"Art Class" Featuring Arthur Miller with Special Guest Carol Summerfield Executive Director Historical Center Lake Forest Lake Bluff
The Lake Forest Podcast
English - August 01, 2021 20:40 - 41 minutes - 37.6 MB - ★★★★★ - 23 ratingsSociety & Culture Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Arthur Miller during his "Art Class" had Carol Summerfield the Executive Director of the Lake Forest Lake Bluff History Center drop by and discuss: Looking into the history of why folks have moved into the community since the 1830s.
Show Notes:
The early agricultural phase of settlers on the land mostly WEST of Green Bay Rd. Was people coming from Ireland to work on the Illinois and Michigan Canal, that connected Chicago to the Illinois River southwest, leading down the the Mississippi, St. Louis, and New Orleans. Their families stayed on their land and then after the project failed in an 1837 Panic, they lived by farming with wood lots east of Green Bay Rd.
The Chicago group of wealthy entrepreneurs and their families, the Presbyterian Yankees, Scots, and Scots-Irish, came in the late 1850s after the 1854 Cholera epidemic killed 1,500 in the city, but also over anti-slavery politics, so their blue laws did not force pro-anti slavery Germans to join the Pro-slaver Irish, who feared new cheap labor, over Sunday and alcohol rules. (Source: “Bygone Days in Chicago” 1910).
The Chicago Fire, 1871, brought new residents by 1875, over the lawlessness in the wake of the fire (Arpee) and then the 1877 Railroad Strike/riots.
More labor unrest up to 1886 and the culminating Haymarket affair , leading to Ft. Sheridan, 1887, and the thepullman Strike 1894 was the last straw for the McCormicks and others. Then, J. Ogden Armour after a packers strike 1904, he bought his first land that December and his house built by 1908.
Also, the stockyards odors brought folks out by the 1890s seasonally mid-April to mid November when windows might be opened. Winters in Lake Shore Drive apts where lake breezes held off the stench from the yards, worse by Friday’s and Saturday’s (cleaning on Sundays).
By the late 1930s to 1970s, middle class coming out for schools, etc. then after Reagan economics after high taxes, new money took over old houses, restored them. Up to 2008, then quiet for a decade while city life boomed, until the pandemic and looting and the exodus to the suburbs again.
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