More ABCs of Evanston

More ABCs of Evanston (2014) is the most recent addition to the Lighthouse Series of Evanston History. With 26 new stories, it covers Evanston's past from A to Z, from our only AIRPORT, Eadie Field in the 1950s, to the ZIMMERMANS, who lived in a residential subdivision smack dab in the middle of the Northwestern University campus for more than 60 years. 

Read More ABCs and discover:

• what Nobel Prize winner penned a #1 pop song.

• how three local women created radio's first soap opera.

• when drinking city water was like drinking an epidemic.

Its stories go back to 1787 with the Ordinance of the Northwest Territory and reach into the 1990s with the city's longest serving mayor. Then again the story of Lemoi Hardware itself spans more than 100 years. So do the two stories about building the sanitary canal along Evanston's west side. 

More ABCs is full of good stories, from Evanston's early telephones and kitchen co-operatives to high-end sports cars and quonset huts.

For more information about More ABCs — and its sister books, The Streets of Evanston (2009) and ABCs of Evanston (2011) — and about where to buy all three books, please see PurpleLinePress.com.

Evanston, Wisconsin?

Today's states carved

from the Northwest Territory 

See arrow marking the original northern 

border for Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.

Sounds funny, doesn't it — Evanston, Wisconsin? But that's how it almost was.

Illinois was carved out of the Northwest Territory whose Ordinance was drawn up in 1787, after the British and French let go of their interests and after several original U.S. states surrendered their claims to the land. It took another 20 years for Native Americans to give up all their land rights here and another 70 years before the whole Territory was divided into states — Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and a portion of Minnesota.

Not one of these states follows the boundaries set out in the Territory’s earliest maps, like the 1814 version shown at left. These maps show the Great Lakes and the Ohio, Wabash and Mississippi Rivers serving as natural east, west and south boundaries separating states, but the northern boundary for Illinois, Indiana and Ohio had no such natural border. It was arbitrarily placed just south of Lake Michigan, running in a straight east-west line across the three states. map at right. 

Through the years that dotted line on a map caused much vexation among the people who lived there and it was repeatedly drawn and redrawn.

Ohio began the border changes before becoming a state in 1803. It reached north to take in the port of Toledo on Lake Erie. Michigan lawmakers objected and fought for more than 30 years to take back the Toledo strip. That conflict was not resolved until 1837 when Michigan became a state and was allowed to reach across the Straits of Mackinac to adopt what is now Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Even without boundary changes, Michigan and Ohio would have had hundreds of miles of land along the Great Lakes, but Indiana and Illinois would have been left high and dry. Thus, when Indiana sought statehood in 1816, it took a page from Ohio’s book and extended its border northward, going even farther than Ohio to take in land along Lake Michigan.

Illinois did the same, only more so. Its lawmakers redrew the boundary more than 50 miles beyond the tip of the lake to gain a Lake Michigan port and significant shoreline. Also, by counting residents in that northern strip, Illinois met the population requirements for statehood. Nathaniel Pope, territorial delegate from Illinois, persuaded the U.S. Congress to agree to Illinois new boundary. In 1818 Illinois became the 21^st state, its northern boundary at 42°30” (42 degrees and 30 minutes north latitude), taking in an extra 8,000 square miles plus a crucial link to the Great Lakes.

The original federal ordinance had specified that the Territory be carved into only five states and, for the first time in U.S. history, required that these states prohibit slavery. However, when Wisconsin became the Territory’s fifth state in 1848, the northwest tip of the Northwest Territory was left unclaimed. Minnesota absorbed it on becoming a state in 1858. That the Territory became six states was a boon to northern abolitionists, happy to count one more anti-slave state in their ongoing numbers battle with the slave-holding South.

And that’s how Evanston became part of the north shore of the free state of Illinois. Evanston, Wisconsin? Don’t even go there. 

Copyright © 2013 Purple Line Press. All rights reserved.

The ABCs of EVANSTON

The ABCs of Evanston (2011) is the second book in the Lighthouse Series on Evanston History, following The Streets of Evanston (2009).

In The ABCs, our city’s rich history unfolds in story after story — from A to Z, from the first automobile race in the country to the Dowie Zionists rioting in Fountain Square.

Read The ABCs of Evanston and discover:
— what world-famous toy was invented here,
— why Gen. Dawes ran three hotels and
— the reason a local folk artist corresponded                        with U.S. presidents.

The ABCs is comprised of 26 stories about Evanston 
that range from the 1860s to the 1960s, from business 
to circuses, from sports to literature. For more information, 
see PurpleLinePress.com.

QUESTION #1/ How did Evanston get its name?

Asking the Evanston history maven —
Evanston could have easily been named Luntville or Simpson, both front-runners among the names considered for the new village in 1854. Other favorites were Orrington, University Place, Lakewood, Evansville and Evanshire.

The village fathers, i.e. the trustees of Northwestern University, wrestled with the matter and finally settled on a name in February 1854. When they submitted a plat to the Cook County recorder in July 1854, it was titled the Plan of Evanston and recorded July 27.

 PLAN OF EVANSTON
 recorded by Cook County in July 1854

Evans, Evansville or Evanshire would have honored NU co-founder and trustee president John Evans. He was a physician, a Methodist minister and the man so strong for the University he made the down payment and gave his personal guarantee for NU’s first purchase of property here — a 379-acre farm. Luntville or Orrington would have saluted grain merchant Orrington Lunt, the trustee and co-founder who literally found this lakeside campus site.

However, Lunt refused the honor and pushed to name it after John Evans, who also happened to be his brother-in-law. Evans himself wanted the village named Simpson, after Methodist leader Rev. Matthew Simpson. But most of the trustees were stalled between variations of Evans and Lunt.

The story goes that Margaret Gray Evans — John Evans’ wife and sister of Orrington Lunt’s wife —broke the bottleneck. She proposed naming the village after both Evans and Lunt, giving a nod to OrringTON Lunt by adding a final syllable to the name Evans. Thus, the village became EvansTON.

In 1855 the post office name was changed from Ridgeville to Evanston.  It took until 1857 for the Illinois legislature to change the name of Ridgeville Township to Evanston as well.

Thank you, Bob LeBailly, for submitting this first question to the Evanston History Maven. Aren’t you glad you’re an Evanstonian and not a Luntviller, Luntvillian, Simpsonian or Simpsonite?

Copyright © 2011 Purple Line Press. All rights reserved.

DAWES HOUSE/ home of a true renaissance man

 DAWES HOUSE

 sparkling after a 20.2-inch snowfall Feb 1-2, 1911

Once the home of Vice President Charles G. Dawes (1865-1951), the lakefront mansion at 225 Greenwood has been home to the Evans-ton History Center since 1960.

Although Dawes and his wife lived out their lives in this house, Dawes gave it to Northwestern University in 1942. He transferred the deed with the understanding that the Evanston Historical Society would have a permanent home there. The Evanston History Society moved in in 1960, and in 2009 NU turned ownership of the house over to the Society, renamed the Evanston History Center in 2007.

Charles Dawes belonged to the Evanston Historical Society but, more importantly, he belongs to history.

It was from the east terrace of this house during a pouring rain in 1924 that Dawes appeared before some 3,000 friends and neighbors to accept the Republican nomination for vice president. The Coolidge-Dawes ticket won easily although Dawes and Pres. Coolidge did not hit it off.

Dawes had been an Army general during World War I and received the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize for the Dawes Plan for post-war Europe. He was a banker and businessman, a musician and philanthropist.

Perhaps he came by some of this over-achieving naturally. His father was appointed a brevet brigadier-general in the Civil War and served as a U.S. congressman from Ohio. His paternal great-great-grandfather was William Dawes, who rode with Paul Revere in 1775 but never made it into The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, perhaps because the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow found Dawes simply didn’t fit his rhyme scheme. Dawes’ maternal great-great-grandfather, 
Manasseh Cutler, was a revolutionary war officer, who helped draw up the Northwest Ordinance. He established the Territory’s first permanent settlement in Marietta, Ohio.

Gen. Dawes grew up in Marietta and went to college there. He was graduated from law school in Cincinnati but then left Ohio to launch his career in Lincoln, Nebraska. His business acumen quickly expanded his role from lawyer to banker to owner of a meat-packing company and a downtown city block. In 1894 he moved to Evanston where he and his brothers launched the Northwestern Gas Light & Coke Company. Dawes later served as comptroller of the currency under Pres. Mckinley, the first budget director under Pres. Harding, vice president under Pres. Coolidge and ambassador under Pres. Hoover.

He lived in Evanston for 57 years and in his lakefront home for 42. He was a wealthy man, but he did not live in the grand fashion expected of him as the new Ambassador to the Court of St. James in 1928. In England, he added a few wrinkles to America’s image when he refused to follow court protocol of wearing knee breeches. Then he and his wife, Caro Blymer Dawes (1865-1957), stunned the British by serving peanut butter sandwiches at an embassy reception. His resignation came as another shocker with Dawes leaving after only two and a half years because, he said, he’d had his fill of fancy dinners.

Charles Dawes was not into fancy. He was a down-to-earth man from the Midwest. He liked to go fishing. He was honorary president of the Evanston Boy Scout Council. As boys he and his brothers all learned to knit. He smoked an upsidedown pipe. In fact, comedian Will Rogers said he figured Dawes won the Nobel Prize for managing to smoke his pipe upside down without setting his clothes on fire. Dawes also liked to noodle around at the piano. One of the tunes he composed in 1911 was given lyrics in the 1950s and became a popular song. When a beat was added, it even soared to the top of the pop charts in 1958 as It's All in the Game.

Gen. Dawes' piano is still a prized feature of Dawes House. A local musician keeps it in tune by coming to play it periodically; he is composing a piece called Dawes Suite. You can see this piano on a tour of Dawes House. For the tour schedule, check the Center’s website — EvanstonHistoryCenter.org.

You will find much of the house still looks as it did when Dawes and his family lived there. It is clear that while Gen. Dawes may have been unpretentious, his house was not. It was, in fact, a mansion — with 28 rooms, lakefront views and a musicians’ balcony overlooking the dining room. 

When Dawes gave his house to the historical society, he wrote a wry note to a friend that the first floor would be kept in tact, to “represent a style of living which is fast passing … Our home is one of the last in Evanston which is filled with the extravagant and unnecessary trappings with which, in their vanity, the well-to-do of this generation have often surrounded themselves.  Possibly its preservation is desired as a type of the sins from which, under the New Deal, future generations will be saved.”

For more about Evanston, see PurpleLinePress.com.

Copyright © 2011 Purple Line Press. All rights reserved.

LOVE those old, manual typewriters —

A VINTAGE UNDERWOOD TYPEWRITER
like the one I learned to type on in the 1950s

Back in the 1950s, my mom was secretary of her bowling league. Every week she typed out individual averages and team standings for the league. As soon as she dragged this monster Underwood out of the closet and set it on the card table to update her stats, my sister and I begged to get our hands on it — that noisy, beautiful machine.No dice. She wouldn't let us just play with it. Oh, no. If we wanted to use it, she insisted we had to use it correctly, which meant learning how to touch-type. So we did, thanks to my mom's instruction.

Because we both played the piano, my mom used a technique familiar to us. She covered the typewriter keys with tape, marking all the left hand keys with pink, the right hand in blue. She didn't write the letter on the key but the finger that should be used to strike the key, much like reading piano music. Thus the "B" key tape was pink-2, the "L" key tape was blue-4 and so on.We each learned in about two days. It was a snap, partly because her teaching method worked but mostly because we had great incentive to get our hands on that big old piece of the past. Besides, it was way more fun than the piano, and it played no sour notes. 

Then she made a picture of the keyboard lay-out, showing the letter on each key, and laid that chart next to the typewriter. Thus we learned to type looking at the picture of the keyboard lay-out, not at the typewriter keys themselves, and using the correct fingers. It took some strength to press those manual keys — pre-computers, pre-electric typewriters — but we had the satisfaction of hearing the keys click and watching them slap against the paper.

Later I taught my three kids to type the same way and long before the schools taught keyboard, so when they tried their hand at computers, they were ready.

The first two newspapers I worked at — the Dearborn Guide and the Elizabeth Daily Journal — used sturdy typewriters like these. Their newsrooms thrummed with pounding keys, the ding of the return shift and ringing telephones mixed with voices of reporters on the phone and editors shouting across the room. I loved it.

Of course, back then newspapers were still being printed on Linotype machines, equipment that dated back to 1886. Invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler (1854-99), the Linotype (Get it? line-of-type) remained a newspaper fixture until the 1970s.

The Linotype beat out the Paige compositor, an 18,000-piece machine backed by the great American novelist Mark Twain and later by Evanston businessman and inventor, T. K. Webster. In 1893 Webster's firm, the Webster Manufacturing Company of Chicago, signed a multi-million dollar contract to produce the complicated Paige typesetters, but the whole project fizzled out as the Paige machines had come late to the dance — arriving in the depth of the 1893 recession and, worse yet, quickly developing a reputation for huge costs and unreliability. Meanwhile, by 1893 the Linotype already dominated the publishing world and was considered both reliable and relatively inexpensive. Twain and Webster barely escaped financial ruin, thanks to the confounded Paige compositor that Twain once called "a cunning devil."

The typewriter itself came into common use in the 1870s and for a long time it wasn't the machine that was called the typewriter, but the person typing. A Milwaukee man invented the typewriter. Christopher Latham Sholes (1819-90) created it in 1867, spent several years perfecting it and then convinced E. Remington & Sons of New York to manufacture it for sale in 1873.

And, yes, Remington was the arms maker. With the Civil War recently ended, the firm probably needed a new product to put its name on.

Copyright © 2011 Purple Line Press. All rights reserved.