Historic Innovations:
Archival Holdings in Special Collections,
Lake Forest College Library
The Chicago Area Archivists group is observing American Archives Month, October 2009, with an Archives Fair on Saturday, October 24, 2009 at the Chicago Pulbic Library (Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago. Lake Forest College's Archives and Special Collections will be among the exhibitors for the Fair, being jointly sponsored by the Chicago Metro History Education Center. This year's Metro History Fair theme is "Chicago and Innovations in History: Impact and Change." Provided below are brief discussions of some Lake Forest College Archival Special Collections that relate to this theme. Material in these collections could be employed for Fair projects and for other research undertakings, for virtual exhibits, essays, etc. dealing with impact and change in many Chicago-related fields.
Arranged roughly in chronological order:
Railroad (Technology, Business) History:
Chicago, the Transcontinental Railroads, and the Emergence of High-Speed “Through” Trains, 1890s-1960s
Lake Forest College Library’s Special Collections since the 1970s have had significant holdings relating to Chicago’s rail empire, including coverage of the railfan phenomenon: books, periodicals, timetables, brochures, maps, and photographs, much from Elliott Donnelley and from author Arthur D. Dubin. In addition to U.S. railroads, there is solid coverage of world railways. Beyond technology and business history, there is coverage of African-Americans and women in railroading, railroads in art, railroad architecture, interior design, etc. Special Collections also serves as the archive for the Center for Railroad Photography and Art (Madison, WI), and about five hundred of this collection's photographs appear on the Center's web portal: http://www.railroadheritage.org. For more information, please see the iShare catalog and http://library.lakeforest.edu/archives/donnelleyrailroad.html.
Landscape Design History:
Lake Forest’s 1857 Curvilinear Street Town Plan by Almerin Hotchkiss (Several Firsts: Non-commercial Town Center, De Facto “Gated” and "No Growth")
The trustees of the 1856-founded Lake Forest Association, Chicago, hired that year east coast trained cemetery designer Almerin Hotchkiss (1816-1903) to lay out their new railroad suburb thirty miles north of Chicago on high bluffs over Lake Michigan and across deep ravines. Bounded by the new railroad tracks west, the lake east, and ravines north and south, and with streets converging on the train station, this was a de facto gated community of over 1,200 acres, as well. The innovative curvilinear streets around the educational town center (businesses were banished to west of the tracks) created a new whole town three times the size of Llewellyn Park, East Orange NJ, an 1853 development with a curvilinear street plan on a ride overlooking New York city. Hotchkiss’s 1857 plan also preceded F.L. Olmsted’s 1869 Riverside, IL by a dozen years. For more information see http://www.tclf.org/pioneers/profiles/hotchkiss/index.htm and also the iShare catalog; the 1857 Lake Forest plan is also discussed in the documented Thirty Miles North: A History of Lake Forest College, Its Town, and Its City of Chicago by Franz Schulze, Rosemary Cowler and Arthur H. Miller (Lake Forest: 2000) while Hotchkiss’s role is first discussed in print in Michael Ebner’s also documented Creating Chicago’s North Shore (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1988).
Planning History:
Edward H. Bennett and City Planning in Chicago and U.S. “Beyond Burnham”
In November 2008 Marcia O. and Edward H. Bennett III donated a family archive documenting in photos and letters Edward H. Bennett’s elsewhere overshadowed role in the 1909 Burnham and Bennett Plan of Chicago. This collection includes largely personal material retained by Edward H. Bennett (1874-1954) of Lake Forest when he donated his mostly professional papers to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1953. Some of the letters very likely seemed too personal to donate just forty-four years after the Plan was published, and the photos were personal candids by Bennett of his friends working in the Plan studio, on the 18th floor of the Railway Exchange Building, Chicago. For more on this collection still being organized but available to researchers, see http://www.lib.lfc.edu/archives/edwardbennett.html
Also, the Lake Forest College Press has just published Beyond Burnham: An Illustrated History of Planning for the Chicago Region by Joseph P. Schweiterman and Alan P. Mammoser, including never-before-seen illustrations from the Marcia O. and Edward H. Bennett III donation.
Architectural History:
Market Square (1916, Architect Howard Van Doren Shaw), “First…Shopping Center”
Lake Forest’s 1916-completed Market Square, just west of the original rail line of 1855, in 1940 was declared “the first integrated and artfully designed shopping center in this country….” By 1997 architectural historian Richard Longstreth concluded that it was the first town center planned around motor vehicles and the first City Beautiful town center to be commercially driven. A 1999 donation by Griffith Grant and Lackie, Realtors, Inc. included the 1912-30 papers of the 1912-founded Lake Forest Improvement Trust, the developers and owners (to 1984) of the project, along with many of the architectural plans, including two earlier versions in 1912 and 1914. The 1915 final plans (the only surviving duplicates?) for Market Square were donated by Susan Dart (McCutcheon) after she published her book Market Square that year. There is other material (photos, plans, etc.) on architect Shaw, many of his residential and other projects, his Lake Forest home Ragdale, and his several generations of his family, including his sculptor daughter Sylvia Shaw Judson (1897-1978). A lengthy finding aid to the over 2,000 leaves and thirty plans is available on request. See also http://www.historicmarketsquare.com/page2.html
Publishing History:
New York Daily News, First U.S. Tabloid Newspaper, 1919
Joseph Medill Patterson (1879-1946) was the grandson of both Chicago Tribune publisher Joseph Medill and the Reverend Robert W. Patterson, a key founder of Lake Forest and its educational institution in the 1850s (also first Lake Forest University president, 1875-78). Patterson who attended Groton and Yale, was a reform era maverick among his cohort of Chicagoans born with silver spoons in their mouths. Critic H.L. Mencken (1917) counted him among the leaders of he Chicago Literary Renaissance for his reform writing, mostly after his early 1900s embrace of Socialism and while he was living on a farm just west of Lake Forest. By 1910 he was sharing the publisher role for the family Chicago Tribune with his cousin, Robert R. McCormick. But by 1919, after reporting on the war in Europe before 1917 and achieving the rank of Captain after the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, he launched for the Tribune Company the first U.S. tabloid in New York in 1919. For much of the 20th C. this was the largest circulating daily paper in the country. It too was a useful “pulpit” for this earnest grandson of a Chicago preacher. Patterson created a new kind of paper for the regular person, not just the businessman or Society matron, with comics, lurid photos transmitted electronically, features, promotions, etc.: all aimed at gaining a wide circulation. He was one of the 20th C.’s earliest media innovators, taking advantage of technology and modern marketing. Patterson’s son, James, donated this archive in the 1980s, one of a very few major press archives open to full public access, and a finding aid to this collection will be found at: http://www.lib.lfc.edu/special/patterson.pdf
Education History:
Effective Schools Process (SM) and the 1970s "discovery" that all children can learn
In a landmark Educational Leadership article in 1979 the late African-American scholar Ronald R. Edmonds cited an already notable body of evidence that all children can learn, if we master the methodology of the effective schools movement and have the will to implement universal quality schools. In the decades that followed this powerful message was acted upon and its success reported, leading to the innovative advancement ideas behind school reform in Chicago and then nationally in the ambitious but under-funded No Child Left Behind Act. The process involves drawing on modern decentralized management techniques also employed since the 1960s in business, libraries, churches, etc. This process of change in schools has been codified, tested in practical settings, and widely adopted: the basis of the Effective Schools Process (SM). The archives of the National Center for Effective Schools Research and Development and related research became available at Special Collections in 2009. See http://library.lakeforest.edu/archives/EffectiveSchoolsProcess.html
Arthur H. Miller, Archivist and Librarian for Special Collections
amiller@lakeforest.edu 847-735-5064 August 28, 2009