North Tour
This northward trip is oriented around the prerailroad routes (such as Milwaukee and Ridge avenues) that angled out from the city center like a fan in every direction, as well as the Chicago and North Western Railway, which first began running north near the Lake Michigan shoreline in the early 1850s. While much of this area is considered the “North Shore,” conjuring up visions of elite commuter suburbs, there were in fact a wide range of settlements, including old farm centers, recreational communities, and institutional towns. Drinking versus temperance, farming versus gardening, and private versus public recreation were among the battles waged by area residents into the twentieth century.
The Best Brewing Company purchased an existing brewery at 1317 Fletcher Avenue (near Belmont and Southport) in 1891. The Best Brewery (N1) expanded two years later to include machine, brew, mill, boiler, and engine houses. The brewery, which abutted a railroad spur line to the east, stood on a block which was otherwise residential. After the brewery shut down in 1961, the buildings were eventually renovated as housing units.
The second stop is the oldest site on this tour, and moves us beyond the City of Chicago. Traveling northwest along Milwaukee Avenue in present-day Glenview, along one of the oldest roads in Chicagoland, is The Grove (1856) (N2). John Kennicott and his family lived in this Gothic Revival house set between the Milwaukee Road and the Des Plaines River. The Kennicotts chose this area, as did many other farmers, because of ready road and water access, as well as a nearby stand of trees, which suggested fertile land and provided building materials and fuel. Across the Chicago area in the nineteenth century, farmsteads with houses such as these were built with ready access to roads and markets.
Traveling eastward from the Grove along Golf Avenue (south of the Grove) to Sheridan Road (Golf becomes Emerson in Evanston), we come to the south end of Northwestern University. University Hall (1869) (N3), located east of Sheridan Road, just south of where Emerson Street would lie if it continued, was built of local limestone in a Gothic style. Northwestern University began operations in Evanston in 1854 shortly after the arrival of the railroad and under its state charter, outlawed the sale of liquor in a four-mile radius from University Hall. This was of little concern to its Evanston neighbors, who embraced temperance from its founding in 1855. Just blocks south from University Hall (south on Sheridan to Chicago Avenue) is the Willard House (N4), home for more than forty years to Frances Willard, who served as dean of women at Northwestern and, as founder of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, devoted much of her life’s work to temperance. Willard called her home the Rest Cottage, which remains in the hands of the WCTU.
Return to Emerson and travel west to Green Bay Road and north to Lake Street. To the northwest, is the farm crossroads that was known as Gross Point (after a road angling into the area from the southwest). Away from the lake and railroad, the settlement catered to German farmers who came into the area in the late 1830s and early 1840s. These farmers supported St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church and Cemetery (1843), as well as stores and saloons.
In response to the temperance crusades of Evanstonians and Northwestern University students and faculty, residents organized as a village and built the Gross Point Village Hall (1896) (N5). The village government remained independent until national prohibition shuttered their saloons and led to the absorption of Gross Point into its eastern neighbor, Wilmette. Wilmette, like Evanston, was an early proponent of temperance and prohibition.
Follow Lake Street east back to Green Bay Road and north to Kenilworth. One of the most affluent communities in the United States, Kenilworth was founded in 1890, after a flag stop on the North Western Railway was established. Catering to affluent Chicagoans seeking to escape the travails of urban life (what travails there were for the wealthy living on Prairie Avenue in 1890), new residents built expansive houses on large lots along the curvilinear streets of the first subdivisions, which centered on the Kenilworth Train Station (1890) (N6). Well into the twentieth century, their ornamental gardens and lawns contrasted with the truck farms and greenhouses of Gross Point residents just to the south.
For many years there was an unincorporated tract fronting Lake Michigan between Wilmette and Kenilworth. Although Wilmette and Kenilworth prohibited nonresident access to their beaches, the beaches in “No-Man’s Land” were open to paying customers, and restaurants and saloons sold liquor to visitors from near and far. Wilmette annexed this land after Prohibition and eliminated public beach access by allowing the sale of the lakefront property to private developers.
North from Kenilworth, the elite commuter rail suburbs of Winnetka, Glencoe, and Highland Park also developed. Continue north on Green Bay Road to Lake Cook Road and east to Sheridan Road. North on Sheridan Road between Glencoe and Highland Park, A. C. Frost developed an amusement park adjacent to both a stop on the Chicago and North Western Railway and the Chicago, North Shore, and Milwaukee Railway. Opened in 1904, Ravinia Park (N7) has offered outdoor music and amusements for more than one hundred years. Residents of adjoining residential suburbs steered the park away from an open amusement area with beer garden and concerts to a semiprivate venue for classical music. In particular, residents wanted to keep the venue unattractive to the thousands of soldiers stationed just to the north at Fort Sheridan.
Fort Sheridan (1887) (N8), off Sheridan Road at the northern end of Highland Park, was established at the behest of Chicagoland elites, unnerved by the labor and social unrest of the 1870s and 1880s (especially the 1886 Haymarket bombing). They successfully lobbied the U.S. government for the establishment of a military base between Highland Park and Lake Forest on bluffs high above Lake Michigan. Fort Sheridan served as a military post until 1993. Today the military base has been turned over to private development, with some acreage left in the hands of the Lake County Forest Preserve District. Holabird & Roche designed the many yellow-brick buildings placed on a landscape design by Ossian Simonds. Among the most striking buildings are the former infantry barracks and watchtower.
Continue north on Sheridan Road into Lake Forest. For many years, Lake Forest was an uneasy northern neighbor to Fort Sheridan (until the transient military officers, enlisted men, and families were replaced by affluent residents who could afford the luxury houses, townhomes, and condominiums which emerged from the shuttered military base). Lake Forest was an early North Shore suburb, developed around a rail stop and Lake Forest College in the 1850s. Market Square (1916) (N9), one of the oldest planned shopping centers in the United States, was built adjacent to the train station along Green Bay Road. While public squares are familiar across much of the country, rail stations centered most settlements founded in Chicago. Market Square was purpose-built next to the train station long after the establishment of the town, as much for shoppers in automobiles as railroad commuters.
The juxtaposition of insular elite suburbs with communities built around more open recreational uses continues to the north of Lake Forest, as we return to Sheridan Road and go northward. Lake Bluff was initially developed as a site for Methodist summer camp meetings. Frances Willard and other members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union journeyed here for conventions and conferences until the facility was shuttered in 1898. North from Lake Bluff, nineteenth-century settlement turned from commuter and recreational uses to commerce and industry.
Waukegan’s settlement predates the railroad. In fact, its harbor was used by the French and then designated as a port of entry by the federal government in 1846. By the 1880s, factories manufacturing goods that ranged from envelopes to sausage jammed the area between the harbor and the railroad. Today, few of the factories remain, and the lowlands near the harbor are being redeveloped for recreational uses. Just to the north of downtown Waukegan, Louise de Koven Bowen donated a seventy-two-acre site between Sheridan Road and Lake Michigan for the Joseph T. Bowen Country Club, a summer camp for boys from the Hull House neighborhood. The house, built in 1843, had for many years served as the summer home of John C. Haines and family. The camp included what is now the Haines House (N10), and brought young men from the Near West Side to this Far North site well into the twentieth century. Today the property is operated by the Waukegan Historical Society.
Continuing north on Sheridan Road from Waukegan, we come to Zion. Zion was the brainchild of John Alexander Dowie, a self-proclaimed faith healer from Scotland, who purchased land to found a town for members of his Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in 1899. Dowie intended for members of his church to work at factories which were planned for the town. Dowie established a grand plan for Zion, including wide boulevards and ample space for a large church, hotel, and religious encampments. Dowie built the Shiloh House (N11) as his residence (now the Zion Historical Society, west of Sheridan on Shiloh Boulevard).
A final stop turns the tour westward along Rosecrans Road and then south on U.S. 45 to just beyond Belvidere Road (SR 120) in Grayslake. There the Prairie Crossing development includes both a historic one-room schoolhouse and a barn. The Prairie Crossing Charter School (N12) functioned as the Wright School between 1857 and 1957. Today it serves as part of the new community’s magnet school. Farmers dominated this landscape just a few miles west of Lake Michigan and its North Shore suburbs.
Across the north, then, we have seen sites related to farming, commuters, institutions, industry, and recreation. While the elite commuter suburbs dominated, they negotiated with competing (and often neighboring) uses for much of their histories. Temperance and various leisure-time activities were issues which divided residents, evidencing fissures along class, ethnic, and religious lines.