CENTURY'S DAWNING

The first two decades of the twentieth century opened as dramatically as the preceding de­cades had ended. The acceleration of change was quite visible in 1905 Bensenville where an eight-mile-per-hour speed limit for automo­biles was posted. Not quite so obvious, but just as much a sign of modern times, was Philip Lambert's replacing his team of plow horses with his first tractor in 1918 on the site of today's College of DuPage.

Not until the "Roaring Twenties" would motorized vehicles came to dominate the scene. In the meantime, the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin would literally electrify much of the county. Not only did this company in 1901 bring the last of the rail lines through the middle of DuPage, where it branched at the Wheaton switching yards, but its power station, south of Batavia, also served to provide electricity to towns served by the trains.

Among the communities virtually created by the CA&E were the twin developments of Ardmore and Villa Park, Just as Louis Meyer had donated land for the right-of-way to the Chicago & Great Western in 1886, so he did again when the CA&E came across his proper­ty at the St Charles and Ardmore roads inter­section; and so did neighbor, Florence Canfield

  In 1908 Chicago-based realtors, Bullard and Pottinger, purchased a part of the Canfield property and subdivided it into 203 lots. The name of Villa Park may have originated with its wealthiest resident, Charles C. Heisen, who owned an estate in Florida with the same name. It was named after the fashionable Philadelphia suburb. Free excursion trains were run on Sunday afternoons for prospective buyers.

The two subdivisions, in order to obtain tax revenues for public improvements, united in 1914, taking Ardmore as the name. By 1917 with the population east of Summit being of greater number, the name was changed to Villa Park. It was also in that part of the community that in 1917 the Ovaltine plant became opera­tional. This company's malt extract had been widely distributed to allied troops, including those in German prison camps, during World War I.

The CA&E also served as a further stimulus to established villages. Glen Ellyn had already undergone its first expansion before the turn of the century under the leadership of Thomas E. Hill. He was a former mayor of Aurora and author of Hill's Manual of Social and Busi­ness Forms, an etiquette guide, which made him the "Emily Post" of his day. With Seth Baker he had developed Lake Ellyn and the health spa hotel overlooking it. In promoting his "Wildairs" subdivision south of the tracks, he would meet prospective buyers at the train with elaborate horse and carriage. English­man John Foster was, at the same time, erect­ing many of the brick buildings still standing downtown. The CA&E added to this momen­tum as the Glen Oak Country Club was in­cluded as a stop.

Brilliant, the Percheron stallion.
from a drawing by Rosa Bonheur
 

Glen Ellyn Hotel.
Courtesy of Glen Ellyn Historical Society
 

Likewise, the Chicago Golf Club, in south Wheaton, was a favorite stop of the city's elite who came to stay in summer homes as well as to play on the course. The architect for many of these was Jarvis Hunt, His own home featured a parquet floor, the tiles of which were brought from the Chicago World's Fair.

Farther west, the pioneer homestead of Jude Gary lay on the CA&E route. Before his death in 1881, complete with a thirty-carriage funer­al procession from the Warrenville Methodist Church, Jude had married a second time. It was this wife who provided a 100-foot-wide strip in exchange for the location of the Mont view stop on the farm.

The Warrenville depot, built by William Rockwell, became the center of the settlement that arose north of the original section of town. Rockwell's family had come as tenant farmers to the area in 1853. By the 1900s he had become the largest property owner in the community, succeeding Julius Warren in this regard. 

Loie Fuller.
Courtesy Hinsdale Historical Society

  These examples of the CA&E's impact along its southwest branch had their counter­part along the northeast fork. A hotel and inn were built for visitors who would come from the train stop to the horse shows and expositions at Oaklawn Farm. Mark Dunham's horse "Bril­liant" was painted by Rosa Bonheur as a way of publicizing the 2,000-acre facility.
 

Such a spread was indeed part of the estate pattern that continued to characterize DuPage even after the World War I era. In 1912 commodities trader Arthur Cutten hired archi­tect Norman Bridges, who had been affiliated with Frank Lloyd Wright, to build the man­sion on his 525-acre estate. It was located just north of Joy Morton's Lisle Farms. To the east of them fuel oil and coal magnet J. Berrymans in 1910 built a three-story home, coach house, and 65-foot water tower at the southwest cor­ner of today's Highland Avenue and East-West Tollway. Hand grenade manufacturer Frank Curran bought this complex and sur­rounding one hundred acres. His family con­tinued to own it until 1979. It is currently being developed as condominiums by Sherman and Gwen Baarstad.

Betwixt and between these clusters of large land holdings, an increasing diversity of popu­lation groups were anticipating the prolifera­tion of varying life-styles later in the century. Prior to World War I, the CA&E brought Cad Lewis Sublett, the first of a group of blacks who would build on the eastern edge of Wheaton. Called "The Hill," this area was the one place where blacks could buy without harassment. Peter Hoy, a Danish immigrant who settled in Lombard, took in "knights of the road," hoboes from the railroad, whom he quartered in his Flowerfield barn.

But of all those from DuPage who represent its penetration of the modern world, Loie Fuller may best exemplify it. Her mid-winter birth in Castle Inn, which had the only iron stove in the Fullersburg area in the 1860s, caused her to say later that she came into the world "with a cold she never got rid of." In contrast to those limited circumstances of her origin, she gained world-wide fame for her innovative, modern dance. After making her start on the Chicago stage, she won greatest admiration in Europe for her combining dia­phanous apparel with electric lights. Her Ser­pentine Dance led Toulouse Lautrec to paint her whirling in "a mist of iridescent color," and Anatole France to extol her in the intro­duction to her autobiography, Fifteen Years of a Dancer's Life. That acclaim was evidence of the cultural and social growth that was evolv­ing before and into the new century.

MATTER OF MIND

The tap root of modern times had its intel­lectual and social fibres intertwined with the profound material change previously noted Its institutional expression could be identified in the number of schools and colleges which sud­denly appeared on the scene. In 1 870 North Western College, originally Plainfield College and subsequently named North Central Col­lege, moved to Naperville, with Old Main built on an eight-acre site by Morris Sleight. By 1880 James L. Nichols was chairing its inno­vative Department of Commerce.

In 1873 Elmhurst College marked its begin­ning when the German Evangelical Synod ac­cepted the thirty acres along prospect Avenue, made available through the generosity of Thomas B. Bryan. The first building, Kranz Hall, built in 1873, was named for the school's first president, Carl F. Kranz. As a proseminary, its main purpose was to prepare students for theological training and to train teachers for the schools of the founding denomination. Bryan's admiration for German culture and learning was also evidenced as he sent his sons to the second floor of the public school where Herr Lussenhof taught in his native language, rather than to the English-speaking classrooms on the first floor.

 St. Procopius College.
Courtesy Lisle Heritage Society
 

 James Henry Breasted
Courtesy Downers Grove Historical Society
 

Wheaton's first graded school, Longfellow, still standing at the Union and Seminary streets intersection, included high school classes. During the last quarter of the nineteenth cen­tury there were only four graded schools clas­sified as high schools, the others being Naperville, West Chicago, and Hinsdale.

The next institution of higher education, St. Procopious in Lisle, did not come to DuPage until after the turn of the century, in 1910. It was founded in 1890 in Chicago by the Bohe­mian Fathers of the Order of St. Benedict. Their abbey followed in 1914, two years after the Sacred Heart Convent and Academy was built. Specialties in the Czech and Slovak languages and literature are still included in the curriculum of Illinois Benedictine College, as it is now called.

Friederich Conrad Koch
Courtesy Elmhurst Historical Society 

  In this same pre-World War I period Avery Coonley School began its move from River­side to the west end of Downers Grove. From 1912 to 1929 this country day school estab­lished a program and facility for preschoolers through eighth grade. From 1906 Mrs. Coonley and her colleague Lucia Burton Morse had applied the progressive principles of John Dewey in the Cottage School as it was called initially. Dewey, in turn, would describe this educational experiment in his Schools of Tomorrow.

Individuals from DuPage whose accomp­lishments bespeak an in-depth education in­clude Herman A. Fischer, Sr., and Jr. The father's father, Conrad, was among the first settlers in Churchville and was the brother of Dr. Frederick Fischer, whose career has been previously noted. Herman A. Fischer, Sr., distinguished himself as professor of mathe­matics and philosophy at Wheaton College for forty-three years; Fischer Hall was named for him. His son, Herman A. Fischer, J.., was one of five children to graduate from Harvard Law School.

Moving to Downers Grove at the age of eight in 1873, James Henry Breasted became fa­mous as an archaeologist in the twentieth century. He first attended school at the two story school house on the present site of Lin­coln Center. After graduating from North Central College, Breasted seemed set on be­coming a pharmacist. But his early participation in the Congregational church led him eventually to enroll in the Chicago Theolo­gical Seminary. There he immersed himself in antiquities. By 1919 he had founded the Orien­tal Institute at the University of Chicago, and in 1922 he was present at the opening of King Tutankhamen's tomb in Egypt.

Pursuing another field of scientific endeavor at the same time was Dr. Friedrich Conrad Koch. Also related to the Fischer family on his mother's side, Fred was born in 1876 in Elmhurst after his parents had fled the Chi­cago fire and built a home in the newly es­tablished Emerson Subdivision. After attend­ing the German Lutheran School, he graduated from Oak Park High School because Elmhurst's high school was not yet accredited. Following his graduation from the University of Illinois in 1899, he became a noted research chemist for Armour Company and a distinguished professor of biochemistry at the Uni­versity of Chicago. Before his death in 1948, he had become internationally recognized for his studies of enzymes and hormones, and was the first to show that ultraviolet light con­verted cholesterol into vitamin D.

Applying such new discoveries were persons in health services. Medical practice at the turn of the century was in pronounced contrast to what it had been when doctors first came to DuPage, usually following the railroads. A number of these first physicians were trained in homeopathy. Offices were in the doctors' own homes, and practice was often taken into patients' homes, with tonsils removed and legs amputated on kitchen tables. Embalming was also done in homes, until the 1920s.

Downers Grove Water Tower.
Courtesy Downers Grove Historical Society

 Wood Dale Road 1916.

According to Dr. Raymond A. Dieter, whose History of Medicine in DuPage County is currently in preparation, the turning point for health care came at the turn of the century, when public utilities were installed. A high pro­portion of nineteenth-century illness was water-related. Once a clean water supply and sanitary sewers were installed, the fatalities from such diseases as cholera declined drama­tically.

Following a system of "rational therapeu­tics," Henry Lindlahr purchased the Lathrop home at St. Charles Road and Prospect Street in Elmhurst in 1914 as a health resort. Among the notables who came for the nondrug treat­ment were novelist Sinclair Lewis and Social­ist leader Eugene V. Debs.

The first hospital in DuPage was the Hinsdale Sanitarium, founded in 1905. Previously, in 1899, Drs. David and Mary Paulson had come from the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan to establish a Seventh Day Ad­ventist mission and medical center in Chicago. After receiving care at that facility, Charles B. Kimball, manager of the Beckwith Estate, arranged for the transfer of that center to the Hinsdale property. The dedicatory address was delivered by J. H. Kellogg of Battle Creek.

Edwards Sanitarium in Naperville opened its doors in 1907 as "the torchbearer of just and efficient treatment of the consumptive." The words were those of Theodore Sachs, who had inspired Eudora Hull (Gaylord) Spalding to found the institution in memory of her first husband, Edward Gaylord In 1909 the Jewish Charities of Chicago opened a tuberculosis sanitarium in Winfield, which eventually evolved into Central DuPage Hospital.

Parallel to the rising concern in the health field was that of child welfare. The first evidence of this was the orphanage established ad­jacent to the Evangelical Lutheran Seminary in Addison, in 1873. The preceding year, during the silver jubilee of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, eight congregations had joined together to build a facility accommodat­ing a hundred youths.

In 1888 the county board of supervisors purchased 176 acres for the DuPage County Home and Farm, now the County Convalescent Center. In 1895 the Evangelical Home for Children and the Aged began in Bensenville. It still is in operation on York Road.

Business-inspired rest and recreation facili­ties for women employees came after 1913. In that year the Chicago Telephone Company purchased a forty-two acre wooded site in Warrenville for its "Hello Girls," who were suffering job-related stress. This program con­tinued until 1939, when Our Lady of the Cenacle obtained the land. Nearby, the old Warren Mansion served as a summer camp for Montgomery Ward female employees between 1918 to 1925. Likewise, the Katherine Legge Memorial in Hinsdale was made available to the women workers of International Harvester.

As these accommodations were being pro­vided, the feminist movement was realizing a significant breakthrough; for it was also in 1913 that women were allowed to vote in all elections in Illinois. Much credit for that devel­opment may be ascribed to Ellen Martin of Lombard. A native of New York state, she became the first woman law student in Chautaugua County, and began practicing in Chi­cago in 1876; however, she was not recognized officially as an attorney, because she was not an elector, a status not then granted to women.

On April 6, 1891, she and fourteen promi­nent women residents of Lombard marched into polling places and demanded ballots. The village charter did not explicitly use the word "male" in defining electors. It referred only to "citizens." The women's claim was then con­tested before county judge George W. Brown. Later that year women were allowed to vote in school elections. Ellen Martin died four years before the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920, granting nationwide suffrage to women.

Evangelical Lutheran Orphan Home.

Courtesy Historical Museum of Addison

DuPage County Welcome Home for returning World War I veterans.
25,000 lined the streets in Wheaton in September 6, 1919.

 World War I era map.

At the time of her death, the struggle with other stereotypes continued. Those of German descent were having to register in S S. Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church and in other ways prove their patriotism during World War I, although sixty-one of the parishioners were serving in the armed forces. Yet even those parochialisms would soon be giving away to the broader view that came with the unprece­dented influx of newcomers in the following decades.