all those years ago that resulted in the museum the community has today.
Photo of Little White School taken by Daryl Gaar in July 1970 in preparation for a real estate appraisal report for the Oswego School District. It looked even worse by the time restoration work began in 1977. (Little White School Museum collection)
The project to save the historic building and create a local history museum in it had begun in 1976 when a grassroots group of local residents established the Oswegoland Heritage Association (OHA) to oversee the project and raise funds to finance it. In a way, it was sort of reminiscent of one of those old Mickey Rooney–Judy Garland movies where they say “Let’s put on a show!” to raise money for some project or another. But this project turned out to be a lot more complicated, with many more moving parts, than one of those old movies let on.
The first thing that had to be done was to stabilize the badly deteriorated building, which required deciding what kind of project we were going to do, restoration or renovation. The OHA Board decided to restore the exterior of the main structure, built in 1850, to its looks in the earliest image we had of it, which dated to 1901. At the same time, it was also decided to renovate the badly deteriorated Jackson Street entrance hall and classroom addition, which had been added in 1936, to accommodate visitors and create a community museum room.
After exterior restoration was completed, the Little White School Museum became a valued community landmark. (Little White School Museum photo by Stephanie Just)
So, right off the bat, the OHA was working on a two-track project.
Also, as soon as the community learned the building was undergoing restoration and renovation, they began dropping off Oswego-related historical artifacts, photos and negatives, and documents. With two complicated projects already underway, those items were simply warehoused in the building’s basement to await figuring out what to do with them sometime in the future.
As it turned out, the exterior restoration and the renovation of the entrance hall and the museum room were completed by Oswego’s sesquicentennial celebration in 1983, thanks to local contractor Stan Young. He’d attended the Little White School as a youngster and figured out ways to achieve everything from restoring the building’s wooden front porch to recreating its missing bell tower.
The museum room—soon to be renamed the museum gallery—was filled with Oswego history exhibits created by OHA Board members and volunteers. It opened to the public in April of 1983.
In the meantime, the OHA Board was discussing what ought to be done with the building’s main room, renovate the two existing classrooms, front entrance vestibule and basement stairways, or remove the drop ceiling and interior walls and stairwells that had been added since 1930 and return the room to its original open 36×50 foot appearance during its original use as a Methodist-Episcopal Church and, starting in 1915, as a one-room school for grades 1-3. After much discussion, the board decided on the restoration option for the main room, taking its look back to the era of transition, 1913-1915, when its use changed from church to school. My friend from high school, Glenn Young, was persuaded to oversee the project, something he’d be closely involved with for the next 19 years.
Restoration work, consisting of removing all the interior walls and the drop ceiling began in the fall of 1983. Fortunately for us, Caterpillar, Inc. was undergoing one of its periodic strikes and my high school classmate Jim Williams, and cousin-by-marriage Omer Horton were both free to volunteer partial days on the project, getting it done much faster than we’d expected. It was about that time the park district retained Oswegoan Mark Campbell and Don Drum to help with the project every Saturday.
In 1994, the basement of the Little White School Museum was an unorganized jumble of items–including priceless artifacts and documents–that had been dropped off during the previous nearly two decades. The first task was to create some sort of order out of the existing chaos. (Little White School Museum collection)
But by the fall of 1993, a decade later, the interior restoration project was far enough along that the board decided to finally get serious about organizing, cataloging, and properly storing all those historical photos, documents, and artifacts that continued to arrive. But, again, it proved more easily said than done.
Keith Coryell works on shelving 3-dimensional artifacts in 1995 following the initial macrosort of the Little White School Museum’s collections. (Little White School Museum collections)
The basement storage area was an unorganized jumble of priceless items that were in danger of damage, and there was no museum office where files could be created and kept. So, the first item of business was to clean out a corner of the basement to create suitable office space. That required coordination with the restoration project as the two efforts were going on at the same time. It took a while, too, because volunteers only worked Saturday mornings and park district-financed construction people only worked Saturdays as well.
A bit earlier in time one of the old farmhouses on Douglas Road in Oswego was being demolished to make way for new development. We were given permission to salvage the kitchen cabinets and doors and doorframes from the building, which were used in the new office. Some used countertops were also located that fit the cabinets just fine. A couple used file cabinets and desks finished out the furnishings.
Stephenie “Stevie” Todd works on the macrosort of the Little White School Museum’s collections in late 1994. (Little White School Museum collection)
Also about the time we were ready to start the organizing and cataloging project, we were lucky enough to gain the services Stephanie “Stevie” Todd, of one of the best historical researchers in the Fox Valley. She was able to procure the volunteer services of Keith Coryell, an actual museum professional who was (fortunately for us) between jobs at the time and willing to help us get started with our project.
We figured early on it was vitally important to get off to a good start. We’d heard horror stories of museums where they’d had to change their systems of cataloging items for one reason or another, sometimes losing track of huge portions of their collections. Because the most important trick with museums isn’t cataloging and properly storing items, it’s the ability to find them again once they’re placed in their forever storage home.
Also, we had to decide exactly what our collection was supposed to represent. Those of us who like old things have an urge to save everything, but we knew we had limited storage space, and so had to decide what our paramaters were. The OHA Board decided the items we collected were to directly deal with the 68 square miles inside the Oswego School District, including the families, businesses, farms, towns, and other things that included.
Cabinets removed from a farmhouse undergoing demolition and some used countertops furnished the new museum office. (Little White School Museum collection)
The “what” settled, the questions related to “how” were next to solve.
We had decided years ago to use a trinomial artifact numbering system, with the first number being the year the item was donated, the second number denoting the order it was received during the year it was donated, and the third number affixed to individual items in multi-item collections.
That was fine and fit in with they way many museums numbered their items. The next decision was whether to number all classes of items—documents, photos, and artifacts—the same. At that time, many museum had different numbering schemes for each type of item, which didn’t seem sensible to us. We figured if someone was going to come to the museum looking for, say, items dealing with the Shoger or Burkhart families, they’d want to see a listing of every item, no matter what kind it was, related to the family or other topic they were searching for. We also though our system would be of benefit for our own staff when, say, looking for items to create exhibits. If we were doing an exhibit on Church School or Bohn’s Grocery Store, we’d want to turn up whatever photos, documents, and artifacts in the collection.
The museum office this past autumn, filled with file cabinets, a new computer server (on the wall) our large format printer in foreground–and still featuring the used cabinets installed 30 years ago. (Little White School Museum collection)
And to keep track of all those items we were looking at we knew from the beginning we were going to need some sort of computerized database system. We’d dabbled with creating card files of artifacts at random periods earlier on, but couldn’t really make them work.
There were commercially available museum cataloging systems available, but at that early time, many of them insisted in treating photos, artifacts, and documents differently, which we didn’t want to do. Further, there were no Macintosh-based cataloging applications available. We’d decided to use Macs because we also wanted to create our own graphics—signs, labels, document and photo scans—and newsletters, and Macs were the gold standard for doing those things.
So, we ended up creating our own cataloging database using the Mac-compatible FileMaker Pro application. We wrote to more than a dozen area museums requesting copies of their accession sheets—accessioning is the formal, legal process of taking ownership of items donated to a museum or library—so we could figure out which fields we wanted to make sure we had in our own database.
The basement archives work and research area with the Equipto flat files to the left and the mobile unit to the right in a photo taken a few years ago. (Little White School Museum collection)
In the early spring of 1994, I’d taken a course out at Waubonsee Community College on museum planning that Keith Coryell had given. And in that course, he strongly recommended that a museum needs a director to oversee the technical aspects of cataloging and storage of donated items. I took that lesson and the data backing it up back to the board and in August 1994 they appointed me museum director with the task of coordinating and overseeing the Little White School Museum’s collections management.
Because the main volunteer emphasis was still on the main room restoration project, we solicited other volunteers to help clean up the basement area, get the floor and walls painted, and staple Tyvek fabric to the ceiling to stop 140 years worth of dust accumulated in the floorboards from sifting down into the basement and onto the artifacts and other materials being stored there. Fortunately, within a couple years, the park district agreed to finance installation of a new drop ceiling (we were able to find a bunch of used light fixtures for the project) that eliminated the sifting dust problem and brightened up the area considerably.
The old textile shelving with non-acid free boxes served well until we could find a better solution. (Little White School Museum collection)
By the autumn of 1994, we were finally ready to begin seriously addressing the collection. Stevie, Keith, and I began showing up at the museum on Thursdays to work on the collection, beginning with a “macro sort,” which left me free to help with the main room restoration project on Saturday mornings. Keith explained the macro sort consisted, basically, of putting like items in piles—textiles, documents, 3-dimensional artifacts, and photogrsphs and negatives.
We also assembled used shelving we’d acquired in the building’s old basement coal room, which we’d painted as a spot where we could temporarily store our sorted piles.
One of the two racks of textile shelving loaded with acid free textile boxes that now store the museum’s collection of everything from military uniforms to wedding dresses. (Little White School Museum collection)
Keith explained the need for acid-free storage media—folders, envelopes, and boxes—as well as acid-free paper with which to make photo copies and so off went our first orders to Hollinger, Inc. and Gaylord, Inc. for the necessary materials. Full-sized and half-sixed record storage boxes from Hollinger, it turned out, were the museum industry standard, and no matter from which manufacturer they were acquired, they were called Hollinger boxes. We were going to need a LOT of both sizes of Hollinger boxes.
The seemingly little things we decided then have stood us in good stead. For instance, when we were planning our needs, we decided that all our file cabinets should be legal and not letter sized. That’s because legal documents are, naturally, legal sized. Documents, Keith, explained, need to be stored flat and unfolded. And while letter sized documents fit in legal sized folders, they don’t fit in letter sized folders.
Another important decision we made was to store our photos—including postcards—in correct archivally-safe pocket pages in three-ring binders. We decided that would allow easy and safe access to the photos, which, 30 years later, it certainly has.
But what about over-sized documents and photos that wouldn’t fit, unfolded and flat, into legal file folders? For that, we needed flat files. And like the helpful Caterpillar strike back in ’83, fate stepped in once again. The venerable Equipto manufacturing company in Aurora was closing its plant, including its showroom. Mark Campbell used his connections to broker a donation from Equipto of a large set of flat files and a unit of rolling shelving that had been on display in their show room. Mark was also able to figure out how to get the storage equipment moved to Oswego and into the museum’s basement storage area. Oversized documents and photos required oversized folders for storage, and fortunately we found all kinds of those in the Gaylord, Inc. catalog.
By 2007 when this photo was snapped in the museum’s archives storage room, the shelves Glenn Young custom made to fit Hollinger records storage boxes was already rapidly filling up. (Oswegoland Heritage Association collection)
Remember all those Hollinger boxes we had on order? We needed someplace to safely and efficiently store them, so we checked with Glenn Young. He agreed to take time out from the main room restoration project to build custom wooden shelving perfectly sized so each shelf would hold six full size Hollinger boxes. We also got the donation of some surplus bookshelves from the Oswego Public Library.
We’d decided to make the basement’s old furnace room, which had been separately walled off sometime in the 1950s, our archival storage area. Its walls were all concrete blocks and it had a fire-proof steel security door, making it the most secure room in the whole building. After we put a couple coats of acid-free paint on the wooden shelving Glenn had made, he installed them and the four steel bookshelves in the archives storage room.
So as 1994 turned into 1995 while sorting and storing the results of the macro sort continued, we were finally ready to start formally accessioning and cataloging all those items that had arrived during previous quarter century. The first really new item was added to our new database on Feb. 14, 1995 while we started work on the backlog, including Dick Young’s extensive collection of Native American stone projectile points and tools collected in the Oswego area.
If the dates donated items had arrived were still with them along with the donors’ names and (hopefully) addresses, we used those to formally accession the items. If we didn’t know when and who donated an item, it was given an “X” instead of a date leading number, denoting “Found in Collections.”
As it turned out, Dick’s collection was the first one we had complete provenance on–a fancy word meaning we definitely knew where and when it came from—and so it got the first verifiable number, 1983-1, with the first point, numbered 1983-1-1, a Snyder projectile point dated to 500 BCE.
And from there over the years, a changing, but always dedicated core of volunteers, and lately paid part-time park district staff, have kept at cataloging and adding capabilities to the collection and to the process of managing it. Keith Coryell got a permanent job, Stevie Todd moved on to other projects, and Bob Stekl and Stephanie Just came aboard for a few decades. The OHA bought a large format scanner, updated its computer equipment, bought a used large format copier, and began a collection of microfilmed documents. The park district bought a used microfilm reader/copier.
Volunteer Bob Stekl works cataloging a collection of small items at the Little White School Museum in 2014. (Little White School Museum collection)
We’d bought a bale of non-archival cardboard boxes to store textiles in during the macro sort, planning to eventually transfer over to acid-free boxes. two successive matching grants from the Illinois Association of Museum’s helped fund two new shelving racks and sufficient archival quality boxes to fill them.
We kept adding shelving and storage cabinets wherever we could find a bit of space in our basement storage area, always managing to keep a bit ahead of the steady stream of new materials that always kept arriving while also slowly but surely whittling down that huge backlog that had built up. Museum Collections Assistant Noah Beckman, one of the part-time staffers provided by the park district, finally finished up the last of the initial backlog a year or so ago, completing cataloging a collection of items donated by Evelyn Heap several years before he was born! Without the OHA’s continued partnership with the Oswegoland Park District, in fact, the museum simply would not exist.
From that initial item entered into the database 29 years ago, the museum’s collection has now grown to more than 37,000 entries ranging from prehistoric stone tools made by the area’s Indigenous residents to modern high school yearbooks to photographs and documents that chronicle the Oswego community’s history from the pioneer era to the present day.
The collection continues to grow at about 1,000 items per year, each item having some direct connection to the 68 square mile area inside the bounds of the Oswego School District, saved so future generations will be able to appreciate and learn about the community’s rich history and heritage.
On Sunday, March 10, starting at noon in the museum’s restored main room, I’ll present a history of the Little White School Museum, including the building itself, the restoration project, and its current uses, and members of the heritage association board will give tours showing off some of the latest upgrades, including a new accessibility ramp and a remodeled main entrance hallway. You’re all invited. Admission is $5 for park district residents and $10 for non-residents, money that will go towards helping us protect and preserve all that irreplaceable history we’ve collected since 1976.
Several years ago while doing family history research, I made connections with a distant cousin who sent me a compact disc (remember those?) with dozens of photos and documents related to my Minnich ancestors. Among the documents were letters written by my great-great-grandmother, Mary Ann Wolf “Polly” Minnich, to her daughter, who was then living out in Kansas.
Mary Ann Wolf “Polly” Minnich from what was probably her 1846 wedding portrait.
The letters were remarkable for a few reasons, not the least of which was because Mary Ann was illiterate. According to the letters’ content, she dictated them to one of her grandchildren, who wrote and mailed them for her and who would then also read the replies to her. Another interesting point, for me, at least, was that at the time she was corresponding with her daughter, she was living in the ramshackle old house on North Adams Street in Oswego that was the first house my wife and I bought back in 1968.
The previous owners were the first non-family members to have owned it since my great-great grandparents owned it in the 1870s. We lived there for about 10 years, and so I was familiar with its interior layout. My grandmother, who as a child had visited HER grandmother at the house told us about the interior changes that had been made, including turning my great-great grandparents’ tiny first-floor bedroom into the home’s bathroom. Which is why the bathroom had a full-sized window in it above the bathtub that looked out onto North Adams Street and the east bank of the Fox River across the road.
The Minnich House as it looked in 1970 with Mary Ann’s bedroom window facing North Adams Street and the Fox River circled in red.
By the time we moved in back in ’68, trees lined both banks of the river, cutting off the view of Route 31 over on the river’s west side. But back when my great-great-grandparents lived there, the original old-growth trees on both banks had been cut down years before to provide everything from fence rails to firewood to building materials for homes and other buildings the pioneers needed. So someone looking out of the window in our bathroom—formerly my great-great-grandparents’ tiny bedroom—could easily have seen traffic over on Route 31, known back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the West River Road.
Which is a long, but I think necessary set-up for a fascinating comment I found in one of those letters long ago transcribed from my great-great-grandmother’s dictation.
North Adams Street about 1910 with the arrow pointing out my great-great-grandparents’ house, and illustrating the treeless banks of the Fox River during that era. The building at right foreground is the Parker Sawmill and Furniture Factory. (Photo by Irvin Haines in the collections of the Little White School Museum)
By late September 1900 residents living in and around Oswego, including those living along North Adams Street, had some new sights to see and marvel at. As my great-great-grandmother put it in one of those letters to her daughter out in Kansas: “When I can’t sleep at night I can watch the Street cars run out my window over across the river.”
She could see the headlights of streetcars running on the west bank of the Fox River in 1900? Yes, as it turns out, there was, indeed, a trolley car line that ran from Aurora south roughly following the Fox River to Oswego that began service that year.
This contemporary map illustrates the route of the interurban trolley line from downtown Aurora south through Oswego into downtown Yorkville where it terminated at Van Emmon and Bridge streets. (Little White School Museum collection)
Because this kind of trolley line ran between towns and not wholly inside them, the lines were called “interurban” trolleys, and were at the height of their popularity as the 20th Century dawned.
A group of investors first proposed building an interurban trolley line from Aurora south through Montgomery and Oswego to Yorkville in 1897. The proposed line was planned to run mostly on public street and highway rights-of-way using light rails and electrically-powered trolley cars.
First iron bridge across the Fox River at Oswego. A King’s Patent tied-arch (also called a bowstring arch) truss iron bridge, it was built by Oswego Township in the fall of 1867 at a cost of $17,000. The bridge was manufactured by the King Iron Bridge & Manufacturing Company of Cleveland, Ohio. It was replaced in 1900 to carry the tracks of the Elgin, Aurora & Yorkville interurban tracks across the river. (Little White School Museum collection)
An early proposal to build a third-rail electric line was quickly discarded in favor of using overhead electrical lines with the cars picking up the power using car-top trolleys. Cars running on third-rail lines picked up their electrical power from an exposed electrified third rail, something that would obviously be dangerous on a rail line running through towns and the countryside and not in an underground tunnel or on an elevated track safely out of reach of pedestrians, horse-drawn vehicles, and livestock.
In August 1897 representatives of the new Aurora, Yorkville & Morris Electric Railroad company (the line’s name would change several times during the next few years) met with the Kendall County Board to start hammering out a trolley franchise agreement. As proposed, the line would begin in downtown Aurora, then run south on River Street through Montgomery, paralleling the Fox River past the new Riverview amusement park (which was to have its own station) then under construction just south of Montgomery before gently curving west to join the West River Road—now, as noted above, Ill. Route 31—for the run to the Oswego Bridge across the Fox River. There, the line would turn east, cross the river on Washington Street to Oswego’s Main Street, where it would turn south once more, following Main Street and heading towards Yorkville along what is now Ill. Route 71. Near Yorkville, the line would turn once again to follow the tracks of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy’s Fox River Branch Line between the tracks and today’s Van Emmon Road right into downtown Yorkville, where the tracks dead-ended at Van Emmon and Bridge streets.
The box truss iron bridge built with trolley company assistance in 1900 to carry interurban cars across the Fox River at Oswego. It replaced the first iron bridge at Oswego built in 1867, and was itself replaced in 1937 to carry increasing motor traffic across the river. (Photo by Dwight Young in the collections of the Little White School Museum)
Among the issues that had to be hammered out was who would pay for improvements the line required, such as either strengthening or rebuilding the Oswego Bridge to carry the heavy trolley cars across the river. In addition, the company pledged “that in every way possible the company would guard against frightening horses” or otherwise interfering with traffic on the roads alongside and on which the trolleys would run. In the end, the trolley company agreed to pay $3,500 towards the cost of a new, stronger box truss iron bridge to replace the existing 1867 tied arch structure at Oswego. The other issues were ironed out as well, including how the trolley line would get across the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy’s Fox River Branch rail line in Oswego.
Interurban trolley car (center of the photo) approaches the west end of the Oswego Bridge about 1903 enroute from Aurora to Yorkville. The tracks crossed the Fox River on the Oswego bridge and then turned south along Main Street.
Residents of the towns the trolley would serve were, in general, enthusiastic about the new, all-weather transportation option. As Kendall County Record Publisher John R. Marshall noted in a Dec. 13, 1899 commentary: “With only four reliable trains a day, it was hard for one to come here and be so late getting into Chicago as is necessary with the regular passenger train. With the electric accommodations, one can go to Aurora and take an early morning train to Chicago.”
After crossing the Oswego Bridge, the interurban line climbed the Washington Street hill and crossed the CB&Q Railroad tracks on a 300-foot timber trestle. (Little White School Museum collection)
Construction began in the spring of 1900 and by June 27, the tracks were completed from Aurora to the west end of the Oswego Bridge.
“Operation of the electric road from the bridge will be commenced this Tuesday afternoon by a free ride of the town and village officials to Aurora and back,” the Record’s Oswego correspondent wrote in that week’s paper. “Yorkville will have to wait about three months longer before enjoying such privilege.”
This 1903 map shows the interurban route through Oswego. Look closely in the lower left at the siding at the Oswego Cemetery. Special funeral cars that carried mourners to this cemetery and farther south, to the Cowdrey Cemetery used this siding and the one at Cowdrey for funerals. (Little White School Museum collection)
Regular service began in early July from Aurora to the terminus at Oswego, and use proved enthusiastic—and frequent. As Marshall wrote on Aug. 1: “That the Aurora and Yorkville electric road will be a great convenience and daily comfort is shown by the way it is used now between Oswego and Aurora. Every day parties drive up from about here [Yorkville] to Oswego and take the car there for Aurora, saving 12 miles’ [round trip] drive.”
Work continued feverishly the rest of the summer and into the fall of 1900 on Oswego Township’s new Oswego Bridge. Construction was also ongoing on an impressive 300-foot trestle at the east end of the bridge designed to carry the electric line up Washington Street over the CB&Q tracks to the Main Street intersection.
By late December, the new bridge and trestle, along with the tracks into Yorkville were finished and regular trolley service had begun, linking downtown Aurora through Montgomery and Oswego with downtown Yorkville. The first car arrived at the Kendall County seat at 10:45 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 22, 1900.
“There were two cars down—one with the Aurora guests, the other empty to return with a number of the distinguished populace of Kendall’s capital,” the Record reported on Dec. 26. Welcoming the new arrivals was Record publisher Marshall, who had also welcomed the first railroad train on the Fox River Branch into Yorkville 30 years before.
At Washington and Main streets, the trolley line turned south to follow Main out of town. This was also the village’s trolley stop, with a waiting room in the building at right just behind the fire hydrant. Note the stack of wooden bread crates. Fresh bread from Aurora bakeries was delivered early every morning. The Little White School Museum has two in its collection, including on on exhibit that was repurposed as the village’s ballot box. (Little White School Museum collection)
The interurban, providing hourly round trip service from Yorkville to Aurora from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m. at affordable rates, was part of a vast interurban network that, it was said, allowed passengers to travel via trolley from the Mississippi River, with transfers, all the way to New York City.
Note the two passengers who’ve just stepped off the interurban, likely after a shopping trip to downtown Aurora. (Little White School Museum collection)
In an era of terrible roads, the interurban was a godsend, carrying passengers and perishable freight, including farmers’ milk, to and from Aurora. Everything from fresh bakery bread to college and high school students to office workers to shoppers rode the trolley to and from Aurora daily. For instance, war hero, musician, and star athlete Slade Cutter rode the interurban to Aurora to attend East High School. The line ran right past the family farmhouse (which still stands at the corner of Ill. Route 17 and Orchard Road) during a time Oswego High School only offered a two-year program.
Motor vehicles shared in-town streets with the interurban lines, making driving on them often an adventure. Here, an auto rattles south on still unpaved Main Street about 1910 in Oswego while sharing the road with the trolley tracks. (Little White School Museum collection)
But a little more than a decade after the line opened, it and others throughout the nation were under financial assault from the burgeoning number of automobiles and trucks—and government support for them.
It wasn’t so much the improved vehicles that doomed the trolleys, but the rapidly improving roads they traveled on—and their funding. From the time Illinois was settled until 1913, road maintenance was the responsibility of township property owners. Each voter—meaning men during that era—was required to work on road maintenance or to pay money in lieu of work. But with the advent of affordable, dependable motor cars and trucks, the old system was proving unequal to the task of road maintenance and construction. So in 1913, the Illinois General Assembly passed the Tice Act, removing the work requirement and replacing it with a property tax levy to fund road construction and maintenance.
An interurban car at the terminal in downtown Yorkville. It’s been turned around on the trolley line’s wye track and is ready to head back north through Oswego and Montgomery to Aurora. Note the advertisement for the Kendall County Fair. (Little White School Museum collection)
At the same time, the public was also insisting on more and better roads, and in what proved a momentous policy decision, U.S. politicians decided that tax dollars should only fund construction and maintenance of roads and not the rails used by railroads and trolley companies. Although few realized it at the time, the policy meant the substantial government subsidy favoring road transport would gradually result in curtailing all of the nation’s rail systems.
Interurban trolley ticket for a passenger fare from Aurora to Oswego from 1918. Note the “War Tax” schedule in the upper left. The tax was levied by the Federal government to help pay for World War I. (Little White School Museum collection)
And with that profound change in motion, in 1918, in spite of the nation’s involvement in World War I, Illinois voters approved a $60 million bond issue to build a system of all-weather paved roads to connect with every county in the state, the bonded indebtedness to be paid through gasoline taxes. The measure passed overwhelmingly. Here in Kendall County, the vote was 1,532-90.
A new iron bridge crossed the Fox at Oswego in 1900 to carry interurban trolley cars across the river, along with regular road traffic. Above, a trolley car is captured on its way from Yorkville to Aurora. (Little White School Museum collections)
The interurbans were simply unable to compete with the combination of increasingly inexpensive, efficient, and dependable motor vehicles and publicly financed roads. Starting in the 1920s, one by one, the interurban lines closed down, went bankrupt, or both.
On Aug. 6, 1924, the Record reported that “Through an order from the Illinois Commerce Commission, the interurban line from the [Fox River] park south of Montgomery to Yorkville will be discontinued.” In the event, the line carried on until Feb. 1, 1925, finally succumbing to the advance of transportation technology and the national consensus to subsidize roads but not rails.
Today, there are scant reminders of the trolley era, but look closely between the road and the railroad tracks the next time you drive Van Emmon Road into Yorkville—especially this time of year with trees and shrubs leafless—and you will see some of the last evidence of the old trolley line that was once such an important part of the area’s transportation system.
One of the things that fascinates me about local history is the number of once-thriving major businesses that not only no longer exist, but of which barely any evidence of their existence remains.
Looking out my window at the couple inches of snow on the ground here at History Central this morning reminds me of another industry of which no trace remains. The ice harvesting business employed dozens of men every winter and was big business. For decades, thick ice was cut above the dams that dotted the Fox River, stored in giant icehouses, and hauled to market in rail cars. The industry’s rise and fall makes for an interesting bit of local economic history.
In 1870, when the Ottawa, Oswego, and Fox River Railroad finally reached Aurora, running from Streator and Ottawa through Oswego and Yorkville, residents in both Oswego and Yorkville had hopes its economic impact would be significant. And their hopes were realized.
Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad locomotive and passenger cars, about 1870.
As soon as the rail line opened, farmers began shipping livestock and grain from stops along the line north to the Chicago market and south to the Illinois-Mississippi river system. The new line was closer to almost all the Fox Valley’s smaller towns south of Aurora than the main line of the Chicago Burlington & Quincy Railroad, which lay two miles west of both Oswego and Yorkville. And farmers living east of the Fox River no longer had to cross the river to get their livestock, grain, and other produce to market.
Not only did the line haul produce and livestock to the Chicago market but it also delivered coal, lumber, and other necessities, reducing the costs of both vital commodities.
Entrepreneurs began eying the two villages for new business opportunities as soon as the first trains rolled. And as luck would have it, the new retail ice business was then just getting off the ground as growing numbers of householders demanded ice for their new kitchen ice boxes. At the same time, Chicago pork and beef packers were trying to expand production outside their normal winter work season.
One of the main uses for ice from Oswego, Yorkville, and other Fox Valley towns was in reefer cars invented by the Swift Company. It took 4,000 lbs. of ice and 700 lbs. of salt to keep a carload of dressed beef and pork cool from Chicago to New York…
For decades, ice had been harvested in New England and sold as far abroad as India. But it was what economic historian William Cronon calls a large-bulk, low-value commodity. With the terrible roads of the era, it was expensive to haul large quantities of ice to market. So in New England ice was harvested on rivers and ponds close to seaports where it could be easily shipped. Out here in the Midwest, ice was harvested on lakes, ponds and rivers near rail lines, but that production quickly proved inadequate, especially for the meat shipping market—it took 4,000 pounds of ice and 700 pounds of salt to keep a reefer railcar of dressed beef cold from Chicago to New York—and ice dealers started looking farther and farther afield.
When the Fox River Branch of the CB&Q was opened, serving as it did towns up and down the river valley, most with dams and mills, ice company owners saw an opportunity. The first to take advantage of the combination of the new rail line and the untapped resource of mill dams in Kendall County was the Caledonia Ice Company of Chicago. Owner Robert Hutchinson began work on a major ice storage facility in Yorkville in the fall of 1872, just two years after the rail line opened. Hutchinson situated the new facility on land along the south bank of the Fox, leased from Jacob and Elias Black, owners of the Paris Paper, Grist & Saw Mills, just upstream from the dam. Workers finished a block of four interconnected ice houses, 20 feet high and the group measuring a total of 100×100 feet, in time for the winter ice harvest. The CB&Q, owners of the Fox River Branch line, built a new siding for the ice company’s use.
Hutchinson’s Yorkville Ice Company sold ice harvested on the Fox River in Chicago.
As the Kendall County Record reported on Oct. 24, 1872: “The [ice] cakes are cut 22 inches square…the ice will be cut by ice plows, of which five will be used, each drawn by a horse. About 30 men will be employed through the winter and four to five in the summer. The company expects to ship three carloads, or 30 tons, to Chicago every night during the summer in cars fitted for the purpose.”
How did the process of harvesting ice from the Fox River work? As the Record explained about the ice harvest in an 1872 story: “It will be taken from the river by a new style of elevator never before used in the West, consisting of a heavy endless chain running over two large iron pulleys weighing 1,100 lbs., and propelled by a steam engine. This chain carries a series of hooks that, as they revolve, grab a cake of ice from the river and carry it up the elevator in grooves that act like a railroad track, to its proper platform, where it is received by a man who pushes it along the track to the door at which it is to be received These tracks on each platform, have “switches” at each door, and by turning the switch the cake is dropped into any door desired. There is no handling of the ice; all is done by machinery, by these tracks, and by the men with pointed poles pushing the ice to its resting place in the house. The cakes are cut 22 inches square and each room is 12 cakes wide so that everything is done systematically. The house will hold 7,000 tons—14 million pounds—and all this can be stored by two men as it comes up the elevator.
Hutchison filled his Yorkville houses that winter with the expected 7,000 tons of ice he planned to market to retail customers in Chicago, along with ice from his other harvesting and storage operations in Naperville and closer in to Chicago.
Icebox’s wooden exterior cabinet, this one of oak, fit right in with furniture of the era. The ability to cool food led to a revolution in public health and private citizens’ economy.
Starting in 1870, the ice business had begun a rapid expansion all over the country, and especially in Chicago. That year, there were seven retail ice dealers in Chicago. By 1875, the number had more than doubled to 15 and rose to 26 by 1885. Some of this expansion was driven by the vast quantities of ice required by the meatpacking industry, but much of it was also due to the introduction of home iceboxes that could keep food from spoiling.
Perfected in England, the home icebox concept was quickly exported to the U.S. Iceboxes of the era were about five feet high and consisted of a wooden cabinet with an insulated double-walled metal lining. Icebox cabinets were generally oak or walnut, with four to five compartments, each with its own door and polished brass hardware. Ice blocks were placed in the top compartment. Grilles allowed the chilled air to sink down through well-ventilated compartments below where food was stored, as warmer air rose to be re-chilled in the ice compartment. Melt water from the ice was either piped outside or dripped into a pan under the unit, which had to be emptied daily.
Primitive by modern standards, iceboxes nevertheless created a food revolution. Their use meant reduced food spoilage and waste, which changed Americans’ shopping habits, saved huge amounts of money, and made life not only easier but healthier for virtually all walks of life.
So it didn’t take long for other Chicago ice merchants to get into the Kendall County ice business. In November 1873, the year after Hutchinson began operations in Yorkville, Esch Brothers & Rabe, another Chicago ice company, announced plans to build an ice harvesting and storage facility, this time at Oswego.
Esch Brothers & Rabe icehouses just above Oswego in the old Village of Troy.
The company was established by brothers William, Frederick, and August Esch and their brother-in-law, Frederick Rabe. While William and August Esch and Rabe continued to live in Chicago, Frederick Esch moved to Oswego to oversee operations on-site.
The company initially built four connected ice houses that first year, each 20 feet high, 20 feet wide and 50 feet long. The houses were situated on a parcel of land they bought in the old village of Troy just north of the William Parker & Sons Furniture Factory and Saw Mill. Within a few years, they expanded the number of houses to 14, and in 1883 the company built six more houses. Eventually, they operated more than 64,000 square feet of ice storage space on the banks of the Fox River north of Oswego. The icehouses were serviced by a new rail siding on the Fox River Branch line.
Esch Brothers & Rabe bought out Hutchinson’s ice company at Yorkville in the late 1870s, and expanded their operations there as well. By 1886, Esch Brothers operated 12 ice houses on Hutchinson’s old site at Yorkville.
Esch Brothers & Rabe’s 20 huge ice storage houses just above the dam at Oswego ready to be filled. Note the piles of sawdust used to insulate layers of the 200-pound blocks of ice cut from the river during the winter.(Little White School Museum collection)
Ice was getting to be a bigger and bigger business as time went on. In 1881, Esch Brothers & Rabe shipped 581 railcars of ice from their siding in Oswego alone. Demand for ice was spiking.
And as demand spiked, so did the number of ice companies. By 1900, 76 ice companies were doing business in Chicago.
With so many new companies, competition was cutthroat, something the established companies dealt with by creating a secret ice cartel in violation of state law. Esch Brothers, along with Griffin & Connolley and other Chicago ice firms formed the Chicago Ice Exchange. Exchange members paid $50 per ice wagon with the promise they would not poach other members’ customers.
The ice harvest in downtown Aurora sometime in the late 19th Century.
Meanwhile, in the Fox Valley things were going great guns. Each January, Esch Brothers & Rabe employed up to 75 men in both Oswego and Yorkville to harvest ice. After scrapers pulled by horses cleared snow off the 15-inch thick ice above the two towns’ dams, horse drawn ice plows cut deep parallel grooves into the ice. Each day, a channel was cleared from the millpond to the shore-based ice house steam elevator. Huge cakes of ice in uniform sizes were floated along the open channel to the ice elevator on shore, where an endless chain propelled by a steam engine raised the ice up out of the water and sent it up an incline to the icehouses where it was planed to a standard thickness. The blocks were stored in layers, each insulated with layers of straw or sawdust. On good days, 1,000 tons of ice were cut and stored.
1885 Sanborn Fire Insurance map showing the plan of Esch Brothers & Rabe’s Oswego icehouses on the east bank of the Fox River just above Oswego during the height of the firm’s operations in Kendall County.
In 1880, Esch Brothers & Rabe had shipped 581 railcar loads of ice from their Oswego siding. By 1884, storage facilities and productivity had both increased, and the company reported shipping 1,089 railcar loads of ice from their busy Oswego siding.
Esch Brothers & Rabe’s steam ice elevator at their Oswego ice harvesting location. (Little White School Museum collection)
Not that there weren’t serious business hazards, of course. In 1887, after the Record reported the largest-ever ice harvest at Yorkville, Esch Brothers & Rabe’s ice houses were destroyed by fire. According to the April 13 Kendall County Record: “There were about a dozen large houses all connected and filled with hundreds of tons of splendid ice…The loss is estimated at about $5,000.” That’s $164,000 in today’s dollars.
In 1890, the ice harvest was poor due to warmer weather, and then in March 1891, 14 of the company’s older icehouses at Oswego burned to the ground. “The scene was grand, yet of a weird appearance, the whole region around being lit up with a red glare, ” the Record’s Oswego correspondent reported.
Self-portrait of Irvin Haines with the remaining icehouses at Oswego after the 1891 fire destroyed 14 of the locations older icehouses. (Little White School Museum collection)
Low water in the Fox hampered the ice harvest in January 1893. Ice was cut at Oswego, but there wasn’t enough water in the river to float the cakes to the elevator on the shore. And then at Yorkville, the dam was damaged by the spring flood in 1901 causing Esch Brothers & Rabe to scramble to get it repaired in time for the winter ice harvest. By November, Record Editor John R. Marshall could report: “Chicago people will get good ice from Yorkville. The water in the Fox River at this point has been very clear and clean this year.”
But in June 1902, the ice houses at Yorkville burned yet again after being struck by lightning. The fire was visible for miles, the Record’s Specie Grove correspondent writing: “Many of our people saw the ice-house fire at Yorkville. Being awakened by the storm, the light through the windows drew their attention to the fire.”
The company immediately rebuilt to carry on the Yorkville operation. In Oswego, however, damage to the dam halted operations there. Then in August of 1904, the rest of the Oswego icehouses burned to the ground, probably from a spark from a passing locomotive. Ironically, eight of the railroad’s freight cars on the ice company siding were also consumed by the fire.
Fire and flood were not the only hazards facing Esch Brothers & Rabe, however. In 1897, a new, much larger “ice trust,” the Knickerbocker Ice Company, was established in Chicago with the goal of eliminating competition so that prices could be raised. Like the Chicago Ice Exchange, the new cartel was also illegal, but it had real money behind it and it quickly gobbled up smaller ice companies. And just as quickly, prices were sharply raised. To persuade smaller companies to join, the trust also tried direct action, such as damaging dams the companies depended upon, including those at Yorkville and Oswego.
In January 1907, Esch Brothers admitted defeat and finally sold out to Knickerbocker.
But by then, the days of natural ice production were nearly over. Not only was the Fox River becoming badly polluted by the turn of the 20th Century that ice harvested on it was nearly unusable, but the development of ice making machines precluded the need for harvesting natural ice. At first, customers were leery of machine-made versus natural ice, but gradually the purity of manufactured ice began making serious inroads in the ice business.
In the 1890s, the “Pure Ice Movement” began agitating to have ice tested for purity. The result was that many ice harvesting operations throughout the nation were closed by public health officials due to polluted streams and lakes on which it was harvested. By 1910, several of Chicago’s 71 ice dealers were advertising manufactured ice.
Strangely, this once-flourishing industry has left virtually no trace of itself behind on the Fox Valley’s landscape. The giant ice houses, workers’ boarding houses, stables, rail sidings, and steam ice elevators are the stuff of a long past generation’s memories, although the old Esch Brothers boarding house still stands on Van Emmon Street in Yorkville.
But while it lasted, it was a rousing, exciting time, when men harvested winter and sold it in summer.
Read a story the other day about the problems they’re having out West with invasive species in that region’s rivers. According to the piece, the fish are turning up in rivers where they’re not supposed to be found, and are competing with native species like trout and salmon.
Now I love walleyes. I like catching them, and I like eating them even more. But I can understand why they might be considered invasive and why they might throw a monkeywrench into the ecology of rivers where they’ve never previously been found.
Walleye are great for catching and for eating–as long as they don’t turn up where they’re not supposed to. Our Fox River has a pretty good population of them these days.
The story got me to thinking about invasive species in general as well as about the kinds of fish we like to eat. Or at least the kinds of fish we THINK we’re eating. When it gets right down to it, the only way to be sure the kind of fish you’re eating is to catch it yourself.
Really? Yes, really. I went back and looked up a story I did several years ago based on the December 2011 issue of Consumer Reports, which had an interesting article titled “Mystery Fish: The label said red snapper, the lab said baloney.” Turned out after spending some bucks on DNA testing of samples of fish from several markets and restaurants, CR found out (and I doubt you’ll be completely shocked to hear this) that what you’re told isn’t necessarily the truth when it comes to what kind of fish you’re cooking at home or eating at your favorite restaurant.
The worse case concerned red snapper, CR said. I used to think it tasted pretty good, but after I read that article, I had to wonder what the heck it was I had really been eating. Stated CR: “None of the 22 ‘red snappers’ we bought at 18 markets could be positively identified as such.”
You might think, what with all the “truth in advertising” and federal food safety laws that are supposedly in effect that that problem might perhaps be of relatively recent origin, given the recent political mania to cut funding for government health and safety mandates.
But, the fact is, mislabeling was one of the many problems that led to government regulation of the sales of meat, poultry and fish in the first place. Upton Sinclair started the regulation ball rolling with his 1906 novel, The Jungle, that recounted the horrors of the meatpacking industry and its resistance to changes that would protect the health of consumers, but which would also cut into industry profits. As Sinclair wrote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
The problems wasn’t concentrated in any specific part of the country. And, in fact, we’ve got our own local story of mystery fish that goes all the way back to the 1870s when experts and the groups they formed, apparently with the best of intentions, created a host of problems with invasive wildlife we’re still dealing with today.
One of the most annoying of these groups was the American Acclimatization Society. Under the leadership of New York pharmacist Eugene Schieffelin, the society reportedly decided to introduce every bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays to North America. Today we can thank these cranks for the pestiferous starlings and English sparrows that are so destructive.
German carp thrived after being stocked in the Fox River by the U.S. Fish Commission in the 19th Century.
But while annoying, the acclimatizatizers didn’t hold a candle to the destruction to natural habitat and native species caused by the federal government itself. By 1873, the U.S. Fish Commission was seriously considering the importation of European carp to be stocked in our waterways. Later in the decade they’d talked themselves into acting on the idea. Why? Well, because, according to the commission’s report for 1873-1875, it was such a good-tasting fish and because it could survive in water conditions that drove other species out.
After quite a bit of bother and expense, the commission managed to import sufficient carp as breeding stock. The fish were considered so valuable, in fact, that they were placed in the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument for the first few years to acclimatize them and assure they’d breed naturally.
By the 1880s, there were enough that offers to stock them in the nation’s rivers were accepted. The first 40 carp were stocked in the Fox River in Kendall County in 1882, with 20 more stocked in 1883. Upriver, the largest group, 1,000 fingerlings, were stocked at Aurora in 1886, with 500 more at Elgin in 1892.
And with the nation’s rivers in such deplorable shape, stocking carp became a popular activity for both the federal government and their colleagues at the state level. But, as it turned out, people really didn’t much like carp. As the Ottawa Republican reported in January 1895: “The German carp which have lately been propagating profusely in this country and for which extraordinary claims were made as a food fish, has not held out in the practical test…The trouble with them, says an old fisherman, is that they are soft and oily. The fat on them is like the fat of hogs.”
W.E. Meehan, commissioner of fisheries of Pennsylvania was definitely not a carp supporter: “Possibly the carp is fit for food. Personally, I do not like his looks as a fish and I do not like the looks of the people I have seen buying him in the market.”
The Fox River at Oswego offered recreational opportunities to residents and visitors alike during the era before World War II including fishing.
Commercial fishermen, however, were finding carp of value. M.D. Hurley, president of the Illinois Fishermen’s Association, noted in an 1898 letter to the U.S. Fish Commission: “…the wonderful demand for Illinois River carp from Eastern markets where they are sold for Illinois River carp, and not canned for ‘salmon,’ as many people believe.”
In a 1902 statement, S.P. Bartlett, superintendent of the U.S. Fish Commission, and a resident of Quincy in western Illinois, argued (including a bit of honesty at the end): “This cry against the carp is a great big humbug—it is an outrage—they are a good fish if you know how to cook them, but not so good if you don’t know how.” Indeed.
But despite the protestations of Hurley and Bartlett, apparently Illinois River carp were indeed being shipped east as carp, but then were being magically transformed into other species. As the Kendall County Record suggested in a report from Yorkville in October 1907: “For the past three or four years the river in this locality has been seined and thousands of pounds of carp taken out, which are shipped to New York, and there converted into red salmon and some other costly fish dishes.”
In March 1911, A.H. Young of London, Ontario, Canada, explained to a group down in Ottawa exactly what happened after carp from the Fox and Illinois rivers were shipped east by the carload: “Instead of being eaten by New Yorkers, [carp] are shipped right back here to Illinois and you buy them. Don’t believe it? Well, it’s the truth, just the same. They have a system by which all bones are removed and the fish is then properly cured and becomes halibut, smoked white fish, and various other varieties of cured fish. Then you people out here in Illinois and all over the country, for that matter, eat carp and think them fine.”
Though carp are still prominent, fishing for smallmouth bass–and walleyes–on the Fox River of Illinois draws thousands of anglers to the Fox Valley. (Photo courtesy of the Illinois-Wisconsin Fishing Blog)
It gradually became conventional wisdom that carp were harmful because of their bottom feeding habits, which, it was thought, stirred up bottom sediment creating the state’s murky waters. However, it was gradually realized the murky water came first, thanks to erosion and excessive pollution. The carp, it turned out, thrived because of the streams’ poor water quality, not the other way around.
So today, the grand old scam apparently continues, although the days of commercial fishing on the Fox and Illinois rivers seems to be long gone. The action has simply moved elsewhere.
As we witness the tide of development currently flowing across what was once some of the nation’s most productive farmland, many of us can’t help but be saddened by the obliteration of whole farmsteads.
On almost a daily basis, barns, silos, corn cribs, and houses that were once—and not all that long ago, either—the hearts of working farms are bulldozed or burned to make way for new housing and commercial developments.
Even on the shrinking number of working farms still left in the Fox Valley many of those familiar farm buildings are being torn down or torched because they’re obsolete. With dairying and livestock raising left to ever-bigger agribusiness specialists, the dairy barns, cattle sheds, and hog and chicken houses that were once vital to the region’s diversified farm operations are about as useful as buggy whips for area commuters. Even so, many of those no longer useful buildings are still maintained by some farmers because they hold fond memories of the past.
This tendency of farmers to hold on to buildings and even farm equipment long after their usefulness has passed is not a new thing. It’s been going on for decades—probably centuries—and will likely continue until the last farmer is finally ousted by some robotic creation that will automatically till, plant, and harvest fields in the distant future.
When I was a youngster, for instance, pyramidal-shaped steel windmill towers still stood in many a farm yard, even though rural electrification had brought the wonders of water systems pressurized by electrical pumps to farms a decade or two earlier. A few of those old windmills still had the actual wind engines mounted atop them, with pump rods still attached to the well pumps at their base. And a few farmers still used the old windmills to pump water up out of farm wells to keep stock tanks full, saving a few dollars on electricity in doing so.
The windmill tower on the Minkler farm out of Minkler Road south of Oswego, was brand new and built of wood when this photo was taken in 1895. (Little White School Museum collection)
In fact, windmills were the way water was provided in town and country for almost a century, and windmill manufacture provided jobs for thousands. Batavia’s current self-description as the “Windmill City” offers modern evidence of that, although it’s safe to say few of the city’s residents realize how important windmills were to the economic development of Illinois and the rest of the Midwest.
1875 Marshall Wind Engine Manufacturing Company advertisement from the Kendall County Record.
While Batavia is best-known locally for its windmill manufacturers, the truth is that most towns boasted a windmill factory at one time or another, even my one-time small farming community of Oswego here in northern Illinois. In the summer of 1870, a group of local businessmen formed the Oswego Manufacturing Company to manufacture, under license, the Marshall Wind Engine Company’s windmills. It took a few years to get underway but by the early 1870s was manufacturing windmills in a small building on the north bank of Waubonsie Creek owned by Asahel Newton. The Marshall Wind Engines were unusual in that they featured a solid wheel, and not one with separate vanes. Soon after, another company, Armstrong & Buchanan, also began manufacturing wind engines in Oswego.
The idea behind water pumping windmills was pretty simple. The wind engine was mounted atop a tall tower. On the engine itself, a large fan-shaped blade, called the wheel, was turned by the wind. The rotary motion of the fan was turned into angular up-and-down energy through a gearbox called the motor. That up-and-down motion was harnessed by attaching a long shaft, the pump rod, to a regular water pump whose handle had been replaced by a pump jack. By that means, wind power instead of human muscle power pumped water.
Not that windmills were all that simple as machines, of course. They were quite ingenious, in fact. For instance, the motor and fan also had a tail and vane that kept the wheel headed directly into the wind thanks to the turntable on the mast post. But you don’t necessarily always want the wheel facing the wind. During a windstorm, for instance, the wheel and attached machinery could be damaged by turning too fast. So a method was provided via a cable and crank mounted near the ground that allowed the tail and fan to be folded together so that the fan blade could be turned into a giant windvane and kept parallel instead of perpendicular to the wind. Many wheels also were equipped with brakes that could be applied from the ground to regulate the speed. The gearing of the wheel and the way the rotary energy it produced was turned into angular motion required to operate the pump was also clever and was patented by a variety of wind engine manufacturers.
Water pumped by windmills was generally channeled into an outdoor tank for livestock or pumped a bit higher up into an elevated water tank to provide water pressure for farm homes. Sometimes, farms had more than one well, a shallow one for livestock and a deeper one for the house, both with their own windmills.
By the early 20th Century, windmill towers were being manufactured of steel members, which were stronger and far less maintenance-intensive. This photo was taken about 1910 on one of the farms in the Harvey Threshing Ring east of Oswego. (Little White School Museum collection)
On the farm my father grew up on in Kansas, the well to provide water for the farm was located a long distance from the house because that’s where the best site for the well was located. Drinkable water in that region where alkali water is most common is hard to come by. The well water was pumped into an elevated tank at the well and then piped the fairly long distance to the farmstead.
In the era before electric pumps became commonly available, windmills were also erected in town, often on building roofs where they’d pump water up to tanks where pipes would then feed the buildings below by gravity flow.
Old abandoned grain binders were still common on farms 60 years ago even though their tasks had been taken over by combined harvesters in the 1940s and 1950s.
When I was a youngster back in the 1950s, windmills weren’t the only obsolete items sitting around farms. Many farms still retained their old outhouses despite having indoor plumbing, while smokehouses with their wonderful aromas were also fairly common throughout the countryside—as well as in town. With the advent of cheaper store-bought food, home smoking went the way of home canning meat, but the smokehouses remained as reminders of that earlier, more self-sufficient era.
Obsolete farm equipment, too, dotted area farmsteads. Rare was the farm that didn’t have an old binder sitting out behind the barn, overgrown with morning glory vines. Binders had been used in the harvest of small grains such as oats and barley before combine harvesters came on the scene. They provided wonderful climbing toys for us farm kids.
For years old windmill towers stood, many minus their wind engines. The angle iron that made up the towers was used by thrifty farmers for a variety of projects, including farm equipment repairs. Some of those towers are still standing today, but they, along with the other trappings of farming’s “old” days, are now disappearing forever as rural ways and days are replaced by suburbia.
Looking out of the window at our Fox River of Illinois here at History Central, it seems the river’s lower than it’s been in quite a while. In fact, if it gets any lower, the fish are going to have to get out and walk.
It’s been a while since the Fox River’s been this low, a reflection of the drought affecting the region.
Our corner of northern Illinois is currently in drought, labeled “moderate” by the weather people, but looking pretty severe when it comes to river levels—not to mention the conditions of area lawns and farm fields. Out in the country, the drought level in corn and soybean fields seems to have reached “Grim” with no signs of moderating.
But it’s the river that’s looking peaked outside my office window this week.
The Fox rises in southeastern Wisconsin and runs 202 miles almost due south except for a slight bend to the southwest before it reaches its mouth on the Illinois River near towering Starved Rock. It’s a relatively wide river—wider than the sluggish DuPage River a few miles to the east, but narrower than the DesPlaines River just to the east of the DuPage.
Although wide, the Fox has always been a fast-running shallow stream during most of the year. But frequent and rapid fluctuations in the river’s level are common—and nothing new. In fact, our Fox River of Illinois started right out being at least a minor annoyance as soon as some of the first European explorers and fur traders started poking around these parts.
Everyone who first encountered the river and its valley, from the earliest French explorers to the permanent American settlers who began arriving along its banks in the 1820s, seemed to agree both were beautiful. But the river’s frequent depth fluctuations meant it was (and still is) often extremely shallow during certain times of the year. And that made it unsuitable to use for either travel or transporting freight.
For instance, in the fall of 1698, Jesuit Missionary Jean Francois Buisson de St. Cosme was sent by the Bishop of Quebec with an expedition to establish a mission on the lower Mississippi River. His party left the Strait of Mackinac and paddled down the west shore of Lake Michigan. Difficulties with the Fox Tribe meant they couldn’t use the usual route from Green Bay, up the Fox River of Wisconsin to the Wisconsin River and downstream to the Mississippi. So they were on their way south to the Chicago portage when some friendly Native People suggested they might try our Fox River as a cut-off to the Mississippi.
This map nicely depicts the Root River to Fox River portage west of modern Racine, Wisconsin. The clip comes from a map of Illinois drawn by Rene Paul of St. Louis in 1815, and then copied by Lt. James Kearney of the U.S. Topographical Engineers for the governor of the Illinois Territory, Ninian Edwards prior to statehood. I’ve highlighted the Fox River in blue. The portage is marked with the dotted line at upper left. The map is Plate XL of Indian Villages of the Illinois Country, Part I, Atlas by Sara Jones Tucker, Illinois State Museum, 1941.
The route they’d have to take would be up the Root River at modern Racine, Wisconsin to a roughly five-mile overland portage to the Fox River. But when they got to the Root River, they found its water level extremely low. “As there was no water in it [the Root River] we judged that there would not be any in the Peschoui [our Fox River] either,” St. Cosme reported, “And that instead of shortening our journey we should have been obliged to go over forty leagues of portage roads; this compelled us to take the route by way of Chikagou.”
Not only was the Fox quite shallow, but it also had a sharp drop about four miles above its mouth on the Illinois River at modern Dayton that Father Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix described as “a fall.” And that meant a century and a half later when steamboats began plying the Illinois River early in the 1800s, that they were blocked from ascending the Fox any farther than four miles.
It must have been extremely frustrating for those early Fox Valley pioneers, who would have welcomed an easy, inexpensive way to get their livestock and crops to market by shipping them down the river to the Illinois and Mississippi systems. At that time, the St. Louis and New Orleans markets were the most active in what was then the United States’ west and the Chicago market had barely begun.
In fact, early on the river became more a barrier than an asset as people living west of it had to get across the wide stream to drive their livestock or haul their grain to market. As a result, shallow fords like the nice, smooth limestone-floored one here at my hometown of Oswego were prized by both the region’s Native People and the White settlers who displaced them.
Which is not to say the river’s geology wasn’t prized by another group of early settlers—the millwrights. Although wide and shallow, the Fox nevertheless experiences considerable fall from its headwaters north of the modern Illinois-Wisconsin border and its mouth on the Illinois River. And this, along with the rich farmland through which the primordial Fox River Torrent cut the valley and riverbed all those thousands ago, meant the river was an ideal source of waterpower.
In fact, according to John White, writing in the Fox River Area Assessment, published in 2000 by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, “The Fox River probably produced more hydropower than all other streams in Illinois put together, excluding the Rock River. In addition to sawing wood and grinding grain, these mills ran factories. The Fox River valley became more heavily industrialized than any other area of comparable size in Illinois.”
But the idea of making at least part of the Fox navigable persisted. But the problem, even early on, had a number of parts. First was the river’s usually shallow levels and second, even as early as 1840, all those dams White wrote about had been built. Nevertheless, the Oct. 2, 1840 edition of the Illinois Free Trader, Ottawa’s weekly newspaper, reported on one successful—though arduous—attempt to navigate the Fox by steamboat:
Fox River Navigation — Arrival of the Bark “St. Charles Experiment.”
“On Tuesday evening last Mr. Joseph P. Keiser and lady arrived at our steamboat landing in a beautiful bark, six tons burthen, from St. Charles, Kane county, Illinois. Mr. K. left St. Charles on the 18th inst.. amid the smiling countenances of a large collection of citizens of that place who had assembled to witness his departure on this hazardous and novel enterprise. He descended Fox River without much trouble, notwithstanding the low stage of the water at present and the dam at Green’s mill, &c, might be considered by some as presenting insurmountable barriers.
“The “Experiment,” we believe, is the first craft that has ever descended this beautiful stream this distance, save, perhaps, the frail bark of the Indian in days gone by. The distance from St. Charles to this place is about eighty miles by water, passing through a section of country which, in point of fertility, is not surpassed by any tract of country in the Union, and to the enterprise and exertions of Mr. Keiser belongs the honor of first undertaking and accomplishing the navigation of Fox River, which winds its meandering course through it.
“The object of Mr. K’s enterprise is somewhat of a novelty. His design is to travel by water to the river St. Lawrence, in Lower Canada, by the following route: From St. Charles down Fox River to its mouth at Ottawa; thence down the Illinois to its mouth; thence down the Mississippi to the mouth of the Ohio; thence up the Ohio river to Beaver, Pa.; thence by way of the Ohio and Pennsylvania Canal to Akron, O.; thence on the Ohio Canal to Cleveland; thence on lake Erie to Buffalo, N.Y.; thence on the Welland Canal to Lake Ontario; and thence to the river St. Lawrence.
“This route will doubtless prove arduous to our friend, but he is in fine spirits and considers his worst difficulties ended by having successfully descended Fox River at the present stage of the water. He has our best wishes for a safe and pleasant journey, hoping that he may be able to inform us of his safe arrival at his distant destination.”
But after Mr. and Mrs. Keiser steamed off into historical obscurity, it seems no more attempts were made to navigate the Fox by steamboat.
The mill dam at Oswego was representative of the dams Joseph Keiser had to ease his small steamboat across during his 1840 voyage down the Fox River from St. Charles to Ottawa. (Little White School Museum collection)
But it wasn’t until 1867 that the area’s local Congressman, B.C. Cook, officially urged the Federal Government to make funding available to see what might be possible concerning Fox River navigation. On May 16, 1867, the Kendall County Record reported that “From Hon. B.C. Cook we learn that he has obtained an order from the authorities at Washington for the survey of Fox River, with the intention of making it navigable as high up as Yorkville or Oswego.”
The idea, as the Record reported, was to build dams with locks to permit river traffic to ascend the Fox. “The thing is done on the St. Joseph River in Michigan and on many other streams and it affords cheaper transportation than by railroad,” Record Editor J.R. Marshall contended.
The Sept. 26 Record noted that U.S. Government surveyors and engineers were wrapping up their work on the project and that the communities up and down the river had high hopes of what might be coming.
But even the raw survey, without any of the engineers’ conclusions, pointed to some substantial issues with the idea, not the least of which was the amount of fall in the seemingly placid river. As the Rev. E.W. Hicks reported in his 1877 Kendall County history: “It was found that Oswego was one hundred and forty-five feet higher than Ottawa, and that Fox river fell fifty-eight feet in the sixteen miles between Oswego and Millington.” Clearly, some interesting engineering—unnecessary on Michigan’s St. Joseph River—would be required to create a navigable channel from Ottawa to Oswego without flooding a good portion of the local countryside.
The engineering challenges of raising river traffic nearly 150 feet by means of dams and locks from Ottawa to Oswego were serious, but were then negated when the Ottawa, Oswego, and Fox River Valley Rail Road finally got serious backing. The line ran from the Vermilion coal fields near Streator to Ottawa and then right up the Fox River Valley to Geneva. Rail traffic between Ottawa and Oswego opened in 1870.
In any case, by that time, serious consideration was also being given to building the Ottawa, Oswego, and Fox River Valley Rail Road to link the coalfields southeast of Streator with Ottawa and then up the river valley all the way to Geneva. And while water transport was, indeed, cheaper than even rail transport, the cost of the dams, locks, and other improvements to make the Fox navigable even as far as Yorkville—not to mention the maintenance costs going forward—would have been prohibitive. Plus, given northern Illinois’s frigid winters, the river, even if it could somehow be made navigable, would only be available for freight about nine months of the year.
So the idea of a navigable Fox was quickly overtaken by the new rail line, which opened in 1870, shipping in the coal and other products Fox Valley residents needed while hauling to market the grain and livestock the region’s farmers were producing.
The Fox River Improvement Plan called for building up to 40 dams and coin-operated locks to permit motorboating from Ottawa all the way to the Chain-O-Lakes in northern Illinois. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and just one of the dams, at Montgomery, was built with the accompanying dredging and channelizing of the river for a quarter mile below the dam–but no coin-operated lock. This map was published in the Oswego Ledger Jan. 15, 1959.
The idea of a navigable Fox lay dormant for a century before it was revived in the late 1950s, with the idea being to create a recreational power boat trail from Ottawa to the Chain-O-Lakes in northern Illinois using dams with coin-operated locks. According to a report in the Jan. 15, 1959 Oswego Ledger, the proposal was to build 30 to 40 dams and locks on the Fox River to allow motorboats to travel up and down the river. In their initial proposal, state officials were planning seven new dams from South Elgin to Sheridan, including at Geneva, Montgomery, Oswego, two between Yorkville and Sheridan, and one at Sheridan.
The dam at Montgomery and that odd dead-end channel along the east bank of the river separating Ashland Avenue Island from Route 25 where the coin-operated lock was supposed to be; the Oswegoland Park District’s Saw-Wee-Kee Park, deeded to it by the state as the proposed location of one of the dams; and the quarter-mile dredged and channelized section of the river below the dam are all that remain of that proposal, eventually shelved for both financial and environmental concerns, as well as, apparently, a sudden attack of common sense.
Today, the Fox remains a priceless natural asset, prized by canoeists and anglers, and still greatly valued for its beauty, while proposals to make it a working river lie buried in the region’s history.
Forty-two years ago, a young recent graduate of Northern Illinois University’s School of Journalism walked into the Ledger-Sentinel office in downtown Oswego looking for a job.
He’d spent the time since his graduation working on his father’s campaign for the Republican nomination and then general election victory to the Illinois State Senate, he explained. Further, he said a few years before, former Fox Valley Sentinel Publisher and Editor Dave Dreier had offered him a job when he graduated. He’d met Dreier at The Office, then a popular watering hole and burger joint on Aurora’s southeast side where local journalists were known to congregate. Beer may have been involved in the conversation, he admitted.
Dave Dreier, my friend from fifth grade, edited and published the Fox Valley Sentinel in Oswego in competition with the venerable Oswego Ledger. I started writing for Dave in 1977, a weekly local history column titled “Epochs.”
But now, months later, when he came down to Oswego from Aurora to see if Dreier was serious about the job offer he found the old Sentinel office closed and so came over to the Ledger-Sentinel office to see what was going on.
What was going on was that Dreier had sold the Sentinel to Jeff and Kathy Farren, the publishers of the Kendall County Record, Inc. papers that then included the Oswego Ledger. Dave and Jeff had come to the conclusion Oswego’s advertising base simply couldn’t support two weekly papers and so agreed that Jeff and his wife, Kathy, ought to buy out the Sentinel.
So in July 1980, the Farrens merged the two papers into the Ledger-Sentinel and asked me to be the editor of the new weekly. I was only able to work part time, battling as I was at the time spinal arthritis, a hip rapidly deteriorating that would need to be replaced within a year, and a variety of other related health problems. So covering Oswego’s village board, school board, park district board, library board, and all the other local news, along with writing my weekly local history column and doing the regular copy editing, going over to the fire barn and the police department to get the fire and police calls, writing obituaries, taking photos and all the other stuff weekly newspaper people do was rapidly wearing me out.
The Ledger-Sentinel was formed by the merger of Jeff and Kathy Farren’s Oswego Ledger and Dreier’s Fox Valley Sentinel in the summer of 1980. The Farrens prevailed on me to become the part-time editor of the new paper, for which I continued to write my column, renamed “Reflections,” which suited me–I never really liked “Epochs,” but I’ve always been terrible at picking titles and headlines.
As a result, when that young man showed up about a year after I started editing the paper, I sent him on down to Jeff and Kathy’s office in Yorkville with my frantic recommendation they hire him as soon as possible, which they did.
This week, John Etheredge, after 42 years with the Ledger-Sentinel—the name changed back to the Oswego Ledger by its new corporate owners— has decided to retire. And I have to say, it’s been quite a ride during those years when Oswego literally exploded from a village of 3,000 people to today’s muscular suburb of more than 35,000.
John and I hit it off right away, and made the Ledger-Sentinel a true cooperative effort. Our main goal, we decided right from the start, was to inform our readers how their property tax dollars were being spent. After all, those annual real estate tax bills were the biggest single chunk of money most people sent to the government. We even put a sign up on the wall asking “What will it cost? Who’s going to pay?”
But we also determined to continue the award-winning sports coverage both the Ledger and the Sentinel had produced, and so we started our long-term cooperative venture with part-time sports editor Terry Coley and photographer Jon Cunningham. And we also determined to have a healthy opinion page, working to create a robust editorial side stating the paper’s stance on local, state, and national issues, along with opinion columns and a lively letters to the editor section designed to give our readers their say on the issues of the day. Finally, we were even able to find a local cartoonist, Anne Coy, to cap off the page.
For my part, I was continually gratified with John’s journalism education, since I didn’t have one of my own. My entire instruction in journalism happened in 1978 after Dave Dreier persuaded me to start covering the Kane County Board and the West Aurora School District for the Sentinel. He sat me down, pulled a wrinkled envelope out of his wastebasket, and drew and upside-down pyramid on it.
“This,” he said, “Is an inverted pyramid. You write your stories using this as a guide—the important stuff goes up at the top, with the other stuff in decreasing importance below it. That way, when I edit your copy and have to cut it, I can start from the bottom so the less important stuff gets cut and the important stuff gets in the paper.”
So it was nice to have a knowledgeable person around to explain not only what we were supposed to be doing and how, but why and what to do when the wheels came off. Because that happened. No matter how hard we tried to get it right, errors popped up, and that meant writing corrections that appeared in the same place in the paper the original error appeared. And typos. Can’t forget the typos. We always published legal notices with the head, “Public Notice.” But there was that one time we printed out the head for one of them from the Oswego Fire Protection District but left the “L” out of “Public.” The firefighters got a big kick out of it and we learned that something passing the spellcheck wasn’t being careful enough.
It was a fast-paced, endlessly fascinating time to be in the local news business around these parts. After the area’s first big growth spurt in the 1960s driven by the post-World War II thirst for new housing, development had taken what turned out to be a temporary breather in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
But as the 1980s progressed, Oswego’s location at the western edge of the U.S. Route 34 growth corridor, made it a target for residential and business development. In 1980, Oswego Township’s population, including the village of Oswego and the sprawling unincorporated Boulder Hill Subdivision, was 16,772 and Boulder Hill was nearly three times Oswego’s size. By 1990, the township’s population had grown to 18,078, but it jumped to 28,417 in 2000, and Oswego suddenly had 5,000 more people living in it than did Boulder Hill. And while that growth has paused from time to time, it has never stopped. In 2020, the township’s total population had ballooned to 57,063 and Oswego’s population was more than three times Boulder Hill’s.
Until my retirement in March 2008, John and I were on hand to chronicle that growth and all of its positives and negatives. And the paper was recognized for those efforts by hundreds of state and regional press awards for our coverage of local schools and other governmental agencies, those agencies’ efforts to stay ahead of that rampaging population growth with construction projects from schools to streets and roads to municipal buildings. During those years, the Ledger-Sentinel’s circulation grew with the community, going from 2,000 copies a week in 1980 to more than 8,000 by 2008.
After I retired, John took over the editor’s reins, maintaining the paper’s award-winning culture and still covering news beats, piloting the paper even after the Farrens decided to retire and sell the Record papers to regional media giant Shaw Media, Inc. back in 2015.
After it acquired the Kendall County Record, Inc. newspapers, Shaw Media, Inc. renamed the Ledger-Sentinel, taking the name back to the Oswego Ledger flag as founder Ford Lippold named it when he started it as a free-distribution mimeographed weekly in 1949.
That sale led to a lot of changes in the paper itself, not to mention the changes that have been forced on the entire weekly newspaper business in recent years by rapidly changing, often confusing business and technological conditions.
John Etheredge
When journalists finish a news story, they type -30- at the end to let copy editors know that’s the really the end of the piece and not to expect any more to come. So now, after watching what had been our small corner of northern Illinois grow and then positively explode with growth, John’s finally decided to type his last -30- marking the end of four outstanding, award-winning decades right in the middle of, and chronicling, profound change.
Good luck, my friend and thanks for your steady hand guiding me for all those decades we spent writing the first draft of history of the Oswego area.
Humorist Charles Dudley Warner once quipped “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” And during Warner’s lifetime (1829-1900), that was mostly true—though not entirely.
For instance, the amount of coal smoke from tens of thousands of stoves and fireplaces created sometimes deadly weather conditions in London, England. But the feeling at the time was that humans really couldn’t affect nature, especially the weather.
Nevertheless, in 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius proposed the hypothesis that massive amounts of human instigated fossil-fuel burning and other combustion that produced carbon dioxide was enough to cause global warming. His suggestion was met with general derision. But then in 1938, Guy Stewart Callendar, a British steam engineer, mathematician, and amateur climatologist gathered actual temperature records from the late 19th Century onward. When analyzed, his data showed that during the preceding 50 years, global land temperatures had increased. In other words, he proved global climate change was happening. In 1938. Something some still refuse to believe.
The heavy smogs in London during the 19th Century not only required carriages and wagons be guided by torch-bearers during daylight hours, but also killed people. That continued into the 20th Century with the notorious London Fog of 1952 that lasted for days and killed several people. (Illustrated London News)
But back to Charles Dudley Warner and his quip about the weather. There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that the weather has had a relatively huge effect on world history. From the 16th Century Kamikaze “Divine Wind” that supposedly disrupted a Mongol invasion of Japan to the 1588 storm that scattered the Spanish Armada, to Napoleon’s disastrous winter retreat from Moscow in 1812, weather’s effects keep turning up in the historical record.
Here in North America—the New World to Europeans but the same old place to the Native People who had been living here for thousands of years—weather began playing an important role as soon as those Europeans mentioned above arrived.
For instance, in 1620, a group of disgruntled British religious separatists left the Netherlands bound for what they hoped would be their very own New World utopia across the Atlantic. Earlier, they’d left England for the Netherlands because their brand of Protestantism was actively suppressed. But they found the religious tolerance of the Dutch intolerable and so decided to make a truly clean break and a new start in the New World, where they hoped to have the religious freedom to oppress other faiths.
They aimed to land in Virginia when they sailed from Plymouth, England on Sept. 16, 1620, but the iffy navigation of their ship’s captain instead landed them on the coast of modern Massachusetts, hundreds of miles north of where they planned to take up their new homes. During their first winter in North America, the unplanned-for cold weather nearly killed the lot of them, but they managed to survive, and then eventually prosper.
Meanwhile even farther to the north, the French were settling Canada, eventually creating a string of settlements along the St. Lawrence River from its mouth upstream to the La Chine rapids, so named because the first explorers hoped China was just beyond them. Although they kept expecting to run across Chinese officials as they continued ever farther west, they were, disappointed when they found the Pacific Ocean in the way of extending their travels.
The weather in Canada was even more brutal than that experienced by the English Separatists settled in Massachusetts. But intrepid French explorers and rapacious businessmen—usually one in the same—kept pushing farther and farther into the interior in their search for China and the East Indies. Among them was René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who managed to obtain the royal trade cession for what is now most of the upper Midwest. LaSalle pushed as far west as the thundering falls on the Niagara River between Lakes Erie and Ontario and in 1679, built the first large sailing ship on the western Great Lakes, the Griffin.
LaSalle’s expedition on its way south on the upper Illinois River looking for open water. They didn’t find any until they got down to modern Peoria.
There, weather again came into play when the Griffin, loaded with valuable furs collected from tribes from the western lakes, disappeared, likely sinking during one of the Great Lakes’ frequent and violent storms. The loss threatened to bankrupt LaSalle, but he managed to talk his way out of the problem and mounted yet another expedition in the spring of 1682.
Setting off from Fort St. Joseph on the St. Joseph River, a Lake Michigan tributary, the LaSalle expedition had to haul their canoes downstream on improvised sledges because the St. Joseph was frozen solid, as was the Kankakee when they portaged into it, as was the Illinois River as they traveled downstream from the Kankakee’s mouth on the Des Plaines. Not until they reached Peoria did they find open water. That allowed them to paddle down the Illinois to the Mississippi, and then down to the Mississippi’s mouth on the Gulf of Mexico. There, in an elaborate ceremony (he’d brought along his royal court clothes in case he met some of those long-sought Chinese officials) LaSalle claimed the entire Mississippi watershed for France, something that must have, at the least, bemused the tens of thousands of Native People who’d been living there for the past several centuries.
Weather continued to have its affects on history as the thin line of European colonies that stretched along the Atlantic seaboard grew and prospered. The frontier moved ever farther west as White settlement pushed the resident Native People ever farther west. By 1830, settlement had begun in what geographers eventually called the Prairie Peninsula, a generally open, huge, roughly triangular-shaped tallgrass prairie with its apex in northwestern Indiana and extending northwest all the way to the eastern Dakotas and southwest into eastern Kansas. It must have been quite a sight for those early pioneers when they emerged from the familiar dense timber that stretched behind them east all the way to the Appalachian Mountains and saw a seemingly endless sea of 6-foot tall Big Bluestem grass extending all the way to the horizon.
Pioneer farmers had to change their techniques when they reached the tallgrass prairie. Instead of clearing timber to plant their fields they had to “break,” or plow, the prairie, an expensive, time-consuming task.
All that open grassland was a great boon for those frontier farmers because they didn’t have to laboriously cut down towering old-growth hardwoods before they could farm the land. But the lack of timber also threw a wrench into traditional frontier farming techniques. While groves of hardwoods spotted the prairie and timber did grow on the east side of prairie water courses, the old ways of depending on logs for cabins and farm buildings, as well as to split into fence rails had to be modified.
The earliest prairie settlers here in northern Illinois staked their claims on the east side of groves and streamside woods in order to assure enough timber for building as well as for firewood. Because prairie pioneering required a LOT of timber for both. For instance, the rule of thumb for firewood was that it took about 30 cords to make it through a northern Illinois winter, a cord being a stack of wood 4 feet wide, 4 feet high, and 8 feet long.
The 1870 plat map of Big Grove in Kendall County’s Big Grove Township illustrates how the county’s groves were subdivided into smaller timber plots for sale by earlier arrivals to later arrivals who needed timber to build farmsteads and put up rail fences.
The earliest settlers who had vision and business sense quickly snapped up those isolated groves and other patches of timber out on the prairie, subdivided them into 10-acre plots, and sold them to later arrivals.
One of the other reasons early settlers preferred to locate their farmsteads on the east side of timber patches was to shelter against the prairie winds that came howling out of the west. In winter, especially, those winds could be brutal, as the early pioneers found out during the fierce winter of 1830-31. Forever after known as the Winter of the Deep Snow, the series of storms led to the deaths of countless settlers as well as many of the Native People who lived here. The weather that winter may even have created conditions that led to the Black Hawk War of 1832, Illinois’ last Indian war.
The 1838 U.S. Survey map of Oswego Township nicely illustrates how the earliest pioneer farmers staked claims hugging the sheltered east side of the region’s patches of timber. The area shaded in green shows the southern-most lobe of the Big Woods, a huge patch of timber that stretched from Oswego north to Batavia and east to Naperville.
But while the Winter of the Deep Snow put a damper on things, and 1832 saw war across northern Illinois, just a year later, the Year of the Early Spring led, at least in percentage terms, to the biggest population explosion in northern Illinois history. As described by Kendall County’s first historian in his 1877 history: “The year 1833 opened out splendidly, as if to make amends for the hardships of the year before. The snow went away in February, and early in March the sheltered valleys and nooks by the groves were beautifully green, and by the end of the month, stock could live on the prairies anywhere. It was an exceedingly favoring Providence for the few pioneers who remained on their claims; for had the spring been cold and backward, much more suffering must have followed. The tide of emigration set in early, and in one summer more than trebled the population of the county. This was partly because the emigration of the summer preceding had been held back by the [Black Hawk] war.”
And weather has continued to have more or less serious effects on our little corner of the world ever since. Annual spring floods—called “freshets” back in the day—regularly washed out the numerous dams and bridges on the Fox River, costing the dam owners and taxpayers substantial amounts of money to repair and replace. And weather’s effect on farming is well-known, from drought conditions to years that proved too wet. Townsfolk were also affected, from winters so cold they froze preserved food in area residents’ basements to summers so hot and dry the mills that depended on the Fox River’s waterpower had to temporarily close.
The old Parker Gristmill on the west bank of the Fox River just above Oswego during a spring freshet (flood) around 1910. The flood waters have completely covered the mill dam. (Little White School Museum collection)
The drought and destructive dust storms of the Great Depression years didn’t just affect the Great Plains—they had severe economic effects here, in Kendall County too, with dust storms carrying away tons of topsoil and dry conditions encouraging insect infestations that destroyed thousands of acres of crops.
The blizzards that swept down across the Great Plains east across the Mississippi didn’t stop with the Winter of the Deep Snow, but created both economic and political problems right up to modern times. The winter of 1978-1979 brought parts of northern Illinois to a halt. And when two January storms dropped heavy snow on Chicago, voters showed their displeasure with how the city handled snow removal by kicking Mayor Michael Bilandic out of office and electing Jane Byrne, the city’s first female mayor.
Unfortunately, the snow from the brutal winter of 1978-1979 didn’t only fall on Chicago. A good bit of it fell out here in the Fox River Valley, too. We were able to keep a walking path to the garage clear, though.
Most recently, on-going global climate change has created a confused weather situation not only here in the Fox Valley but across the nation. Far western states have lately been toggling between extreme drought and record floods and snowfall. The fragile electrical grid in Texas gets regular stress tests that it partially fails due to colder than expected winters and hotter than anticipated summers.
Meanwhile here in northern Illinois, winters have become increasingly mild, creating year round open water on the Fox River and the numerous water detention ponds created to control stormwater runoff that has attracted tens of thousands of once extremely rare Canada geese and various duck species.
And from what we see on the news these days, warmer weather is not only encouraging the northward march of such pests as fire ants, but the climate change causing it seems to be pushing the old Tornado Alley of the Great Plains eastward across the Mississippi River into more densely populated areas.
Even with climate change driven weather causing so many problems, though, we’re still only taking baby steps to try to do something about it. While weather has always had major effects on history, and while we do have the technical ability to do something about it these days, it looks as if Charles Dudley Warner’s quip is likely to continue to describe the situation for the foreseeable future.
I read a news story on the Oswego Ledger website a week or so ago and that got me to thinking about the history of safety in general and safety at rail crossings and crossing accidents in Kendall County in particular.
The story reported that the unprotected rail crossings at Jackson and North streets in Oswego will be signalized. Most of the funding will come from the Illinois Grade Crossing Protection Fund, with the rest coming from Illinois Railway, which is said to currently own the rail line.
Railroad accidents began happening almost as soon as the first rail line extended through the county in the early 1850s. That was the CB&Q’s main line that bent slightly to the southwest after crossing the Fox River at Aurora to run through northern Kendall County—Lewis Steward had offered to build a town if the line ran through his land. The railroad did, and the city of Plano was the result.
Original route of the Ottawa, Oswego & Fox River Valley Railroad from the Vermillion Coal Fields to Streator and then north to Ottawa and up the Fox River Valley to Geneva.
Next, the Fox River Branch Line opened in 1870 as the independent Oswego, Ottawa & Fox River Valley Rail Road. But the line was immediately—and not a little fraudulently—snapped up by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad.
As laid out, the OO&FRVRR ran from what was then called the Vermillion Coal Fields to Streator and then to Ottawa before turning due north along the Fox River all the way to Geneva. Its route took it through Oswego and its suburban neighbor to the north, the old Village of Troy, cutting slightly diagonally through the two long-established communities. That put the roadbed perilously close to some existing homes and businesses, including my great-great-grandparents’ house where my wife and I lived for about 10 years and not quite as close to my great-grandparents’ house next door, where my parents and I moved when they left and farm in 1954 and where my wife and I subsequently moved to spend 42 years of our marriage.
The house where my great-great grandparents lived–my great-great-grandmother’s rug loom sat in the small wing to the left–and where my wife and I lived for about 11 years. The Fox River Branch Line’s tracks ran parallel to the back of the house about 40 feet from our back door.
We were lucky, I guess, during the 72 years my family and I lived adjacent to the railroad there were no serious derailments on our branch line like the one that’s recently been in the news out in Ohio. About the most serious semi-recent local accident on our section of the line was in December 1972 when a youngster found a key for one of the switches on a siding in downtown Oswego, threw the switch, and derailed the three diesel engines on an 80-car CB&Q freight. Fortunately, neither the cars nor the engines overturned.
Almost immediately after the rail line opened in 1870, its trains were involved in a variety of accidents, from killing livestock that wandered on the tracks—locomotive cowcatchers actually caught cows back in those days—to hitting the unwary horse-drawn wagon or buggy at crossings.
In January 1870, just weeks after the stretch of line between Yorkville and Oswego opened to traffic, young Theodore Minkler was struck and killed by a southbound train when the lumber wagon he was driving was hit while crossing the tracks south of Oswego, thus becoming the first county fatality on our stretch of the new line.
All the accidents on the Fox River Branch didn’t happen at crossings, of course. On May Day, 1877, for instance, Oswego teacher Anna Brown took her elementary students on a nature walk down the tracks south of Oswego to collect wildflowers. According to the Kendall County Record: “As the five o’clock train came along a little boy, named Carpenter, about nine years old, was on a railroad bridge over a ravine and became frightened. Miss Brown ran on the bridge to help him off. She saved the boy, but the engine struck her, ran over her left foot and threw her from the bridge to the creek, ten feet below.” But Miss Brown, obviously a tough cookie, was helped back up out of the ravine and was taken to a doctor. She recovered, but walked with a limp and used a cane the rest of her long, eventful, and colorful life.
Oswego Fox River Creamery located on Ill. Route 25 just north of North Street and east of North Adams Street. Aurora Historical Society photo.
On the other hand, many accidents did indeed happen at rail crossings. In September 1883, according to the Record’s Oswego correspondent, cufflinks caused a near-fatality: “When Henry Johnston, a young fellow from Specie Grove, was returning from the Fox River Creamery [located north of downtown Oswego between modern Rt. 25 and the Fox River Branch right-of-way], and Charles Lehman the superintendent was riding down to town with him; Charley was engaged in readjusting his gold cuff buttons and the driver failed to look up the track, so they drove on the crossing just as the 10:14 passenger came along. The engine struck the hind wheel. Charley however had jumped, but being that he was run over by the horses and the wrecked wagon piled on top of him, he received a few scratches; Henry, who was thrown off with the wagon, wasn’t hurt a bit.”
Not that the Fox River Branch was the only local rail line where serious accidents happened, of course. The CB&Q’s main line on the west side of the Fox River crossed the West River Road—now Ill. Route 31—near the Wormley family farms. Called the Wormley Crossing, it was the site of a number of accidents some of which involved Wormley family members themselves. As the Record reported from Oswego on Dec. 19, 1872: “John H. Wormley was considerably hurt one day last week at the railroad crossing this side of Montgomery.”
A fast CB&Q passenger and mail train like this one hit Fannie Roberts as she drove her horse and buggy across the double tracks at Montgomery, Illinois in June 1889. She was lucky to escape with her life after being thrown 50 feet by the force of the collision. Neither the horse nor the buggy survived.
And on the morning of June 3, 1889, Fannie, wife of prominent Oswegoan Charles Roberts of Oswego, drove her horse and buggy into the path of a westbound passenger train while driving across the CB&Q’s main line tracks at Montgomery. She was seriously injured after her horse and buggy were thrown about 50 feet by the collision. Miraculously, she survived and was finally able to return home after spending a little over two months in the “new” Aurora hospital (the building adjacent to the old Copley Memorial Hospital that formerly housed the Copley School of Nursing and then the Aurora Blood Bank).
In 1918, Illinois voters approved a $60 million bond issue to build paved roads linking every county seat in the state to a new hard road system. In Yorkville, the Kendall County seat, that meant more traffic on already busy Bridge Street—now U.S. Route 47 through its downtown—and across the street’s Fox River Branch Line crossing. By early 1928, in light of the eminent paving of Route 47 through town, Yorkville had prevailed on the CB&Q to put up one of the new warning lights with bells at the busy crossing.
As the Record reported on Feb. 15: “After several years of faithful endeavor the village fathers have had the Burlington railroad interested sufficiently to put up a crossing light at Bridge street and the tracks. The new danger light is under construction and will be in the middle of the street, plainly visible to drivers and a wonderful relief to locomotive engineers.”
As might be imagined, however, state highway engineers had some serious safety concerns about a warning light atop a raised concrete base in the middle of a busy north-south state highway located at the bottom of steep grades in both directions.
So the state ordered the light-and-bell warning device moved to the side of the road But Yorkville officials, who liked it where it had been originally, finally prevailed in getting it moved back to the center of the highway. As the Record explained on Feb. 29, 1929: “There is not a better way in which to guard the crossing at Yorkville than this light and bell equipment. The fact that it is in the center of the street is more of a benefit than a menace. People will not be able to drive so fast through the main street and the traffic will be slowed up for those who wish to back out from the curb.”
And there the signal remained for a few decades before common sense—and frequent collisions—dictated the warning signal be moved to the sides of the street.
The all stainless steel Denver Zephyr set numerous speed records on its runs from Chicago to Denver and back again. In late June 1936 it maintained its on-time westbound record in spite of hitting the auto driven by Harley Shoger in Kendall County’s Bristol Township, killing both Shoger and his wife. (Everett L. DeGolyer Jr. collection of United States railroad photographs)
The increasing speed of trains as the years rolled by didn’t have much impact on the Fox River Branch Line, where the grades and curves it followed tended to keep speed down. But the speed on the CB&Q’s main line was a different thing. First improved steam locomotives began breaking speed records and then the Burlington introduced the streamlined diesel-powered Zephyrs, which were even faster. So fast, and so much quieter than their steam locomotive ancestors that they created new rail crossing danger.
On June 28, 1936, Mr. and Mrs. Harley Shoger were driving across the Burlington Main Line in rural Bristol Township when their car was struck by the racing Denver Zephyr, which was making a speed run west from Chicago. Mrs. Shoger was killed in the collision and her husband died shortly thereafter at Aurora’s St. Joseph Hospital.
But a couple of incidental crossing deaths couldn’t dampen the Burlington’s Zephyr spirit. As a CB&Q press release enthusiastically explained: “Capping the climax of their sensational performance since inauguration of the service May 31, the original Zephyr on June 28 gave a startling demonstration of its reserve stamina and speed. Delayed by striking an automobile near Bristol, the Zephyr made up an hour and twenty minutes in 700 miles from Galesburg, Ill. to Wray, Colo. and coasted into Denver exactly on the dot June 29 for the 29th consecutive day to maintain its perfect record.” So, yes, sorry about the two crossing deaths, the railroad seemed to say, but, hey, we managed to keep to the schedule in spite of them!
The Jackson Street crossing of the Fox River Branch Line at Oswego is one of two that will receive warning signals soon, according to news reports. The crossing is seen here with a diesel freight passing the CB&Q’s Oswego Depot in September 1965. (Little White School Museum collection)
There have been a few accidents over the years at the two Oswego crossings approved for signalization. But traffic across the stretch of rail line at the North Street and Jackson Street crossings has increased significantly during past years as more and more motorists use the Adams Street cutoff to avoid crowded Route 34 through Oswego. And it’s likely to increase even further with the construction of the new multi-story apartment building at Adams and Washington streets and plans for a second adjacent building.
But after those signals are installed, at least we shouldn’t have to worry about a young man getting his milk wagon smashed to smithereens at one of those crossings while admiring his gold cufflinks.
The saga of Roger Matile attempting to track down local history, one blog post at a time, while avoiding the French. Although they do make good fries and toast.
historyonthefox 