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