Chicago’s Earliest Industry – the Fur Trade

You never know where you will end up when you start researching some aspect of Chicago history, but it will certainly surprise you. This phenomenon happened to me when I was researching James Carney, a possible early Chicago (1820s-50s) Irish ancestor. I saw a listing in the 1839 ChicagoDirectory for James Carney, grocery and provision store. I wanted to find out what early grocery stores carried and what determined their choice of inventory.

 

In order to understand what kind of goods a merchant in early Chicago offered, one must first understand what his customers needed and wanted. And who were these customers? The Indians, living in the northeastern part of what was to become America and Canada, had long been trading furs and other items with each other.  The French were the first Europeans to enter the fur trade in the New World in the early 16^th century and the Indians became their trading partners.

The trappers camp-fire. A friendly visitor,  

Published by Currier & Ives, 152 Nassau St., c1866,  

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Washington, D.C. 20540 USApga.00935/ 

The French traders realized that in order to gain access to the knowledge and the experience of the natives and to gain access to the fruit of their hunting grounds, they had to earn their trust.  Part of their outreach was for some of them to join the Native American community through marriage. 

Another reason for marrying into the Native American culture was that Indian women were used to life on the frontier unlike European women.¹ When the English came into the fur trade after the French, some English traders also married Indian wives for the same reasons.

Since there were few Europeans other than traders and a native population eager to trade in northeastern Illinois and eastern Canada, the Indians formed the customer base of early trading posts and small grocery and provision stores.  It was the traders who started these stores as they knew the Indian through business and social connections. Most likely James Carney began his grocery with the Indian trade.

Fur trading with Indians,  By William Faden -

 Library and Archives Canada - originally from: Cartouche

 from William Faden, "A map of the Inhabited Part of Canada

 from the French Surveys; with the Frontiers of New York

 and New England", 1777, Public Domain,

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1196945

We know that the Indian was the main customer for the early grocery stores, but what made him a very good trading partner?  To find out the details of the fur trade in and all around Chicago, I consulted four scholarly texts. The original source was one Alfred H. Meyer, who provided the first in chain of citations:

Dr. Meyer made an exhaustive study of the history of northeastern Indiana and northwestern Illinois from the time of the Native American through pioneer settlement in 1850, gives more detail on the Indian customer:

“Indians were the most profitable customers prior to 1840, for many of the white settlers ran accounts which some of them were slow to pay or sought to default. The Indians, on the other hand, most of whom were Potawatomi, periodically brought in large quantities of cranberries and bundles of furs which they traded for articles of food, clothing, or ornaments.”²

I now had some general idea of what the Indian customer desired when he came to trade.  But Dr. Meyer goes on to list the inventory of the “leading store (he doesn’t give us the name) in Chicago, at the corner of West Lake and West Water”:³

Three challenges appear with this inventory list. First, the large number of items in the inventory (108) makes it necessary to organize them in some way. I came across another inventory of the North West [Fur]Company in Grand Portage, MI from 1797 in a publication by Dr. Bruce White. The items were divided by function/material according in these categories: “Adornment, Alcohol, Ammunition, Amusement, Animals, Blankets, Cloth, Clothing, Food, Garden, Guns, Medicine, Powder, Tobacco, Tools, Utensils, and Writing.”⁴

The second challenge to the inventory list is the number of items that are unfamiliar to most modern readers. I researched each item and made a chart of definitions:

The third challenge to this list of inventory is locating the original source. Where did the list come from? My research path led me through the chain of citations, starting with Dr. Meyer. When I reached Charles Cleaver's research, I struck gold:

“After crossing the bridge,” [the bridge across the Chicago River at Lake Street called Lake Street Bridge] “at the corner of West Lake and West Water Streets, Bob [Robert A.] Kinzie …kept the largest store in town, though chiefly filled with goods for the Indian trade. There was beside Kinzie’s on the West-Side, but that would be about all, some three or four small groceries where liquor was retailed.” ¹²

I had now identified the owner of the large grocery store. I still had another challenge – locating the original source of the inventory list.

By the time I found Hurlbut’s research, I was worried that I might never find the source of the list.  On p. 28 Hurlbut began a section called “TheAmerican Fur Company” where he discusses how some old records (including account books) of this company now held at the Chicago History Museum.)

American Fur Cos. buildings. Fond du Lac (back view), 

1827, Library of Congress Washington, D.C. 

20540 US Am LC-USZ62-2087

Hurlbut  quotes several items from these records and at the end of the section, he prefaces the inventory with these words:

 “We will close this article by giving a catalogue of goods furnished for the trade of the Chicago country, fifty-three years ago." (Hurlbut wrote this in 1875, so 53 years past would have been 1822.)¹³

But Hurlbut gave no specific source within the American Fur Company documents. The closest that I could get to the actual source was an inventory of these records written for the Chicago Historical Museum by Robert D. Kozlow, American Fur Company records, 1816-1947. A search was done for me in the records at the Chicago History Museum but nothing came up except a similar inventory from another trading post, Lac du Flambeau of the North West Company in Wisconsin. More on-site search of the records must be done.

I have been very intrigued by the tastes of the Native American consumers at the early trading posts ever since I came upon the inventory for Robert Kinzie’s store in Chicago in 1833-34. Remember my ancestor James Carney had a grocery just a few years after (1839) in the same commercial area.

You can learn about the needs/wants of a people (a subject of great interest today to all the online retailers who track our purchases with cookies) by looking at what they purchase. How did the Indian traders prioritize the items they bartered for? According to E.E. Rich (see section “The fur trade and economic anthropology”) noted scholar on the fur trade in the Americas wrote:

“…the Indian would always supply himself first with powder and shot. After that would come what the trader would call ‘necessaries’ and what we would call luxuries—tobacco, spirits, gay cloth of different kinds, beads and caps with articles such as ice-chisels, snow-glasses, and hatches varying in  priority.”¹⁴

By Unknown artist from 1800 According to Getty Images - 

Historic image from the Hulton Archive, 

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28585531

There has been much research and discussion of the effect of alcohol on the Indian tribes. In many sources one reads of how the fur traders took advantage of the Indian customer by plying him with alcohol. But this has been questioned by other sources:

“Perhaps surprising, given the emphasis that has been placed on it in the historical literature, was the comparatively small role of alcohol in the trade. At York Factory, Native traders received in 1740 a total of 494 gallons of brandy and “strong water,” which had a value of 1,976 made-beaver. More than twice this amount was spent on tobacco in that year, nearly five times was spent on firearms, twice was spent on cloth, and more was spent on blankets and kettles than on alcohol. Thus, brandy, although a significant item of trade, was by no means a dominant one. In addition, alcohol could hardly have created serious social problems during this period. The amount received would have allowed for no more than ten two-ounce drinks per year for the adult Native population living in the region.”¹⁵

Professor Rich mentions the difference between European perspective and values and those of the Native American throughout the article. Much of the tension between the fur trader who wanted more furs and the Indian (who was usually not the hunter but the middleman) who provided them came about because of a difference in culture. The Indian was interested in the here and now and would only bring sufficient furs to satisfy current needs, a prevailing view of the Europeans involved in the fur trade and expressed by Andrew Graham, who began working for the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1749:

“…the Indian annually could get hold of between seventy and a hundred made-beaver in furs without effort. For seventy made-beaver he could fully satisfy all the wants which he would anticipate before he next came down to trade  and the other thirty for waste and dissipation were all that he had time to spend before he had to leave the plantation and begin his journey inland again. ”¹⁶  

From this research project to find the source of the inventory list, I learned how ethnocentrism can cloud even scholars’ eyes as they analyze records and draw conclusions about different cultures. I was fortunate to find Dr. Rich’s study on how the Native American culture differed from the European and how this influenced the trade between them.

I also learned how much the fur trade played in the economic beginnings of northeastern Illinois (including Chicago,) northwestern Indiana and Canada. Before the railroads, the meat packing industry and the factories built the Chicago we know today, there was the fur trade that laid the foundation for the future economic blossoming of the city.

By Arthur Heming  

National Archives of Canada,

C5746http://www.canadianheritage.org/

images/large/20061.jpg, Public Domain, 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4046172

Thirdly, I learned about a pitfall of research and citation. It is very important for a writer to include the original source of a record that he/she cites. In his 1881 publication, Henry Hurlbut gave the original source of the Chicago store inventory as part of the American Fur Company accounts. But researchers that came after him did not include the provenance of the inventory in their publications.

Finally, from the inventory list, I learned what my possible grocer ancestor James Carney may have carried in his store around 1839. But he wasn’t in the grocery business for the long haul. In 1840 he opened a brewery, one of the earliest Chicagoans to do so. He probably faced two facts in making this decision: 

1. the fur trade with its profitable and reliable Indian customer base was coming to an end
2. beer was a popular product with the growing number of European immigrants and American-born persons flocking to Chicago 

Endnotes

¹A.Gottfred,  “Art. II. Femmes du Pays: Women of the Fur Trade, 1774-1821” (Northwest Journal, http://www.northwestjournal.ca/XIII2.htm) p. 12

² Solon Robinson, Solon Robinson, Pioneer and Agriculturalist; Selected Writings, ed. By H.A. Kellar, 2 vols. (Indiana Historical Bureau, 1936) quoted in Alfred H. Meyer, “Circulation and Settlement Patterns of the Calumet Region of Northwest Indiana and Northeast Illinois: The Second Stage of Occupance – Pioneer Settler and Subsistence Economy, 1830-1850.” Annals of the Association of Geographers 46 (3): 312-356, 1956, p. 349.

³ Alfred H. Meyer, “Circulation and Settlement Patterns of the Calumet Region of Northwest Indiana and Northeast Illinois: The Second Stage of Occupance – Pioneer Settler and Subsistence Economy, 1830-1850.” Annals of the Association of Geographers 46 (3): 312-356, 1956, p. 349.

⁴Bruce M. White, “Grand Portage National Monument Historic Documents Study,” (Turnstone Historical Research, March, 2004), pgs. 83-101.

⁵John Splinter Stavorinus, Voyages to the East Indies, 3 volumes, (London. G.G. and J. Robinson, Pater-Noster- Row, 1798) I: 519 (books.google.com)

⁶The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: Complete Text Reproduced Micrographically. Oxford [England: Oxford University Press, 1971. Print. 1:1833)  (http://bit.ly/2rdgfza)

⁷Ibid., 1:1230

⁸Ibid., 1:334

⁹Ibid., 1:1178

¹⁰"Appendices to 'The History of Fort Langley, 1827-96, Canadian Historic Sites No. 20, Appendix E, 1973, Mary Cullen, Parks Canada, Dept. of Indian and Northern Affairs, Ontario, Canada, p. 72

¹¹Carolyn Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade, (Lincoln, NE, University of NE Press, 2006), p. 124.

¹²Dena Evelyn Shapiro, dissertation “Indian Tribes and Trails of the Chicago Region: A Preliminary Study of the Influence of the Indian on Early White Settlement” (Master of Arts dissertation, The University of Chicago, March, 1929), p. 53.

¹³Charles Cleaver, Early Chicago Reminiscences, 1833 (Chicago, Fergus Printing Company, 1882) p. 27.

¹⁴Henry Higgins Hurlbut, Chicago Antiquities: comprising original items and relations, letters, extracts, and notes, pertaining to early Chicago (Chicago, IL, privately printed, 1881) p. 36.

¹⁵E.E. Rich, “Trade Habits and Economic Motivation Among the Indians of North America” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Feb., 1960), pp. 35-53 (Ottawa, ON, Canadian Economics Association) p. 45.

 ¹⁶ Ibid., p. 53

 ¹⁷Carlos, Ann and Frank Lewis. “Fur Trade (1670-1870)”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. March 16, 2008. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-history-of-the-fur-trade-1670-to-1870/

Discoveries at the Chicago History Museum Part II

Here I am again in the Chicago History Museum (see my post of  Dec 27, 2012 for Part I.)

After I checked out the Sanborn maps, I took a walk around the Research Center. It is really important to become familiar with the lay of the land, to see what the site you are visiting offers. Although much of the material is kept in closed stacks outside of the main Center room, there are open bookcases along the walls.


As I was looking at some books on a shelf, my eyes were drawn to one title in particular: 

The Slum and the Ghetto: neighborhood deterioration and middle-class reform, Chicago, 1880 – 1930 was written by Thomas Lee Philpott, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas. Just by chance, I had found a reference that would give me new and chilling insight into the NearWest Side where my Irish ancestors lived in the late nineteenth century. I wrote about this area in my post of December 6, 2012 when I showed how Clara Laughlin described that area and time period of Chicago in her novel, Just Folks. Now I would have a view of my ancestors’ neighborhood from a historian’s perspective.

In order to understand how so many people in Chicago and other large American cities were living in crowded, unsanitary, dark substandard housing in the late nineteenth century, known as tenements, (see photo below that shows the wooden tenement buildings built so close together)

The Maxwell Street area in 1906, from the Charles R. Clark Collection, in the folder for "Interpersonal Relations--Manners and Customs--City and town life--Slums--Illinois--Chicago--Near West Side.", used by permission of the Chicago History Museum. 

 we need to look at several factors.  It took a convergence of all of these factors to produce a perfect storm

of squalid living conditions that led to disease and death for a large number of people who lived in the tenements of Chicago.

First, in the latter part of the nineteenth century industrial progress and capacity had grown exponentially and stockyards, meat packing plants and factories of all kinds sprang up in many cities, especially Chicago.¹

The Great Union Stock Yards of Chicago, 1870, Photo by Rascher, Charles, Chicago: Published by Walsh & Co., c1878, Wikimedia, public domain due to copyright expiration.

These businesses required thousands of workers to do unskilled labor at very low wages. And where did this labor come from? A great number of Europeans were looking for new opportunities. The photo below shows hundreds of new arrivals from Europe waiting for processing at Ellis Island:

Underwood & Underwood, photographer, c1906. cph 3a23424 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a23424, [Emigrants in "pens" at Ellis Island, New York, probably on or near Christmas --note the decorations,] Library of Congress.

A second factor in the mix that produced tenement slums in Chicago was that during this time economic and political conditions in Europe were driving many poor and low-skilled people to look to America for a better life. But no one in the municipal government of Chicago was actually planning for this influx. So it was left to market forces, in this case land developers and landlords, (see section: Tenement Inspections as Public Health Practice, paragraph 4) to fill the areas in and around the new industrial areas with as many housing units as they could fit and to build them for the cheapest price. This was the formula that resulted in tenement slums: a need on the part of poor people in Europe to escape their living conditions that left them no hope for economic improvement in their countries of origin and a need on the part of industry in Chicago for huge numbers of workers to do low-skilled work at low wages:

Image of eight girls sitting and facing a narrow table, sewing by hand on material held in their laps, during a sweatshop inspection in Chicago, Illinois. The girls are all looking at the camera, 1093. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society.

A third factor in this already bad situation in the Near West Side happened in 1871. It was the Great Chicago Fire  in which “One-third of the city’s 300,000 residents lost their homes.” ²    

Gibson & Co. (Cincinnati, Ohio), c1871, The Great fire at Chicago Oct. 9th 1871. View from the west side, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92506070/, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

Many of these refugees ended up in the tenements, and this added to the already deadly overcrowding.

By the late 1880s, the slum housing of Chicago had become so bad that government officials had to take notice. Social reformers, such as Jane Adams 

Jane Addams, Wikimedia, public domain due to copyright expiration.

who founded Hull House

Hull House Women's Club building on Polk Street, 1905, Wikimedia, public domain due to copyright expiration.

in the Near West Side, began documenting conditions in the tenements while offering language programs, day-care centers, playgrounds, nutritional advice and hope to those who had been relegated to the bottom of the social ladder by low wages in dead-end jobs with no way out.  Philpott describes their plight:

“The great majority of the laborers had no marketable skills. The work they did was hard, stultifyingly dull, and often dangerous. They swept and shoveled streets, dug ditches, sweated over garments, peddled from pushcarts, tended machines. Employment was irregular because of market fluctuations and weather conditions. Laborers went long stretches without work….”³

In 1901,Robert Hunter published a report for the City Homes Association  called Tenement Conditions in Chicago.  Hunter studied blocks around Hull House and documented the overcrowding, lack of sanitation, no access to clean water, absence of light in many of the tenement rooms, among other grievous conditions.  According to his statistical research, Hunter stated that between 35%and 47% of Chicagoans lived in substandard housing.⁴

As mentioned above, in the late nineteenth century, European immigrants came by the thousands to find jobs in Chicago as well as in other American cities. They found low-paying jobs that only allowed them to afford substandard housing in tenements. The immigrants came from not only one country but from many, and they arrived in stages, as Philpott describes: 

“The area around Hull House was a ‘labyrinth’ of nationalities and creeds. Catholics predominated on three sides of the settlement, and the Jewish ‘ghetto’ was to the south. Protestants were scattered through the district….Most Jews were either Russians or Poles….The Catholics…came from more than a dozen different counties….The most numerous foreigners at the beginning were Irishmen, Bohemians, and Germans. They gradually gave way to Italians, Russians, Poles and Greeks. But at any given time in the 1890s people of twenty-six or more nationalities could be found living within three blocks of Hull House.”⁵

My own family history bears out what Professor Philpott observed. First my Irish ancestors showed up on the Near West Side around the 1860s. They lived on Halsted at Hastings. Then the Bohemian contingent arrived in the early 1900s and settled on Blue Island Street.

As we saw above, the immigrants lacked money to demand better housing and they lacked any social cohesion because of the maze of different languages and cultures that were found in the tenements. Instead of cooperation, there was competition and the attitude of “We don’t trust or like you because you’re different from us.” In addition, many of the immigrants who had arrived earlier in the century disliked the more recent arrivals, seeing them as interlopers who just added to the poor, overcrowded living conditions. Photo below shows the crowded conditions of a typical market street in Chicago in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century:

 One of the busiest streets in the world--State St., Chicago, Ill. (18 miles long), N. from Madison St. New York : Underwood & Underwood, publishers, c1903. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

This isolation into small groups worked against community building. And this was another factor that kept the population of the Near West Side powerless. As Philpott writes:

“A community crisscrossed by so many lines of cleavage seemed to lack all coherence. Nothing the settlement workers encountered in the tenement districts distressed them more than the disorganization and disorder they saw all around them. To Jane Adams it looked as if the entire ‘social organism,’ from the family level up, had ‘broken down’ on the Near West Side.” ⁶

Thus we have seen how the perfect storm of tenement housing developed from six factors:

1.     The explosion of industrial activity in Chicago in the mid-nineteenth century which resulted in the need for large numbers of low-skilled workers to fill the factories and slaughter houses

2.     The influx of poor, low-skilled immigrants from Europe

3.     The lack of a municipal plan to house these new immigrants which left a vacuum: the need for some kind of shelter for the newly arrived workers

4.     The type of shelter devised by businessmen (responding to market forces) who came in and built as many housing units as the land would hold at the cheapest cost

5.     The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 which forced many of the homeless to seek housing in the Near West Side which added to the overcrowding

6.     The powerlessness of the poor of the Near West Side in the face of economic and political forces of the times

It would take until 1901 for the reports of reformers and the overwhelming visual evidence of huge areas of the city mired in slums to open up the eyes of both the public and the politicians of Chicago as documented on the history.comwebsite:

“In 1901 city officials passed the Tenement House Law, which effectively outlawed the construction of new tenements on 25-foot lots and mandated improved sanitary conditions, fire escapes and access to light. Under the new law--which in contrast to past legislation would actually be enforced--pre-existing tenement structures were updated, and more than 200,000 new apartments were built over the next 15 years, supervised by city authorities. By the late 1920s, many tenements in Chicago had been demolished and replaced with large, privately subsidized apartment projects.”⁷

As I have learned more about the conditions my ancestors endured in the Chicago tenements, I realize once again the debt that I owe these brave people. It was through their sacrifices as they worked to gain a foothold in this country that I have benefited. Thank you to those who came before.

Notes:

1.      Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-class Reform, Chicago, 1880-1930, The Urban Life in America Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) p. 7.

2.      Fire of 1871, Encyclopedia, online http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1740.html, downloaded 6 Jan 2013.

3.      Philpott  p. 64.

4.      City Homes Association, Encyclopedia, online http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/289.html, downloaded 6 Jan 2013.

5.      Philpott, p. 67.

6.      Ibid., p. 69.

7.      Tenements, History.com, online < http://www.history.com/topics/tenements>, downloaded 5 Jan 2013.

Categories: US citizenship

Discoveries in the Chicago History Museum – Part I

Whenever you plan a research trip, time is a very big factor – there never seems to be enough time to visit all the places of interest, and this is especially true in Chicago. When I was making my itinerary, I was trying to choose between the Chicago Public Library and the Chicago History Museum. I only had time for one. I am fortunate that I decided to follow someone’s suggestion and chose the Chicago History Museum because that happened to be the place where one of my mysteries was solved. 

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Who led me to the Chicago History Museum? Some months ago, Jacqi Stevens , a fellow genealogy blogger, made a comment on my blog, asking if I knew about a locally-focused family history group called Chicago Genealogy. I didn’t. Jacqi said it was a Facebook group.

Facebook logo, facebook.com, 2006, Wikimedia

Fortunately, I had opened a Facebook account some time ago for genealogy purposes. I requested admission to the group and began receiving members’ postings.

As I came close to leaving on my trip to Chicago in September 2012, I asked the group for their suggestions on the best places to do research in the city. One of the members said that I should definitely not miss the Chicago History Museum. I am so grateful that I heeded this advice. After spending two days at the Newberry Library, (see Oct 31st post) I headed over to the Chicago History Museum.

One caveat about visiting the Museum for research is that the Research Center doesn’t open until 1:00:

September - May

Tuesday through Friday: 1 - 4:30 pm

Saturday: 10 am - 4:30 pm

Somehow despite all my planning, I had forgotten the 1:00 opening time. I arrived at a few hours early, but that turned out to be a good thing because I was in time for a tour and lunch in the Museum cafeteria where you can eat a tasty meal in the sun room overlooking the Museum grounds.

The tour takes place in The Exelon Wing, “Chicago: Crossroads of America.” This glimpse into nineteenth and twentieth century Chicago, including an authentic elevated railroad car, really puts you in the mood for some more exploration upstairs in the Research Center. 

South Side Elevated Railroad car 1, built 1892. On display at the Chicago History Museum, 25 October 2007; Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

At l:00 sharp I was waiting at the door. As you know from visiting different libraries and research facilities, each one has its own set of rules for protection of its precious documents, photographs and other historical memorabilia. At the Research Center, you are asked to lock your purse in a locker, to use only pencils for writing, and to wear white gloves  when handling photographs.

Two archivists/librarians were at the front desk to greet me and asked what I was looking for. I was interested in finding a Sanborn map of Chicago that might show three cottages that my great grandmother, Mary Kearney/Carney Kries Lauer owned. The addresses of these cottages were 125, 127, and 129 South Irving Avenue. I knew about these properties because they were listed in the divorce record of Mary Kearney/Carney Kries Lauer and Otto Lauer in 1925 in Chicago, Cook County.

I had hired Kim Stankiewicz, a researcher at Genlighten, to look for land records on these South Irving cottages and to search for the property chain of ownership. Although Kim contacted several sources who might have had access to property records, none responded to her inquiries. However, she consulted a criss-cross or reverse directory from 1928 which listed Mary Kearney/Carney Kries Lauer as the occupant and owner of 125 South Irving Avenue between Monroe Street and 118^th  Street.

I was very happy when one of the librarians located a Sanborn map from 1917 that showed the three dwellings right where they were supposed to be on South Irving:

Sanborn, Chicago, 1917 Vol. 7, p. 2

However, the librarian also produced a second Sanborn map from 1950 where the cottages had vanished. So now I knew that sometime between 1928 and 1950, the cottages were torn down.

My visit to the Chicago History Museum was very profitable. In addition to the Sanborn maps that verified the location of my ancestral cottages, I also found a history of the Near West Side that gives an incredible look into how the inhabitants of that area lived. Look for more on this amazing historical study in a future post.

Categories: genealogy groups, genealogy tools