Living with History

We had the opportunity to visit with John White in Elburn last week. Mr. White kindly took us on a tour of his 1840's log house, filled with antique furniture, pottery and other bits of everyday life.

The log house is not original to the property -- he moved it like a huge stack of Lincoln Logs from Wisconsin -- but it was originally built more than 150 years ago.

Not all of it could be salvaged.Parts tha were too rotted were rebuilt or worked around. For instance, the two-story walls are now more like one and a half stories and the flooring had to be laid completely new.

But what a floor! The planks are random widths, from narrow to almost two feet wide. White ripped the boards himself from a White Pine that grew near his farm and was toppled during the Plainfield tornado in 1990. He figures the tree was a seedling about the same time that the log house was being built originally.

Some people like to read history and others like to visit historical sites, but John White went out to rescue history, dragged it home and spent years rebuilding it. Many thanks to Mr. White for a truly special Saturday morning!

For more details of Mr. White's log house, see The Daily Herald article.

Six Degrees of Girl Scouting

March 12, 2012 was the 100th birthday of the Girl Scouts. In Naperville, girls were part of the DuPage County Council until 2006 when it merged with adjoining councils to become Prairie Winds. In 2008 a major reorganization created Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana, the largest council in the United States, serving 94,000 girls.

But here’s another local connection: The Daisy Girl Scout is named after Juliette Gordon Low, nicknamed “Daisy.” While living in England, Daisy became interested in the Boy Scout and Girl Guide movement there and brought the concept back to the States.

Daisy’s mother Nelly raised her family in Savannah, Georgia but she was born in Chicago. In 1912 Nelly wrote a book called “John Kinzie, The ‘Father of Chicago,’ a Sketch,” which was about her grandfather. In fact, Nelly felt so connected to Chicago that after seeing a 1916 Chicago Daily News article about early settlers, she wrote them to point out:  “I notice that my name is conspicuously absent. This is more surprising, as I am the oldest person now living who was born in Chicago...therefore, older than Chicago itself.”

Nelly’s father, John Harris Kinzie, arrived in Chicago as a six-month-old baby in 1804. His younger sister, Ellen, has been called the first child of European descent to be born in the yet-to-be incorporated Chicago.

Daisy’s grandmother and namesake was Juliette Augusta Magill. She married John Harris Kinzie and moved with him to Chicago in 1834. Juliette Kinzie wrote a book called “Wau-Bun, the Early Days in the Northwest” about her own experiences in early Chicago as well as those of her mother– and father-in-law.

Her mother-in-law was kidnapped as a child and raised by Native Americans. As an adult she married John Kinzie (John Harris Kinzie's father) who was a British sympathizer, an Indian agent and a spy, which is most likely how he and his family avoided being killed during the Fort Dearborn Massacre. It may also explain why he murdered one of his Chicago neighbors. Kinzie owned a lot of property in the fledgling settlement, including an inn during the time Joseph Naper and his group arrived on the schooner Telegraph in 1831.

John Kinzie’s step-daughter, Elizabeth, was among the many who took refuge in Fort Dearborn during the Black Hawk War in 1832, the summer after the Telegraph arrived. Naper Settlement families also fled to the fort. Unfortunately, over-crowding and illness made the fort almost as dangerous. Elizabeth died there and the Naper families built their own fort and moved back to their settlement.

That's a lot of local history to think about the next time you bite into a Thin Mint from your local Girl Scout!

Stretching Our Mind Muscles

"Networking" is huge today in the business world and we're all hustling to keep our families fed.

But "talking shop" gets old quickly and we start to sound one-dimensional.

Knowing a few quirky facts about our state's history makes for a richer conversation. Will knowing history make us better business people? Perhaps not. But it will make us better people in general.

I am now using paper.li to curate and share some of the fascinating articles I've been reading. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I do. You can subscribe to my weekly "newspaper"
Brief History - Illinois at paper.li or check in from here.

This week are some interesting stories about Al Capone, Japanese internment camps, War of 1812 batttles in Illinois, an historic black orphanage in Elgin, and Naperville street names. "Extra! Extra! Read all about it" at Brief History - Illinois!

Naming Naperville Streets

Recently Roy Brossman, a lifelong resident of Naperville and Wheatland Township farmer, passed away. Knowing someone who lives in the Ashbury subdivision on Brossman Street sparked some speculation into other local street names.

Lyman Butterfield

Lyman Butterfield was one of the settlers who threw in his lot with Joseph Naper and came west on the schooner Telegraph in 1831.

He was known as a “fearless character” who was “brave to foolhardy” and “particularly skillful with a rifle.”

Lyman named one of his sons Andrew Jackson Butterfield after “Old Hickory,” the President very popular with Illinois settlers.

Butterfield didn’t stay in Naperville but moved early on to found Milton Township in the present-day Wheaton/Glen Ellyn area.

Bailey Hobson

Bailey Hobson has lent his name to more than one street. He arrived in the area with his wife and five children in the spring of 1831, a few months before the Naper group arrived.

Hobson settled along the DuPage River, but his homestead has always been just outside of the official city borders. Only recently has that bit of land been included in the town proper, making Hobson the actual “first settler of Naperville.”

Hobson built a grist mill for farmers in the area to use as the next closest mill was in Peoria county.

Mark Beaubien

Mark Beaubien reportedly was a man with a huge personality so it’s no surprise that his legacy is spread over a wide geographical range. Beaubien made his mark in Chicago, Lisle and Naperville, too. The Beaubien family was a big one — Mark himself had sixteen children — and older brother Jean Baptiste helped shape Chicago.

Mark kept an inn called the Eagle (later Sauganash) and may have hosted the Telegraph’s travelers.

A born entertainer, Mark “played the fiddle like ze dibble,” as he says in his own words. He performed a rousing last hornpipe at an Old Chicago Settlers Meeting at the age of eighty. His fiddle is on display at the Chicago History Museum.

Later, he moved out to DuPage County and was one of the investors of the Plank Road. His inn, from which he collected tolls , has been moved out to the Lisle Depot Museum. His family cemetery, can still be seen along Ogden Road near the subdivision that bears his name.

For more tidbits of history, see Kate's new weekly "newspaper" at K8's Brief History.

Embracing Today's Technology for Yesterday's Sake

You may have wondered where Brief History went to over the holidays. It certainly wouldn't be the first time an emailed newsletter or blog has suddenly close up shop. But Brief History intends to continue to bring little bits of history to people just as it has since the fall of 2009.

To do that, we're experimenting with some new technology; specifically, paper.li, an online "newspaper" generator. The "newspaper" is currently called Brief History - Illinois with the idea that folks searching for Illinois history will find it easily.

Paper.li advertises that it helps people curate "a personalized newspaper built from articles, blog posts, videos and photos." Most of the content is gathered automatically from Twitter or other online sources that the "publisher" follows. Brief History - Illinois derives it's content from Tweets posted by organizations or individuals that K8sBriefHistory follows. This is not a personal Twitter account, but strictly a way to follow organizations that are dedicated to preserving and sharing history. Paper.li publishers can also manually edit the paper to weed out any unrelated content to keep the information offered to you as useful and interesting as possible.

The next step is to get more local historical societies to post their content online so it can be found and curated! It has been a big stumbling block since Brief History was started that it's so hard to get news about wonderful local events before they happen so we can tell people about them. But we'll continue to do our best to share that information with you.

So take a look at Brief History - Illinois at this link: http://paper.li/K8sBriefHistory/1326909766. Since this is a new format, we'd love to know whether it works for you or not. Please feel free to forward your comments to kate@gnuventures.net. Thanks so much!