Everyone thought these local landmarks would be around forever, but they’ve completely disappeared…

One of my favorite local history topics through the years has been the changes our small corner of northern Illinois has undergone. In particular, I’ve been interested in those businesses and industries that were once major players in the area’s economy of which there is no longer any tangible evidence.

That doesn’t mean there is no evidence, of course, only that you have to, first of all, know there was something there in the first place, and then that you have to recognize the evidence you’re seeing but which might not register.

For instance, here in our little town of Oswego, Illinois, we once had three water-powered mills. One of them, the Hopkins Sawmill, was located on Waubonsie Creek very close to the village’s downtown business district. The other two were located at the dam that was once situated on the Fox River about a half-mile north of Oswego’s downtown.

Of the Hopkins mill, nothing at all remains—except for notations on legal papers created when the Oswego Public Library District bought the parcel of land along Waubonsie Creek on which the old mill once stood. When that happened, they found that a portion of the property had never been surveyed, presumably because it was covered with the mill pond’s water, and so had become a tiny island of real estate in the middle of town owned by no one. It took the library district’s lawyers a few months to figure out what had happened and why, and then fix it. For me, it once again proved that actions taken around these parts in the 1830s continue to have modern implications.

The Parker Mills about 1900 in a photo taken by Irvin Haines. The sawmill and furniture factory is in the foreground on the east bank of the Fox River. The gristmill is on the west bank with the miller’s house behind it and to the left. (Little White School Museum collection)

Of the other two mills on the river and the dam that provided the water power for them, there is at least some evidence they once existed—provided you know what you’re looking at. Both are now the sites of parks maintained by the Oswegoland Park District, one on either side of the Fox River. Millstone Park, site of the old Parker Gristmill, is on the river’s west bank, while Troy Park, the sawmill and furniture factory site, is on the east side of the river, directly opposite the old gristmill.

Both mills were built right at the dam that spanned the river, with their short millraces running underneath the mills. No tall overshot mill wheels for Fox River mills—at least not this far upstream. Instead these mills were powered first by horizontal tub wheels and then soon after by horizontal turbines. If you’re interested in what a turbine wheel of the era looked like, head up a few miles north to Montgomery and you can inspect one that sits as a sort of unmarked memorial on the river’s west bank just a couple yards above Montgomery’s Fox River bridge.

Turbines like this one on display in Montgomery ran most of the mills on the Fox River.

The mill sites are still marked with quite a bit of limestone flagging that provided the two mills’ foundations, especially around the sawmill site on the east bank of the river. Some of the limestone blocks used to wall the two millraces are still visible on both sides of the river.

Of the dam, not much is visible except the riffle caused by the rubble left behind when the dam crumbled early in the 20^th Century. However, if a person looks closely, they can still make out, especially during periods of low water, some of the original timber from the cribs that made up the old dam’s structure. Timber cribs were fastened to the bottom of the river with huge wrought iron stakes before the cribs were filled with gravel and limestone rubble. The dam was finished by being sheathed with thick boards on the downstream side.

Just upstream from the old dam site was another industry that no longer exists, and of which there is no longer, unlike the mills, any evidence at all. Esch Brothers & Rabe built their first giant ice house in 1874, finishing it in time for the 1875 ice harvest. The company gradually added more ice storage houses to the riverbank north of Parker’s dam and mills until there were 20 of them to fill with ice. The northern group of 14 houses each measured 30×100 feet, while the southern group of six houses each measured 30 by 150 feet. Ice in the houses was stored in thick layers, each layer insulated with a thick layer of sawdust.

A lot of ice was harvested, too. Generally the ice harvesting crew consisted of 75 men who worked with horse-drawn ice plows to score 200 lb. ice blocks that were then broken off the frozen surface of the river and floated to the steam-powered elevator that lifted the blocks up to the scaffolds to be skidded to storage. In August 1880 alone, the company shipped 124 railcar loads of ice from the firm’s siding. In total that year, 581 railcar loads of ice were shipped to market from Oswego.

Esch Brothers & Rabe’s giant ice houses above the Parker Mill dam at Oswego. The operation produced hundreds of rail cars of ice annually. (Little White School Museum collection)

What was all that ice used for? Some of it went to homes for food preservation in those new-fangled iceboxes and some went to various businesses for use in soda fountains and to freeze ice cream. But most of it went to the meatpacking industry to keep railcar loads of dressed beef and pork carcasses cool while being shipped to eastern markets.

Gradually, the ice harvest declined due to a number of factors. Pollution of the Fox River prevented its ice from being used in food preparation. Warmer winters resulted in poor harvests, and spring floods damaged the old Parker dam. Then in March 1891, the northern group of 14 ice houses caught fire, probably by a lightning strike, and were destroyed. The southern group of houses was destroyed by fire in 1904. Today, there’s nary a trace of this once-thriving industry.

There is, however, a trace of another once-thriving business, and that’s the depot, sidings, and other facilities once used by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad’s Fox River Branch Line at Oswego.

The Oswego Stockyards. The Waubonsie Creek bridge on Adams Street is visible upper center, and the old feed mill, later a home on the north side of the creek is visible just to the right–upstream–from the bridge. (Little White School Museum collection)

The line reached Oswego in 1870. At one time, there were two sidings at Oswego, one that served the lumber yard and coal storage sheds (there were four of them) west of the main tracks, and another that served the grain elevators on the east side of the tracks just south of the depot. The depot was located on the east side of the tracks at Jackson and South Adams Street. In addition, there was a livestock loading yard and loading chute between the tracks and South Adams Street just south of the Waubonsie Creek bridge. The west siding not only served the stockyard, but also served the lumber company that had been located at Jackson and South Adams since the rail line was built.

Nowadays, both the sidings have been removed, the stockyard is long gone, and Alexander Lumber, the last lumber company to occupy the site, closed down in 2006. That site is now occupied by the sprawling Reserve at Hudson Crossing apartment, retail business, and parking garage complex. The depot was demolished by the railroad in 1969, the site now paved over as parking for the Oswego Brewing Company’s parking lot.

Another business that made use of Oswego’s rail connection in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries was the Fox River Butter Company. Operating out of their creamery between the railroad tracks and what’s now Ill. Route 25 about an eighth of a mile north of North Street, the creamery was once big business in Oswego with hundreds of dairy farmers sending their milk there to be processed.

The Fox River Butter Company’s creamery located on Ill. Route 25 just north of North Street and east of North Adams Street. (Aurora Historical Society photo)

The native limestone building began life as a brewery in 1870, but for whatever reason was not a success. Then on Oct. 5, 1876, Lorenzo Rank, the Kendall County Record’s Oswego correspondent reported: “W.H. [William Huston “Hugh”] McConnell & Co., a new firm, have just commenced business in this town. They have bought the brewery and are converting it into a butter factory. The [steam] engine and other machinery for the establishment have arrived and they calculate to have it in running order by the first of December.”

McConnell made a success out of the creamery, the business growing as the number of local farmers milking cows increased. Business was so good, in fact, that another creamery operator, L.H. Partridge, moved to Oswego in 1881 to compete with McConnell from a new creamery located on the site of the old Armstrong Broom Factory on South Adams south of the grain elevator. The Partridge creamery was soon producing 400 pounds of butter a day, most of it shipped by rail to the New Orleans market. Partridge closed the creamery in the late 1880s and in 1892, the Farmers’ Mutual Benefit Association—a farmers’ cooperative—opened a new creamery apparently using the Partridge site and equipment. The cooperative eventually drove the Fox River Butter Company, then owned by C.S. Kilbourne, out of business.

Then a combination of factors, mostly competition by larger corporate butter and cheese makers, slowly drove all the small creameries—at one time there was at least one in every Kendall County community—out of business.

The final major business that once served Oswego was the interurban trolley line that ran from downtown Aurora through Montgomery and downtown Oswego to downtown Yorkville. Service in the line opened in 1900 and provided convenient passenger and light freight service for the next two decades. With trolleys on the line running hourly, Oswego residents could easily attend high school or college in Aurora, work there, or do their shopping in the city’s downtown.

A southbound interurban trolley crosses the 300-foot trestle taking it over the CB&Q tracks in Oswego around 1910. (Little White School Museum collection)

The trolley line also built an amusement park—all evidence of which has also disappeared—on a site across the Fox River from the huge Boulder Hill subdivision. Realizing ridership would probably lag on weekends, the company figured, rightly as it turned out, that an amusement park would boost weekend riders. The park included a rollercoaster, merry-go-round, shoot the chutes and featured boating on the Fox River, a huge auditorium, and a baseball diamond where semi-pro teams played.

The trolley line was finally killed off when hard-surfaced highways and affordable motor vehicles became common throughout the area in the early 1920s and along with it went the amusement park.

Humans tend to want to believe that the landscapes, services, and amenities they currently enjoy have not only always been around, but will continue to be around forever. But it doesn’t take much investigation to realize the old saying about the only sure things in life being death and taxes is true.

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Fiery 1943 Oswego train wreck produced a young heroine

What does it take to make a hero? What, in fact, does that word really mean?

We tend to throw “hero” around a lot these days. Sports stars in each generation, from Babe Ruth to Walter Payton to Michael Jordan are described as heroes. Men and women who served in Afghanistan and Iraq were described as heroes. The hostages held in Iran back in the ’80s were called heroes.

But sports heroism consists mostly of being born with physical gifts and then using them to earn lots of money performing in front of sports fans. Not much actual heroism there. The men and women serving in the military were doing their jobs—tough jobs—and doing them very well. Those who left family and friends (including female soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines who left spouses and children including newborn babies, and their homes) certainly verged on heroism if they didn’t exactly achieve it. The diplomats imprisoned by the Iranians 40+ years ago weren’t precisely heroes, although they acted, for the most part, heroically.

Local heroes are hard to come by, too. Perhaps that’s because we live in such a mundane community that there is little need for heroism here in northern Illinois. But we’ve had a few. Oswego native Slade Cutter was a bonafide World War II hero. Teenager Robinson B. Murphy was a legitimate hero, earning the Medal of Honor during the Civil War. And teacher Anna Brown achieved hero status in 1877 by saving one of her students from being run over by a train at the expense of losing part of a foot, crippling her for the rest of her life.

Several years ago, while going through some newspaper clippings donated to the Little White School Museum in Oswego, I came across another real life local hero. Just a year older than young Robinson B. Murphy, she nonetheless selflessly endangered her own life to save others.

Helen Gilmour was just 16 years old on that Tuesday afternoon in April 1943 when she stood waiting for the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad’s gas-electric motor car—locals all called it the Dinky—to pull into the Oswego depot down at Jackson and South Adams streets.

The country was in the midst of World War II. Gilmour, a student at Oswego High School, was waiting at the Oswego depot to take the Dinky to Aurora to help her parents, Mr. and Mrs. James Gilmour of Wheatland Township, celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary.

But although it had been scheduled to arrive at 4:05 p.m., the car was running an hour and a half late due to engine trouble at Streator.

Following the end of regular interurban trolley service in the late 1920s, the Chicago Burlington & Quincy Railroad began using the Dinky, which looked like a large trolley car, to provide daily passenger service from Streator to Aurora. The 58-mile Fox River Branch Line linked Streator with Aurora via Ottawa, Millington, Yorkville, Oswego, and Montgomery. The service was convenient and economical, offering residents of all those communities the public transportation option to commute to Aurora or Ottawa for jobs, school, and recreation in an era when two-car families were rare.

Plan of the CB&Q Railroad’s gas-electric passenger cars that ran on the Fox River Branch line through Oswego from the 1920s through 1952.

The Dinky, formally identified as Car 9850, was built in 1928 and was powered by a 275-horsepower gasoline engine that turned an electric generator that, in turn, powered the electric motors that turned the wheels.

The blocky car—no streamlined beauty—was painted a bright orange red, was nearly 78 feet long, and was divided into an engine and control compartment, a Railway Post Office compartment, a baggage compartment, and a passenger compartment seating 32 people.

One of the CB&Q’s gas-electric cars at the Aurora Depot on South Broadway in 1942. (Photo by H.W. Barber)

On that relatively warm April afternoon, the Dinky finally arrived in Oswego about 5:30 p.m. and the waiting passengers, including Helen Gilmour and one of her OHS schoolmates, 17 year-old Harold Alderman, hurried aboard. Motorman F.E. Bishop of Galesburg gunned the noisy engine and the car accelerated, heading north up the grade towards Montgomery. As the car clattered across the Waubonsie Creek trestle near downtown Oswego, mail clerk Paul Chrysler of Elmhurst and Chicago Assistant Chief Clerk John G. Gall of the U.S. Railway Mail Service sorted mail and baggage man Chalmers O. Kerchner of Streator prepared for the short run to Aurora. Conductor P.H. Follard kept track of the occupants of the passenger compartment in the car’s rear.

The Dinky sounded the distinctive “Blat!” of its horn at the North Street, North Adams, and Second Street crossings as it clattered up the gentle grade and across the Route 25 viaduct, laboring to reach 20 mph.

A steam shovel works in the gravel mine between Oswego and Yorkville in 1913 in this photograph from the Stephens-Adamson Manufacturing Company’s May 1913 “The Labor-Saver” newsletter. The mining operation used a variety of Stephens-Adamson equipment manufactured at the company’s Aurora plant.

Meanwhile, a CB&Q steam engine and caboose, with engineer Leo Kasid at the throttle, had started from Montgomery south on that same Fox River line to pick up a string of loaded hopper cars at the gravel pits south of Oswego. Fireman R.L. Parker stoked the engine’s boiler with coal as brakemen G.P. Schwartz and E.L. Shields and conductor D.R. Clark settled in the caboose for the short ride down the line to the gravel pit siding. Crossing the Fox River where Boulder Hill would one day be developed, the short train picked up speed as it steamed down the slight grade and around the gentle curve leading to Oswego.

It all seemed routine, but, as the Interstate Commerce Commission report on the accident noted about that stretch of track: “…the view of an engine approaching from the opposite direction is restricted to a distance of 753 feet, because of the cut and the track curvature.”

In addition, Kasid had not read the stack of dispatches he’d picked up on the way south, instead reading them as the train steamed down the grades. Possibly distracted by reading the dispatches, Kasid, who assumed the Dinky had passed that stretch of tracks an hour and a half earlier, didn’t see the Dinky coming towards him around the blind curve.

A Beacon-News photographer captured this image as rescuers removed the charred bodies of the motorman and the Railway Post Office workers from the wreck of the Dinky.

As a result, just after 5:30 p.m., roughly in back of today’s Oswegoland Civic Center, the steam engine crashed full speed into the Dinky, smashing five feet into the lighter weight car, pushing it 93 feet back down the track before the engine could be stopped.

Minnesota Falk, who lived about 300 yards from the crash site, told a reporter she heard the smash-up in her house and given the on-going war, feared the worst: “I heard the crash and thought it was the Nazis bombing the tracks,” she said.

A wider view of the wreck from a photograph in the collections of the Little White School Museum, Oswego, shows that a crowd of local residents gathered to see the wreck.

Dinky motorman Bishop along with baggage man Kerchner and the two post office employees, all riding in the front of the car, were killed almost instantly.

In addition, the Dinky’s fuel tank ruptured and then the fumes exploded, spraying 160 gallons of burning gasoline in all directions, engulfing the front half of the car in flames. Burning gasoline flowed downhill back towards the passenger compartment from the shattered fuel tank, setting everything in its path ablaze.

As the dazed passengers sat in danger of being incinerated, young Helen Gilmour, despite the ankle sprain she sustained in the collision, jumped up and began shepherding the traumatized survivors out of the blazing car.

“I just remembered what I had learned in first aid,” she later told a local newspaper. “We were taught not to get excited, so I didn’t; but it was pretty bad. The injured were lying all over the field. It looked just like a battlefield.”

Her schoolmate, Harold Alderman, critically injured, was rushed to St. Charles Hospital in Aurora, where he later died. A number of other passengers were also seriously injured, including the entire crew of the steam train.

The subsequent Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) investigation found the freight train, because the Dinky was running more than an hour late, was supposed to have waited at Montgomery until the Dinky passed. But faults in the communication system resulted in the failure to inform the locomotive’s crew of the on-coming passenger car. In fact, the steam engine crew, busy reading their stack of orders, never even saw the Dinky before the collision. Why the Dinky’s engineer both failed to see the approaching train and apply his brakes was never adequately explained.

The Dinky leaves the Oswego depot, heading southbound to Yorkville in this 1942 snapshot taken by the Cutter family, now in the collections of Oswego’s Little White School Museum.

In its accident report, the ICC strongly recommended that all gasoline electric passenger cars be transitioned to diesel engines, which use less explosive fuel. Further, since the surviving train crew said they’d never have proceeded had block signals been installed and working on the Fox River Branch line, the report recommended the railroad install the signals along the entire Aurora to Streator line.

Helen Gilmour went on to graduate from Oswego High in 1945. The community mourned young Alderman’s death. And while much of the mail Chrysler and Gall were sorting at their time of their death was incinerated, some of the letters were saved, arriving at their destinations charred and streaked with soot, causing not a little consternation among local military personnel serving overseas.

The demolished Dinky was replaced, despite the ICC’s warning, by another gas-electric car that provided service until the CB&Q discontinued it, with the last scheduled passenger car on the Aurora to Streator branch finishing its run on Feb. 2, 1952.

That marked not only the end of the Dinky, but also the end of the passenger train era on the Fox River Branch Line that had begun in 1870. It was also the final reminder of the deadly, fiery crash late on that April afternoon in 1943.