A Last Look at Naperville in 1913

In closing out the 100th anniversary year of the Naperville Chamber of Commerce, let’s have one final review of our counterparts from one hundred years ago.

President Woodrow Wilson took office that year, officiating over the establishment of the Federal Reserve.

1913 also saw the inauguration of Income Tax, although the rate was only 1% after your first $4,000. And since the average annual income was $800, Income Tax didn't affect a lot of folks.

The average automobile cost $600, which seems cheap until you figure that took most of the average family’s annual income.

Only a little more than half of school-aged children actually attended school. But we suspect the things they learned at home were more useful to their adult lives than how to win at video games.

Charlie Chaplin was just beginning his movie career in 1913 and popular tunes included “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”

Closer to home, the DuPage County Farm Bureau was formed. Now there’s barely a farm to be found in DuPage.

In 1913, Illinois became the first state east of the Mississippi to allow women to vote in national elections. Today women not only vote, they are elected to serve.

1913 has been called by some “the long summer,” a pleasant moment before World War I progressed into the Great Depression and World War II.

What will people say about 2013 a hundred years from now? Will they remember it as a pleasant time or a difficult time?

Not that it matters much. This is the time we have to work with, so the only choice is to make the most of it!

Kiekhofer Hall, built in 1913 to serve as the Evangelical Theological Seminary, is now part of the North Central College campus.

Not Always Sunny in 1913 Naperville

Looking back at 1913 Naperville calls up sentimental images of a possibly better time, but there was also a downside. as seen in the following quotes from contemporary city council minutes.

For instance, horses were still a primary— and messy— mode of transportation:

“Gentlemen: -- The rapid accumulation of debris on the brick pavement, especially in the business district in front of the stores where hitching posts and rings are placed, makes it advisable for this department to recommend that an employee of the street department be assigned to patrol the down town streets with a wheeled carrier to remove at least twice daily the accumulations from the streets.”

But the new-fangled automobile also had its problems:

“Whereas, it has been reported to the Council that Automobiles left standing on the Streets of the City by owners while at church, places of business, etc., have been tampered with by cutting tires, taking away switch keys, changing gears etc.”

A new teen center is being planned today for downtown so kids have a place to hang out, but finding a place for them was also a issue in 1913:

“We the undersigned persons desire to enter complaint to you that the peace of our families is disturbed every Sunday afternoon by persons who congregate near to our dwellings to play base ball or witness the same. And who by their loud hallooing, quarreling and use of profanity, disturb the peace of the community.  These same persons also trample on our gardens and otherwise trespass on our property until such gatherings have become a nuisance and we petition your Honor to have this nuisance abated.”

And then there was the mess created when a large portion of the Naperville Lounge Factory collapsed during a storm in March of that year. 125 feet of the building was destroyed, but Peter Kroehler rebuilt and renamed the factory after himself.

Every decade has its pros and cons and we strive to improve ourselves. 1913 photos of the downtown area point out many improvements we’ve made such as better street surfaces, more trees and greenery, and no visible telephone poles!

Naperville Relates 2013 to 1913 and 1831

By 1913, Joseph Naper had long since taken up his eternal residence in the Naperville Cemetery. While his wife Almeda outlived him by more than two decades, she joined him by the 1880’s.

 

Joseph and Almeda raised seven children, but sadly, none of them survived until 1913.

The wife of their son Thomas, however, was still living in Naperville in 1913, along with two of Joseph’s grandsons.

Thomas and Julia were married only eight years and following his death, she remained a widow for the next 52 years, raising their two boys on her own.

Thomas’ sons were both grown men in 1913 and fixtures in the Naperville community. Charles served with the Naperville Hose Company, an early incarnation of the city fire department.

Caroline Martin Mitchell  was another fixture in town who bequeathed her mansion home and the surrounding land to the city. In 1913, she was still living at Pine Craig, as it was then known, with her husband Edward and her older sister Lizzie Martin.

Caroline and Lizzie, along with sister Kitty until her death, carried on the operations of their father’s business after he passed away, including the stone quarries where we now swim and paddleboat.

Dick Tracy, a familiar figure on the Riverwalk today, started appearing in comic strips in 1931, so he technically could have been a comic strip child in 1913. Naperville artist Dick Locher took over from Chester Gould, drawing Tracy from 1983-2011.

Locher wasn’t around in 1913 or 1831, but he was tapped to design a statue of founder Joseph Naper for the Naper Homestead park on Mill and Jefferson streets.

His design was then imagined in bronze by sculptor Jeff Adams of the Oregon, Illinois InBronze studio.

On August 9, the statue traveled via flatbed down Washington Street to Jefferson to be installed at the park.

The official dedication ceremony will be held on Friday, August 23 at 4pm. The public is invited to attend, so stop by before the Chamber Centennial Celebration at Naper Settlement and see the unveiling of this impressive sculpture.

That’s two great chances on Friday for you to be part of Naperville history!

Celebrate Naperville's Founding This Week

Happy Birthday, Naperville!

In 1831, Joseph Naper, along with his brother John, his sister Amy and their families and friends, settled down along the banks of the DuPage River to build a new community. While we can’t pinpoint the exact date, historians are fairly sure it was during the week of July 15 in 1831 that the wagons completed the three-day journey from Fort Dearborn.

You may want to stand in an actual northern Illinois prairie this week and imagine that you are one of Naper's settlers. Much of the original prairie in our area has been plowed up or built over, but there are still a few places that are either original or restored.

One of the best places to find original prairie is in very old graveyards. Yes, the settlers did dig into the prairie long ago for graves, but they didn't plow the land, so the grasses and wildflowers continued to grow in the natural way. Conservationists will often collect seeds from old graveyards to help create prairie restorations with native plants.

The Belmont Prairie in Downers Grove boasts some original prairie, but there are also some restored areas that are worth a trip. Both the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn and Fermi Lab  in Batavia have been working on prairie restorations in recent years.

Or visit the Joseph Naper Homestead site in Naperville and try to imagine what it looked like in 1831. Now a park, signage and landscaping give visitors an idea of where the original house and trading post stood. Down Mill Street, Naper would later build his mill, swelling the DuPage River into a mill pond that he could see from his log house.

If you get to visit a local prairie, use all your senses to put yourself in the place of the early Illinois settler. What can you smell and hear? How does it feel to walk through such tall grass? Are there bugs? Imagine yourself barefoot, for nearly everyone went barefoot in the summer to save on shoe leather, walking for three days in the July sun from Chicago.

Now imagine trying to explain hitting the highway in an air-conditioned SUV to Joe and the rest of his group! Our forefathers were certainly a hardy lot!

Moving Pictures: Going to a Show in 1913 Naperville

Continuing our look at what Naperville was like one hundred years ago, here is a page from the City Council meeting minutes from March 17, 1913.


Asa Frank Stoner applied in March “to operate a moving picture show.” Stoner was a prominent citizen and a member of the Euclid Lodge, the local Masons chapter. He served in World War I and was also a member of the American Legion.

The early 1900’s was the “wild west” of cinema, before big corporations monopolized the industry. Anyone who could scrape together a little cash could open a nickelodeon theater in an existing storefront.

They would rent films from a distributor, patch them up if they were a little worse for wear, and run them maybe thirty times a day.

Folks would pay a nickel to watch about a half hour’s worth of entertainment — twenty minutes’ worth if the operator sped up the projector to squeeze more showings into an evening.

Moving pictures were considered “not quite nice” at first, but by 1913 they were well accepted. Men could bring their wives and children along to a nickelodeon, unlike a saloon.

In 1913, the Keystone Cops and Tom Mix cowboy movies were popular. Dialogue titles were not yet common so the silent film stars mimed their roles completely.

The earliest moving pictures were presented as one act of a vaudeville show and many of those traditions continued in movie theaters. Live piano music accompanied the films and the show might include sing-a-longs to filmed “illustrated songs.”

Traveling moving picture shows offered the same film every night for a week before heading to the next town, but Chicago was the biggest movie-going city in the entire nation. No doubt there were plenty of new titles available to watch on a regular basis at Mr. Stoner’s moving picture show.