USA > Illinois > Cook County > Chicago > Historical review of Chicago and Cook county and selected biography, Volume I > Part 13
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ments had necessitated the infusion of outside capital, but upon Mr. Medill's return to Chicago in November, 1874, he purchased a con- trolling interest in the establishment and reorganized the business as the Tribune Publishing Company. He resumed active control of its editorial policy also, and at once infused into it the vigor and momentum of the old times. One of the local measures which he advocated with unfailing earnestness during the later years of his life was an increase in liquor licenses, and the effect of his work is largely seen in the present law, which has placed millions of dollars of revenue in the city coffers and helped sustain the cause of popular education, as well as other beneficial institutions. Mr. Medill's death occurred at San Antonio, Texas, March 16, 1899. As an editor and a molder of public sentiment, he was one of the greatest which the country has produced, and for many years the Chicago Tribune stood in the west much as the New York Tribune in the east, both dominated by masters of journalism and masters among men.
Carter H. Harrison, four successive terms mayor of Chicago, and after an interregnum of three administrations, assassinated dur-
CARTER H. HARRISON. ing his fifth incumbency of the office, was a native of Lexington, Kentucky, born on the 15th of February, 1825. His great-great-grand- father was the ancestor of President William Henry Harrison, and his grandfather a cousin of Thomas Jefferson, he himself being a cousin of John C. Breckenridge. The fever of politics was there- fore in his blood. His father dying when he was eight months of age, he was left to the sole care of his mother, a daughter of Colonel William Russell, of the United States army, and one of the pioneers of the northwest. The home of the half-orphan was a log house and it is said that his first cradle was a sugar trough; but, despite this rude entry into the world, the brilliant and versatile traits of such an ancestry were evident in his character at a very early age. Most of his education before he entered Yale College as a sophomore was ob- tained under Dr. Marshall, brother of the chief justice and father of Tom Marshall, the great orator. Graduating therefrom in 1845 he commenced the study of law, but did not enter practice at once, de- voting himself rather to his mother, for whom he always evinced the deepest affection and whose strong and inspiring character was, per- haps, the leading force which, in his early manhood, brought him
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into the front rank of the emancipationists of Kentucky In 1851 he went abroad, traveling for two years in Europe, Asia and Egypt, and in 1855, after a prospecting tour through the northwest, selected Chicago as his residence. He at once invested his means in real estate, and his ventures in this line proved so profitable and such an absorbent of his time, that he abandoned his intention of becoming a practicing attorney, and when he actively entered politics, in 1870, he was a citizen of fortune. In 1871 Mr. Harrison was elected a member of the first board of county commissioners, holding that office until December, 1874, when he took his seat as congressman from the second district of Illinois. He spent the summer recesses of 1874 and 1875 in Europe with his family. He was elected mayor of Chicago in 1879, 1881, 1883, 1885 and 1893, but was defeated for the governorship in 1884, although he cut down the normal Re- publican majority from 40,000 to 14,500; he found, on the whole, that he was not as strong a candidate among the agricultural and interior classes as with the city populace. The mayor is known to have aspired to the presidency and was often mentioned by his party as a promising candidate for the vice presidency, but, even under the circumstances, his defeat for the governorship seriously checked his national advancement as a politician.
Mayor Harrison was a choice spirit in the initiation and develop- ment of the World's Columbian Exposition, and his last public ap- pearance was at Music Hall, Jackson Park, on All Cities' Day of the World's Fair (October 28, 1893), when he was the central figure among the chief executives of the American municipalities, and, with characteristic mannerisms and magnetism, delivered an address of welcome which could not have been more typical of the Chicago spirit of unbounded faith in the future, based upon the great achieve- ments of the past. Although he was in his sixty-ninth year, those who were present will never forget his stalwart and inspiring appear- ance upon the stage, as he exclaimed "There is a city that was a mo- rass when I came into the world sixty-eight and a half years ago. It was a village of but a few hundred when I had attained the age of twelve years in 1837. What is it now? The second city in America. The man is now born-and I myself have taken a new lease of life, and I believe I will see the day when Chicago will be the biggest city in America and the third city on the face of the globe. I once heard
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Tom Corwin tell a story of a man who was about to be put on the witness stand over near the eastern shores of Maryland. He was fifty years old. He said he was thirty-six. 'But,' said Mr. Corwin, 'you look fifty.' Whereat the witness answered 'During fourteen years of my life I lived in Maryland, and I don't count that.' I don't count except from the past year, 1892, the four hundredth anniver- sary of the discovery of America. I intend to live for more than half a century, and at the end of that half a century London will be trem- bling lest Chicago shall surpass her, and New York will say 'Let us go to the metropolis of America.'"
From that brilliant scene, to whose life and significance he had contributed so much, Mayor Harrison went to his beautiful home, modeled after the generous and open architecture of the south, and after his evening meal with son, daughter and a sweet woman whom he was soon to wed, he retired to an upper room for his accustomed nap. Soon the servant summoned him to see a visitor on important business, and descending to the vestibule he met the advancing figure of a young man with outstretched hand. Both from policy and tem- perament Carter Harrison never resisted the promptings of courtesy and proffered friendship, but no sooner had he held out his hand than four pistol reports echoed through the mansion and he fell bleed- ing to the floor. The man turned, ran into the street, eluded his pursuers and within an hour surrendered himself to the police. Pat- rick Eugene Prendergast, the assassin, was what is vulgarly called a "ward heeler," and in the past had done some work for the party which, he imagined, should be signally rewarded by the chief execu- tive of the city. No benefits had come to him, so he purchased a re- volver and shot the mayor to his death. A city paper, commenting on the act, says : "The assassin of Mayor Harrison is almost' an exact counterpart of that of President Garfield. A vicious system pursued to its logical conclusion poisoned the mind of a man not too wise under favorable conditions, destroyed his sense of responsibil- ity, exaggerated his ideas of the wrongs he had suffered, until to his distorted fancy murder seemed not a monstrous remedy for his imag- inary injuries." As the murder of President Garfield hastened the inauguration of the merit system in the civil service of the general government, so did the assassination of Mayor Harrison emphasize the evils of the spoils system as entrenched in the civil service of
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Chicago: Mayor Harrison was twice married, his first wife, who died in Europe in 1876, being Miss Sophy Preston, a lady of distin- guished southern family. Their son, the present Carter H. Harrison, whose education and training were parallel to those of his father, was also mayor of Chicago for four successive terms-elected in 1897, 1899, 1901 and 1903. The two cases furnish a unique illus- tration of personal strength and family popularity in the history of municipal politics in the west.
Vol. I-9.
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Educational Influences and Institutions
It was to be expected that a city of so democratic a spirit as Chi- cago would show marked and original development in its public edu- cational system, whose remarkable outward growth has been con- sidered as but a natural index of its general advancement. It seems a prodigious stride from half a thousand scholars and half a dozen teachers, in the early forties, to nearly a third of a million pupils and six thousand teachers of the present. But the sixty intervening years has made such a magical transformation of Chicago as a whole that the special strides of its public school system are merged in the gran- deur of the general forward movement. The same is true, in large measure, of those independent influences and institutions, which have tended toward the education and culture of the people, through their mental activities, their aesthetic tastes and their moral sensibilities.
The tendency of the intellectual and educational movements in Chicago was fixed quite early in its history; for the Lyceum, founded in 1834, and the Mechanics' Institute, organized in 1837, were de- signed to encourage the talents of the cultured, as well as to diffuse useful knowledge and found institutions for the benefit of the working classes. They both had libraries, and some of the successful agricul- tural and mechanical fairs held in Chicago during the fifties were con- ducted by the Institute. But, while such destructive forces as the panic of 1857 and the fire of 1871 all but scattered the Mechanics' Institute, the Chicago Lyceum passed its library and its good will into the keep- ing of the Young Men's Association, and the movement thus inaugu-" rated developed, in about a quarter of a century, into the great public library of Chicago. Organized in 1841, the Young Men's Associa- tion first opened a reading room at the northwest corner of Lake and Clark streets, the nucleus of its little library being furnished by Walter CHICAGO PUBLIC L. Newberry, its first president. Prominent citizens made continuous donations to it ; the Lyceum collec- tion of 300 or 400 volumes was absorbed in 1845;
LIBRARY. the panic of 1857, which seriously crippled the Me- chanics' Institute, brought important accessions to the shelves of the Association library, and by 1866 the collection had reached 9,000 vol-
CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS R L
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umes. In 1868 the Young Men's Association was re-organized as the Chicago Library Association, both to distinguish it from the Young Men's Christian Association and to give it a name descriptive of its chief object. In its earlier years the library was supported by membership dues, voluntary contributions and the proceeds of lecture courses. The depletion of its membership as a result of the war brought acute financial embarrassment upon the association, and shortly before the fire of 1871 strenuous attempts were made both to unite with the Young Men's Christian Association and to transform the collection into a free library supported by the public revenues. So that although the fire destroyed the property and the corporation of the Chicago Library Association, it did not even retard the move- ment already under full headway for the establishment of a public library.
For from proving an obstacle to the movement, the great fire hastened the realization of a free city library and was the direct cause of its founding. The destruction of the only considerable collection of books in Chicago ( 18,000 volumes) strongly appealed to the sym- pathy of Queen Victoria and many noble men of letters in England. Thomas Hughes, then a member of parliament, led the movement among his associates to collect from the authors, publishers and book- sellers of the British Isles the nucleus of a Chicago public library, and an appeal for contributions, headed by the queen, was signed by such authors as Spencer, Carlyle, Disraeli, Gladstone, Tyndall, Tennyson, Hughes, Sir Charles Lyell and Sir John Lubbock. The responses were so prompt and generous that within a few weeks authors, socie- ties, publishers, book-sellers and libraries had contributed something like 7,000 volumes. The British Museum, Oxford University, the British government and Queen Victoria personally were well repre- sented in the list of donors. The Queen contributed "The Early Years of the Prince Consort," with her autograph appended to the inscrip- tion "Presented to the city of Chicago toward the formation of a pub- lic library, after the fire of 1871, as a mark of English sympathy, by her majesty, Queen Victoria." In January, 1872, prominent citizens of Chicago held a meeting in old Plymouth church to discuss the enterprise, at which Mayor Medill presided and Thomas Iloyne was appointed chairman of a committee to prepare a free library bill and present it to the legislature. This measure became a law March 7,
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1872, although there is some dispute as to whether the Hoyne bill was the first one introduced into the Illinois legislature for the estab- lishment of free libraries in the state. As the books were received from England, they were stored in an iron tank, around which was built the temporary city hall, or Rookery, corner of LaSalle and Adams streets. In the second story of this building a public reading room was opened January 1, 1873, with addresses by Mayor Medill, President Hoyne and others, and placed in charge of William B. Wickersham, the secretary of the board. Mr. Wickersham, who died in October, 1908, had held that office continuously and was the Nestor of the officials connected with the Chicago public library.
In October of that year Dr. William F. Poole was called from Cin- cinnati, whose public library he had established and developed for the four previous years, and placed in charge of the Chicago enter- prise. His talents as a librarian had been evinced even when he was a student at Yale, when he also laid the foundation of "Poole's Index to Periodical Literature." He afterward served for thirteen years as librarian of the Boston Atheneum, whose collection was the largest in the Hub, and at the conclusion of that service established himself as an expert in the organization and management of libraries. In this capacity, during the five years which preceded his noteworthy Chicago career, he had organized, re-arranged or catalogued the Brown library at Waterbury, Connecticut, the Naval Academy library, at Annapolis, Maryland, the Newton and Easthampton libraries of Massachusetts, the Athenaeum library of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and the Cincinnati public library. He entered upon his duties in this city on the Ist of January, 1874, and retired August 1, 1887, to give the balance of his life to the founding of the Newberry library of Chicago. When the public library was first thrown open it contained about 17,000 volumes, and when Dr. Poole retired thirteen years later it had on its shelves, or in general circulation, not far from 125,000. Both scholarly and genial in temperament, a master of both the prac- tical details and the science of library administration, he received the strong support of the intelligent and wealthy men of the city, as well as of the great reading public. And while this splendid enter- prise was thus progressing under his guiding hand and brain, the services of Dr. Poole as a consultant were in demand everywhere in the United States where libraries were to be founded or improved.
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and his writings on the organization and management of public li- braries are still standards of the world. He was honored with the presidency of the American Library Association, received the degree of LL. D. from the Northwestern University, and when he passed directly from the librarianship of the city institution to that of the Newberry library he was one of the foremost of his profession in the world. At the time of his death, March 1, 1894, he had placed the latter great collection of reference literature on a practical work- ing basis, and Chicago is indebted to him more than to any other one man for the broad and free facilities now enjoyed by its people in the acquisition both of solid knowledge and intellectual culture.
From the old Rookery building the city library was removed in 1874, to rooms at the corner of Wabash avenue and Madison street ; after several years it was again transferred to the Dickey building. Lake and Dearborn streets; in 1887 to the fourth story of the new city hall on LaSalle street, and ten years later (October 11. 1897) to the magnificent structure on Michigan avenue, occupying the site of the old Dearborn park. It was erected at a cost of more than $2,000,- 000, and both in its interior embellishments and practical arrange- ments is considered one of the American models. Dr. Poole's resigna- tion occurred soon after the library had been fairly established in its city hall quarters, his successor being Frederick H. Hild, who had also entered the library service in 1874, and who had been assistant librarian for many years. Mr. Hild is still its head and during his twenty-one years of able and popular administration the library has increased three-fold, now numbering over 350,000 volumes. To fa- cilitate the delivery of books, seventy stations have been established in various sections of the city. There are also ten branch reading rooms and a branch library ( Blackstone memorial ) at Forty-ninth street and Lake avenue.
The Newberry library was founded on the munificent gift of $2, 149.000 made by the late Walter L. Newberry, who died Novem-
NEWBERRY ber 6, 1868, leaving one-half of his estate for the
LIBRARY. purpose of establishing a free public library on the north side. Various legal proceedings by the heirs made the bequest unavailable until the final decision, February, 1880, of the state supreme court in favor of the trustees of the estate.
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When Mrs. Newberry, the widow and only surviving heir, died in 1885, the executors commenced active steps to carry out the pro- visions of the will. As the larger portion of the estate was in real estate, the available fund has constantly increased in value. On the Ist of July, 1887, the trustees laid the ground work of the institution by christening it the Newberry library, and decided that its books should be for reference only and be consulted solely on the premises. Although steps were taken for the erection of a permanent building in 1888, the library occupied temporary quarters on the north side for six years. Its present site on Walton place, opposite Washington square, was the historic "Ogden block," and was selected in 1889. A massive building of gray granite was commenced in the fall of 1890 and virtually completed three years later. It is four stories in height, covers half a block, and houses books and pamphlets to the number of nearly a quarter of a million. It is particularly rich in historical and art literature. For years it also contained a large medical department, but this is now installed in the Crerar library. Dr. Poole, who had conducted the work of collecting and organizing the library through its various removals and other discouragements of the preliminary steps, lived happily to see the completed structure in all its grandeur and completeness. As his experience and thorough knowledge extended to the construction of library buildings, the Newberry structure (and to a great extent the Public library build- ing) was mainly his creation, as well as the systems by which its contents were classified and catalogued. Dr. Poole was succeeded by John Vance Cheney, the present, librarian, who, although born in New York, where for a year he was a practicing attorney, had been for seven years librarian of the San Francisco public library and a litterateur of standing before he made a reputation as a librarian. He has since increased his reputation in both fields. The president of the Newberry library is E. W. Blatchford, who was one of the original trustees of the Newberry estate. He was a personal friend of the founder and from first to last has stood by the enterprise, his ceaseless work and his wise counsel having always been esteemed as among its strongest assets.
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The third of the free public libraries to be established in Chicago was founded upon the $4,000,000 bequest made by the late John
JOHN Crerar, who died in 1889. In its formative stages the Crerar library passed through much the same CRERAR. experience as the Newberry, its advancement being retarded for two years by the efforts of the heirs to break the will. The decisions of the circuit, appellate and supreme courts sustained its validity, and the library has since steadily increased in size and working efficiency. Like the Newberry library, it is purely for refer- ence, but its collection of some 220,000 volumes and 50,000 pamphlets relate chiefly to social and physical subjects, and the natural and medical sciences. The department of medical science, long a strong feature of the Newberry library, is now a portion of the John Crerar library, being logically related to the designed scope of the latter institution. The quarters occupied by the Crerar library in the Marshall Field building have always been considered temporary, and there is every likelihood that its permanent home will be on the Lake Front and stand in Grant park as a companion piece to the Art Insti- tute and the Field Museum of Natural History.
The Chicago Historical Society is one of the oldest organizations in the city, established with the primary purpose of founding a library and contributing to the knowledge and education of the public. As its name implies, its collections of books, maps, paintings and memen-
CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
toes are designed to chiefly refer to local history, but with the expansion of Chicago front a small to a great city and from a metropolis to cosmopolis, the scope of the society which would fairly represent it broadened in proportion. Organized April 24, 1856, its original constitution allowed considerable latitude for future developments, providing for not only the collection of material illus- trating the settlement and growth of Chicago and the investigation of the aboriginal remains within the state, but for the founding of a general collection of books, manuscripts, documents, relics and an- tiquities. The most prominent citizens of Chicago were connected with it, and many of them gave it their liberal support. Walter L. Newberry, one of its earliest members, furnished a large room in a building belonging to him at the corner of Wells and Kinzie streets, and its 13,000 volumes were stored therein during 1858. The col-
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lection constantly increased during the following decade, both from local donations and outside accessions. Among its most liberal gifts was the bequest from the estate of Henry D. Gilpin, of Philadelphia, made in 1860 and rendered available in 1892, by the death of Mrs. Gilpin. The entire fund had then reached an amount exceeding $115,000, the accrued interest of $60,000 being applied toward the construction of the present building on the corner of Dearborn avenue and Ontario street. Another bequest, which greatly facili- tated the erection of the building now occupied, was that of John Crerar, one of its members, amounting to $25,000. In 1868 the Chicago Historical Society took possession of its first building, erected on the corner of Dearborn avenue and Ontario street, at a cost of $60,000. This was destroyed by the fire of 1871, with its library of 60,000 volumes, nearly 2,000 files of newspapers and many thousand valuable manuscripts, in the last named class being the original draft of President Lincoln's emancipation proclamation. Although stunned by this blow, the society gathered the nucleus of another library within the succeeding three years, only to lose it in the fire of 1874. All that was then left of its original treasures comprised a catalogue of the books, and a few portraits and records. Under the presidency of Hon. Isaac N. Arnold, the enterprise was revived and fifteen members of the society contributed funds for the erection of a temporary building on Dearborn avenue, which was occupied from October, 1877, to August, 1892, when it was demol- ished to make room for the present building. The nucleus of the society's third library consisted of about two hundred books, which were removed from the office of E. H. Sheldon, its former president and faithful patron, to the Ashland block, and after being stored there for some time were transferred to the old building on Dearborn avenue. In 1878 the society received a remarkable addition to its collections as a bequest from Mrs. Elizabeth E. Atwater, a former resident of Chicago, who died at Buffalo, New York. The so-called Atwater collection consists of books and pamphlets, medals and badges, coins and paper currency and other relics, relating chiefly to the American wars. It is one of the most unique in the country. In 1879 Miss Lucretia Pond, a parishioner of Rev. William Barry, first secretary of the society, bequeathed eight valuable lots on the -
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