Monday, October 16, 2017

Christiana and John Tillson, Illinois Pioneers.

On Saturday, September 14, 1823, John and Christiana Holmes Tillson, residents of Montgomery County in central Illinois, supervised the baking of bricks for the new chimney in their crude log cabin. While the bricks were cooling, John returned to his desk in the cabin and attended to the never-ending series of letters that were a part of his real estate business. She went to work in the kitchen and soon made enough cakes and pies to keep her "family" of six that included the brickmakers and the bricklayers satisfied for the coming week. As the day wore on, she served tea and supper to the family and to four guests; and then she climbed into the cabin's loft to make beds for her company. Finally, after their visitors were comfortably tucked in, Mr. and Mrs. Tillson prepared to go to bed themselves.
Christiana and John Tillson - Oil Paintings.
Just as they were about to lie down to enjoy a peaceful night's sleep, a loud thumping noise occurred at the kitchen door. A neighbor, Joel Wright, had come with a sick horse and asked to use the Tillson's kitchen to boil some herbs so that he might nurse the suffering animal back to health. Too tired to sleep anyway, Mrs. Tillson watched throughout the night as her husband and Wright dirtied most of her pots and pans and, incidentally, saved the horse. At dawn, Mrs. Tillson cleaned the kitchen and prepared breakfast for the crowded household. After the meal, the workers went off to spend the Sabbath with their own kinfolk, and the visitors began to leave the Tillson homestead; Judge Pascal Enos and his clerk, William Porter, went north to Springfield where they had business; W. H. Brown went south with Mr. Tillson to Bond County where they planned to catch the last of a three-day camp meeting of a group of Presbyterian ministers. Mrs. Tillson was left only with Mrs. Brown, happy to be relieved of the responsibility of caring for her husband and the endless stream of the company. At last, with a nearly empty house, she could turn to those household tasks that had piled up but that had not demanded her immediate attention, what with so many guests and a busy husband to feed and make comfortable. That evening, Christiana Holmes Tillson, well-rested and satisfied with the course of her full day's work, bore her first child, Charles.

When she first gave birth, Christiana Holmes Tillson was twenty-five years old. She would go on to have three more children, presumably with the same matter-of-factness with which she bore her first, squeezing their arrivals into a daily schedule that included nearly constant physical labor. The Tillson's' only daughter, Christiana, was born in 1838 while the couple was visiting family in Massachusetts; it was the younger Christiana who persuaded her mother to write of her early Illinois experiences. By the time she finally had the time to write about her pioneer days forty-eight years later, in 1870 Christiana Holmes Tillson had come almost to the end of a long and fruitful life. She was born to Charles and Rebecca Briggs Holmes in Kingston, Massachusetts, on October 11, 1798. Her husband John was born to John and Desire Tillson in nearby Halifax, Massachusetts, on March 13, 1796.


Immediately following their marriage in 1822, the young couple set off for new lives in Illinois where John had earlier journeyed as a land agent for Dr. Benjamin Shurtleff of Boston. Accompanied by Shurtleff's son, Milton, and Joel Wright (who would later take his sick horse to the Tillson kitchen), John had traveled in 1819 to the Edwardsville, Illinois branch of the United States Land Office to survey and record the deed for a piece of land that Shurtleff had purchased from a War of 1812 veteran. Upon his arrival in Edwardsville, Tillson secured a job as a clerk at the land recorder's office. In that capacity, he was privy to information about the condition of government land that was available both in and outside of the Illinois Military Tract between the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. While working at the land office, he bought 160 acres of arable land for himself on a tract northeast of Edwardsville on Shoal Creek (in what would become, in 1821, Montgomery County) and continued to record deeds for land speculators in the East. By 1832, Tillson had increased his land holdings to 844 acres in Montgomery County and was the proud owner and operator of a prosperous land office business. When he brought his bride to Illinois in 1822, John Tillson moved her into the log cabin that he had built on his first tract of land and where he had lived in a "Bachelor's Hall" with the younger Shurtleff and with Wright from 1819 until 1821. It is clear from her description of it in her memoir that Christiana Tillson did not find the cabin initially inviting to her eastern sensibilities; however, she made the best of the situation and lived the next five years in the cabin as the obedient wife of a prospering businessman. With few complaints about her tiring duties, she bore and cared for her children and she cooked and cleaned for the various combinations of people who composed the Tillson household including the female servants who worked for the family over the years. In her spare time, Christiana Tillson also helped her husband to keep up with his business correspondence and kept his general store when he was away from the homestead. In 1823, while his family remained in the cabin, John Tillson built another log structure in the new village of Hillsboro, where he also opened a brickyard. He was appointed the first village postmaster, an office for which he was especially suited since he had been serving as Montgomery County postmaster since 1821. In 1824, the Tillson's began construction of a brick home in Hillsboro and they planned to move into it in the spring of 1826 but construction delays did not permit occupancy until 1827.


The Tillson's lived in Montgomery County for three decades. Over the years the family prospered and grew to become one of the most influential in Hillsboro. John Tillson's business, the New York and Boston Illinois Land Company, was so successful by the 1830s that he took on a partner and opened a branch office in Quincy. With an increasing amount of his business being handled out of his Adams County office, Tillson began to spend more and more time in Quincy. In 1837, he built the Quincy Hotel and gave nine thousand dollars to support Illinois College in Jacksonville. In 1843, the Tillson family moved to Quincy where the children grew to maturity and formed families of their own. John Tillson died suddenly of "apoplexy" on May 11, 1853, while on a business trip to Peoria. Christiana Tillson lived for two more decades; she died in New York City on May 29, 1872.


Christiana Holmes Tillson had been in poor health for the four years preceding her death but, in 1870, her daughter had convinced her to write the story of the family's early years in Illinois. The result was Reminiscences of Early Life in Illinois, by our Mother, privately published in 1872 (or 1873) in Amherst, Massachusetts. The memoir is one of only a few sources that document the role that women played in the settlement of Illinois. The Reminiscences would have remained obscure-very few copies were printed and less than ten exist today had it not been for the efforts of editor Milo Milton Quaife and the R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company of Chicago, who printed it in 1919 as "A Woman's Story of Pioneer Illinois." Christiana Holmes Tillson's memoir of pioneer Illinois was Quaife's fourth work for Donnelley and the seventeenth of the Lakeside Classics series. A Woman's Story was recently republished by Southern Illinois University Press.


Readers of the memoir should remember that Christiana and John Tillson were typical Illinois pioneers; they were certainly wealthier than many, but so were most of the people who moved to the frontier during the nineteenth century since such a journey was always an expensive proposition. Just like millions of other Americans, they were born in the eastern part of the United States and migrated, as young adults, to the West. Just like many other people of their time, the Tillson's worked very hard to build better lives for themselves and for their children. Just like countless other Americans, they struggled with the political and moral issues of their day, and it does not appear from her memoir that Christiana Tillson thought of her life or her experiences as unusual. In fact, her honest manner and her exceedingly low-key delivery give the book its charm.


The book, though, is remarkable in the way that it illustrates the drama of everyday life in the early nineteenth century and in the way that it depicts a time when the lives of typical Americans were so different from our own. It is also remarkable in that it intimately reveals, to the modern reader, an era in which ordinary people lived through extraordinary times. Whether she realized it or not, Christiana Tillson wrote of an age in which the United States was on the verge of tremendous economic, social, and political change. In 1820, the people of the United States viewed their surroundings through a very narrow lens, but by 1870, America would become a country in which citizens could appreciate the possibilities and the opportunities of a modern world. So, although "A Woman's Story of Pioneer Illinois" appears to be a simple story of one family's experience of frontier Illinois, it is really a book about a nation that was about to come of age. Christiana Tillson did not give much information about her husband's business ventures. She wrote about his extensive travel in Illinois and mentioned that she helped him with his correspondence, but she told little else about how he made his living. In fact, she is so circumspect that the reader might wonder whether Christiana Tillson sought to hide the details of her husband's profession. In actuality, John Tillson did not conduct his business in secrecy and his career was fairly representative of many men who dealt with real estate in the first half of the nineteenth century. He rode the crest of the speculative land wave for nearly twenty years and made a small fortune in the process, but, when the wave broke in the late 1830s, John Tillson nearly drowned.


His career mirrored the development of the land business in Illinois. In the early 1820s, he represented individual eastern investors. He traveled throughout eastern Missouri and western Illinois to find the best land deals for his clients in Massachusetts. From June of 1820 until November of 1821 he made a series of jaunts into the bounty lands of Missouri and Illinois, keeping a journal along the way. It describes the land over which he rode and records his impressions of the people he encountered. On November 22, 1821, he and Joel Smith (who Tillson claimed he took with him "on account of his company and the advantage he would be to me with his gun by killing game so as to prevent starvation") met a band of Kickapoo near the Illinois River. He wrote that "they treated us very civilly, and asked us to eat with them." Two days later, the two travelers stayed near Lewistown with Osian M. Ross, whom Tillson described as a quiet, industrious, entertaining man; he also noted that Ross was a Yankee, "or a New Yorker which is nearly the same thing."

The entries in Tillson's pocket diary record various landholdings owned by eastern investors. The pages are shown here record the property in Fulton and Knox Counties belonging to S. and M. Allen. The map shows Township 14 North Range 7 East and the property owned by Peter H. Schenck. If this notation is correct, the land is in present-day Osceola Township in Stark County.
Tillson was hired as the agent for the New York and Boston Illinois Land Company in 1836 and, in that capacity, represented a group of stockholders in New York and Philadelphia. As its agent, Tillson handled huge sums of cash sometimes as much as twenty thousand dollars for the company, which was worth two million. He spent many days in Vandalia, the state capital until 1839, paying the company's taxes and lobbying for the Illinois legislature to give land grants to railroad companies; the railroads, he reasoned, would increase the value of the land company's holdings by attracting settlers and by providing cheap transportation for agricultural goods. Tillson urged the officials of the company to invest five hundred thousand dollars in government land along the route of a prospective railroad between the Wabash River and the Mississippi River. Hoping to profit personally, he convinced the legislature to charter the Alton, Wabash & Erie Rail Road Co. to run through Hillsboro, and was named a commissioner of the railroad.

During the next year, however, John Tillson's world began to come apart. He was caught, like so many other investors and agents who profited from the great land boom of the 1830s, in the great Panic of 1837. The panic, in its turn, caused a nationwide depression that ruined businessmen across the country. In October 1836, President Andrew Jackson declared that after September 1 only specie would be received in payment for the sale of public lands on the frontier. This Specie Circular was issued in response to the increasing number of bank and personal notes that the federal government was acquiring in payment for the land. The banks, many of which had very easy lending policies, did not control the number of notes that were issued to borrowers and did not keep cash on hand to back them. The President's actions caused an even larger rush but only in the short run. The eastern capitalists eventually felt the pinch of scarce money and pulled back their investments. By the middle of 1837, land sales had declined across the Midwest; in a letter to Robert Rankin, the secretary of the land company in New York, Tillson rationalized that sales had fallen off in his two offices because "sales in the summer months will always be small, [because] at that period of time farmers have but little money on hand." It soon became clear that he was only fooling himself. Sales continued to plummet.


Then in January 1838 Tillson and the company were hit with another crippling blow. The Illinois legislature declared that land titles would no longer be issued when proof of ownership was determined through tax payments (tax titles). Owners would now have to present deeds to show that they owned their land before they could obtain titles. And since the New York and Boston Illinois Land Company had not usually acquired deeds from sellers, Tillson could no longer sell much of its land. The company was stuck with thousands of acres for which taxes had to be paid but for which it had no titles. Finally, in March 1839, the Illinois General Assembly passed a special bill that would decrease the company's tax liability by half and would buy it out for six hundred thousand dollars. Tillson had convinced the legislators to pass the law by promising to include the Quincy House Hotel as part of the deal, even though he was the sole owner of the establishment. Afterward, his life would no longer be as fast-paced, and he would never again cut the same figure in the community. He continued as an agent for a much smaller Illinois Land Company until his death in 1853 at the age of fifty-seven.


John Tillson was a typical, albeit tragic, example of a middle-class man of the early nineteenth century. And Christiana Tillson was a typical woman of the same period. However, in many ways, the life that she portrays does not fit the pattern that present-day readers might expect of a middle-class woman of the nineteenth century. She was, after all, a contemporary of Queen Victoria of England, and one might think that she and women like her would have been a little more ladylike. However, history shows us that while many women lived in the Victorian age, they were not "Victorian women." When, in 1870, Tillson wrote of her early days in Illinois, she described a life of comparative isolation and of constant physical labor. In this respect, she was speaking for most women of her time. Since the overwhelming majority of American women (and men) lived on farms throughout the nineteenth century, their lives were filled with work about which most, like Tillson, rarely complained.


The Tillson's were a bit unusual, however, in at least one respect; they had only four children. It is true that birth rates were falling in the nineteenth century as the American population grew more urban, but the Tillson family, completed in 1838, was even below the average of five and one-half children in 1860. It is impossible to tell whether Christiana Tillson suffered any miscarriages during the years of her fertility. There appears to have been sufficient space in between the births of her children for her to have become pregnant many more times; she bore her children in 1823, 1825, 1831, and 1838. However, there is another possible explanation that, if correct, would put John and Christiana right back into their roles as typical Americans of their time. They might have been practicing some sort of birth control to limit the size of their family. That part of their personal lives, however, will have to remain a mystery to us; and rightly so.


Whatever explains the small size of their brood, it remains clear that the Tillson's were people of their time. However, in her memoir, Christiana Tillson leaves the impression that she wished she was not so typical in one area of her pioneer life. Writing in 1870, just five years after the nation had gone through the agony of the Civil War, she was clearly not comfortable with the family's personal history with African-Americans and slavery. Her story about the lives and legal fate of two people named Lucy and Caleb (who might have been held by the Tillson's in slavery) smacks of both rationalization and racism. But it is difficult to distinguish her ambiguous views about slavery that she expressed in her twilight years from those she might have possessed in the 1820s.


It is not surprising that the Tillson's would be ambiguous about slavery since the people of Illinois continuously dealt with and debated the issue during the first half of the nineteenth century. As a part of the old Northwest Territory that was carved out by the Confederation Congress in 1787, Illinois was, theoretically, to be free of slavery when it became a state in 1818.


However, because many of the early European settlers in the state were French and owned slaves, the Illinois Constitution of 1818 called for the protection of existing slavery and allowed the introduction of new slaves for specific purposes and for short periods of time. As a result, people were held in legal bondage in Illinois until the Constitution of 1848 finally made it illegal. Until then, a slave owner in a southern state was permitted to take slaves into Illinois and continue to hold them in bondage. The Tillson's may have purchased Lucy and Caleb from such a slaveowner.


Christiana and John Tillson were from Massachusetts, and one might suppose that they would have a totally different attitude about slavery and African-Americans than that of their southern neighbors. In A Woman's Story, Christiana Tillson wrote of southerners in a way that was, to say the least, grudgingly respectful. She referred to them as "white folks," drew amazingly detailed and amusing character portraits of them, and contrasted their habits with those of "Yankees." It is clear that she did not consider herself or her husband to be in the same class as their southern neighbors, even though they socialized, worshipped, and did business with them. It is difficult, however, to distinguish her prejudices and attitudes of the 1820s from those of 1870 when she wrote about them. Perhaps it is good enough to say that they were probably not the same.


By writing her Reminiscences of Early Life in Illinois, by our Mother, Christiana Holmes Tillson hoped her children and grandchildren might better remember their family's story. She must have sensed that she and other pioneers had lived through a time in which the traditional American way of life had irreversibly changed. She did not, however, realize that with the republication of her remarkable story as "A Woman's Story of Pioneer Illinois," the twists and turns of history have allowed all of us to remember, too.

John Tillson died on May 12, 1853, in Peoria, Illinois; and Christina Holmes Tillson died on May 29 1872 in New York City (Manhattan), New York.

Compiled by Neil Gale, Ph.D.


NOTES: 
John Tillson - Civil War Union Brevet Brigadier General. Served in the Civil War first as a Captain in the United States Regular Army, then as Colonel and commander of the 10th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. He was brevetted Brigadier General, US Volunteers on March 10, 1865. After the war, he served briefly in the Regular Army (resigning in 1866 with the rank of Captain), and served in the Illinois State Legislature. General John Tillson wrote an important early history of Quincy entitled, "History of the City of Quincy, Illinois."

Christiana Holmes Tillson - In her book, "A Woman's Story of Pioneer Illinois," left a rare and rich narrative of her family's early years in Illinois. Her commentary has unintentionally left us with a significant historical document that reflects a microcosm of Illinois in 1822-1827. As a well-educated New England woman, born in Massachusetts on October 11, 1798, she married John Tillson in October 1822 and immediately set out with him for her new life in the small log cabin he had built in Montgomery County located in southern Illinois. The focus of her writing is in detailing her trip to the frontier and the first few years of her life here.


She wrote her memoirs late in life (1870) to depict for her daughter the dramatic changes in society since her pioneer experiences. The manuscript she left provides a unique glimpse into her struggles as a pioneer housewife. Abundant anecdotal stories enliven the portrayal of life as she encountered it and enrich the reader with another dimension of frontier history from a woman's viewpoint.


The Tillson's are buried in their family plot on the south ridge of Woodland Cemetery in Quincy, Illinois.



Read Christiana Holmes Tillson's memoirs, "A Woman's Story of Pioneer Illinois." It's in my Digital Research Library of Illinois History®. Published 1919

Read General John Tillson's book, "History of the City of Quincy, Illinois." It's in my Digital Research Library of Illinois History®. Published 1880

Sunday, October 15, 2017

The Busy Bee Restaurant, 1546-50 North Damen Avenue in Chicago, Illinois (1913-1998).

One of my Dad's offices (he was an optometrist) was on the ground floor of the Tower building at North, Milwaukee, and Damen Avenues in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago.
He knew the owner of the Busy Bee Restaurant, Sophia Madej, very well. She would stop by his office and give my Dad the homemade soup of the day (the beet borscht was to die for), a few dozen different kinds of Pierogi's, and sometimes some other Polish specialties Sophia made that day as a care package for my Mom. I loved the Busy Bee because Sophia treated me just like her own family, perhaps even better.
The restaurant had numerous visits by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton, both Mayor Daley's, Senator Edward Kennedy, and lots of other local big-wig political figures. Walk-in and most likely there were some big sports stars eating there. With so many recognizable people eating at the restaurant, Officers Bill Jaconetti (right) and Al Kohl (left) stopped in many times a day (their beat) to check on Sophie and the Busy Bee restaurant.
The Busy Bee has been a Near Northwest Side mainstay since 1913 when the area was predominantly Polish, and the restaurant was known as the Oak Room. No one knows for sure when the restaurant was renamed, but it was long before the Madej's bought it in 1965. The restaurant closed in June 1998.
VIDEO
The Closing of the Busy Bee Restaurant.

INDEX TO MY ILLINOIS AND CHICAGO FOOD & RESTAURANT ARTICLES.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

The History of the Village of Hecker, Illinois and Civil War Colonel, Friedrich Franz Karl Hecker.

The Village of Hecker had its beginnings first as the town of Freedom, with the first house built in 1849. Hecker, located at the intersection of Illinois Routes 156 and 159, is on the eastern tip of Monroe County.
In 1895, due to the discontent of the citizens of Freedom, with the muddy roads and lack of sidewalks, they decided to incorporate. Because there was already a town named Freedom in Illinois, the U.S. Post Office requested another name for the village.

Hecker, as it is known today, was named for Colonel Friedrich Franz Karl Hecker (1811 B Born: Angelbachtal, Germany and buried in Summerfield Cemetery, Summerfield, Illinois in 1881), a German lawyer, politician and revolutionary. He was one of the most popular speakers and agitators of the 1848 German Revolution (aka: the Hecker Uprising)[1].

His arrival in America saw a huge reception. He settled in Summerfield, Illinois, just outside St. Louis, Missouri. Then, in 1861 he enlisted as a Private in Franz Sigel's 3rd Missouri Volunteer Infantry.
The Hecker Farm in Summerfield, Illinois.
He had assembled a regiment consisting of German and Jewish soldiers as a Union Army Colonel in the 24th and later on the 82nd Illinois Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War. He was severely wounded at the Battle of Chancellorsville while carrying the battle flag during a charge on Confederate positions.
Colonel Hecker during the American Civil War.
Hecker owned a farm near Summerfield in adjacent St Clair County. Because of Col. Hecker's personality, courteous dealings and intellect, the people of Freedom decided to name their village after him.

Hecker died in 1881 and was buried in Summerfield, Illinois.


[1] 1848 German Revolution / The Hecker Uprising - The Hecker uprising was an attempt by Baden revolutionary leaders Friedrich Hecker, Gustav von Struve, and several other radical democrats in April 1848 to overthrow the monarchy and establish a republic in the Grand Duchy of Baden (The Grand Duchy of Baden was a state in the southwest German Empire on the east bank of the Rhine. It existed between 1806 and 1918). The main action of the uprising consisted of an armed civilian militia under the leadership of Friedrich Hecker moving from Konstanz in the direction of Karlsruhe with the intention of joining with another armed group under the leadership of Georg Herwegh there to topple the government. The two groups were halted independently by the troops of the German Confederation before they could combine forces. The Hecker Uprising was the first large uprising of the Baden Revolution and became, along with its leader, part of the national myth.

Saturday, October 14, 2017

French & Indian War Encampment at Fort de Chartres in Prairie du Rocher, Illinois on Oct. 14, 2017.

The Fort de Chartres French & Indian War Encampment is this weekend in Prairie du Rocher, Illinois.
It's about historically dressed Native American, soldier, militia, and camp followers re-enactors that participate in everyday camp activities and military drills in the 1750s style. It was a small gathering of perhaps 60 re-enactors.

I visited this morning and captured some excellent photographs. 

A canoe used as the base for a "lean-to" tent.




Photographs © Neil Gale, Ph.D.

Fort de Chartres (1720-1763) / Fort Cavendish (1765-1772) and the Village of Nouvelle Chartres.

Fort de Chartres is located on Illinois Route 155, four miles west of Prairie du Rocher, Illinois. The site marks the location of the last of three successive forts named "de Chartres," built by the French during their eighteenth-century colonial occupation of what is Illinois today.

Initially, the Illinois Country was under the jurisdiction of the Canadian province of Quebec, but in 1717, it was transferred as a district to the province of Louisiana. The first commandant of the Illinois Territory was Pierre Duque Boisbriant, who arrived in December of 1718 with orders to govern the country and erect in the Mississippi Valley a bastion to forestall possible aggressions of the English and Spanish as well as to protect the settlers from hostile Indians. With eagerness, he started to build the most pretentious in the chain of forts along the Mississippi River.

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The word "Mississippi" comes from the Ojibwe Indian Tribe (Algonquian language family) word "Messipi" or "misi-ziibi," which means "Great River" or "Gathering of Waters." French explorers, hearing the Ojibwe word for the river, recorded it in their own language with a similar pronunciation. The Potawatomi (Algonquian language family) pronounced "Mississippi" as the French said it, "Sinnissippi," which was given the meaning "Rocky Waters."

The First Fort
Fort Chartres was the creation of the Company of the West, or Mississippi Company, which was organized by the celebrated John Law in August 1717, immediately after the surrender by the Sieur Antoine Crozat (Crozat, marquis du Châtel, the French founder of an immense fortune, was the first proprietary owner of French Louisiana, from 1712 to 1717.) of his patent and privileges in Louisiana to the French crown. It was named Fort de Chartres, presumably in complement to the Regent of France, from his son's title, the Due de Chartres. This commercial company and its early successor, the Royal India Company, held away in the province of Louisiana, of which Illinois formed a part for fourteen years.

On February 9, 1718, three ships of the Western Company – the Dauphin, Virilante, and Neptune – arrived at Dauphin Island with officers and men to take possession of Louisiana. On one of these vessels, or on the frigate La Duchesse de Noailles, which arrived at Ship Island on March 6, came Pierre Duque de Boisbriant, a French Canadian, who had been commissioned first king's lieutenant for the province of Louisiana, and who was the bearer of a commission appointing his cousin, LeMoyne de Bienville, governor and commandant general of the region, in place of M. L'Epignoy's removal.

In the early part of October 1718, Lieutenant Boiabriant, with several officers and a considerable detachment of troops, departed by bateau (boats) from Biloxi, through lakes Pontchartrain and Maureeas and up the Mississippi to regulate affairs in the Illinois County and to establish a permanent military post for the better protection of the French inhabitants in their northern district of the province. Arriving at Kaskaskia late in December of that year, he established his temporary headquarters, which was the first military occupation of the village. This, however, was continued for only about 18 months.

Having selected a convenient site for his post, some 18 miles northwest of Kaskaskia, de Boisbriant brought a large force of mechanics and laborers to work in the forest.

This palisaded log fortification, completed in the spring of 1720, covered 1¾ square miles and was located on the Mississippi River about sixteen miles northwest of Kaskaskia. It served as the company's headquarters and the civil, military, and marine government authority of the Illinois Territory (1809-1818). Its erection was meant to pursue three economic goals set by the company: to facilitate the fur trade, to kick-start lead mining, and to develop regional agriculture.

The company decided to build the new fort between two villages, should they ever need to quickly intervene in either place: Cahokia to the north, Kaskaskia to the south. Its construction, led by Captain Pierre Dugué, sieur de Boisbriant and first lieutenant of the king, was pretty rudimentary. Its shape was rectangular with two diagonally opposed bastions. Its wooden palisade, measuring about 190 feet on each side, was surrounded by a dry moat. This fort contained only three buildings, lodging about one hundred men.

The fort stood on the alluvial bottom (sand, silt, clay, gravel, or other matter deposited by flowing water, as in a riverbed, floodplain, or delta. Alluvium is generally considered a young deposit in terms of geologic time.) about 3/4 of a mile from the Mississippi River and near to an older fort that had been erected by the adventures under Crozat. Midway between it and the bluffs on the east extend a bayou of the lake, which was supposed to add to the strategic strength of the place.

The fort was built of wood and was very large, but whether it was furnished with bastions is still being determined. It is described as a stockade fort, fortified with earth between the rows of palisades. Within the enclosure were erected the commandant's house, the barracks, the large storehouse for the company, etc., the same being constructed of hewed timbers and ship-sawed planks.

Although not a strong fortification, except against Indian attacks, it was made to answer the needs of its builders and commandants who successfully ruled here for an entire generation. Moreover, it formed an essential link in the lengthened chain of French posts stretching from eastern Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The idea of this long line of military and trading posts appears to have originated in the fertile brain of that explorer, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. Poor maintenance and frequent flooding caused this fort to be abandoned. 

Two chapels, one in Prairie du Rocher and the other in St. Philippe, were managed by the parish of Saint Anne, which, in turn, was alternately run by the Society of Foreign Missions, Jesuit, and Recollect missionaries. Unfortunately, the fort, constructed at a "musket's shot" distance from the Mississippi River, was regularly flooded by rising waters in the spring. Consequently, the first fort was only used for a few years before being replaced.

Village of Nouvelle Chartres (1720-1765)
Shortly after the completion of the fort, the Louisiana government founded a village outside of the fort that shared the same name, Nouvelle Chartres, in 1720. Contrary to New France's Fortress of Louisbourg (in Canada) or Fort Michilimackinac in today's State of Michigan, the inhabitants did not live within Fort de Chartres. Settlers from Canada and France, confident of protection, arrived and clustered near the fort. They wondered whether the native Indians could be trusted. While the local Metchagamia tribe near the fort proved to be anything but warlike, in 1729, the Natchez Indians, provoked by the tyranny and greed of the French commandant Chobart – incited a conspiracy against the French. Massacres were frequent. 

In 1736, the garrison of Fort Chartres marched against the Chickasaw Indians, who threatened to cut communications between the Illinois Country and the city of New Orleans. The focal point of this little French community of Nouvelle Chartres was the parish church of St. Anne du Fort de Chartres. Commander Jean-Jacques Macarty's census tallied the population to 198 French, 89 black slaves, and 36 panis (native) slaves in 1752. Thus, the Village of Chartres people were classed third in importance after Cahokia and Kaskaskia. The fort itself could accommodate up to 300 soldiers.

The village of Chartres disappeared shortly after 1765, making way instead for the parish of Saint Joseph in Prairie du Rocher, which still exists today.

The Second Fort
The second fort was constructed sometime around 1725. Erected near the first fort, it was a little smaller than its predecessor but included four bastions. A small chapel and a hospital were constructed outside the palisade. Just like the first fort, it often flooded. After the West India Company failed to find gold and precious minerals, the government of New Orleans took control of the region and the fort. The decrepit state of the fort forced the garrison to move to Kaskaskia in 1747.

The Third Fort
The land exploitation never yielded precious metal deposits, but the region became an important lead source. The fertile ground is favorable to agriculture.
Fort de Chartres' gate. Note that initially, the entrance faced the river, while that of the rebuilt fort faces away from it.
The Illinois Country quickly became a sort of "breadbasket to Louisiana." To protect commerce and exchanges, the colonial administration decided from then on that a more robust military presence was required in the area.
The third fort, erected in 1753
Initially, the government of New Orleans wanted to reconstruct Fort de Chartres in Kaskaskia. Founded in 1703, this community was larger than the old fort. In 1751, Governor Vaudreuil left the administrative center of Illinois, where it stood. To avoid annual floods, however, it was reconstructed about one-half mile north of the first fort under the supervision of engineer Jean-Baptiste Saucier. Construction was difficult. The lack of experienced workers and the many desertions slowed the work effort.
Furthermore, construction material was brought in from north of Prairie du Rocher, located several miles from the construction site. The cost of construction, evaluated at some $7,750,000, according to some estimates, rapidly escalated to the point where the French crown threatened to abandon the work in progress. The new governor of New Orleans, Louis Billouard de Kerlerec, assured the French minister that construction was nearly complete. In reality, the fort would only be completed in 1760.
This new fort, as would be revealed by archaeological digs, measured up to 170 feet from one bastion tip to another. According to contemporary eyewitnesses, the walls were covered by plaster, measured between 18 and 24 inches thick, and had gun loops at regular intervals. Each bastion wall contained two post-holes for cannons. All agreed that the gate was impressive and of "nice appearance." Inside the enclosure were the commander's house and that of the commissary, the storehouse, the guardhouse, and two soldier's barracks. At the heart of each bastion were the powder magazine, a bakehouse, and a prison comprised of four dungeons divided between the underground and the second floor. Philip Pittman wrote in 1764: "It is generally allowed that this is the most commodious and best-built fort in North America."

The End of the Fort
Although it was constructed out of stone, the new fort was not made to resist grand artillery fire but to withstand native sieges. Luckily, despite the apprehensions of Commander Pierre-Joseph Neyon de Villiers, Fort de Chartres was never the target of any English offensive. In theory, should Canada be lost, the head staff of the French army expected to retreat to it with a few thousand soldiers to attack Virginia and Carolina. In the end, this plan was never put into action.
After the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, officializing the French defeat at the end of the Seven Years' War, Fort de Chartres wound up in British hands. The new occupants of the fort quickly faced the same problems as their predecessors: disease, particularly malaria[1], and soil erosion. The British tried different methods to attenuate the effects of the erosion that threatened to engulf the fort. Still, maintenance costs soon exceeded the fort's worth in the eyes of British authorities. Because of the murder of the Ottawa Chief Pontiac, the British renamed Fort de Chartres – Fort Cavendish in October of 1765. The garrison thus abandoned it in 1771. After a severe flood in 1772, Fort Cavendish/Chartres was abandoned forever. One year later, the South wall and its bastions collapsed.

As for the residents of the East shore of the Mississippi, most moved onto the western shore, which was thought to be more hospitable because of the presence of a Spanish catholic government. 

From Deterioration to Valorization
Once abandoned, Fort de Chartres was only occasionally occupied by errant natives. The fort quickly deteriorated, and vegetation reclaimed the land; thus, by 1804, about thirty years after being abandoned, the presence of trees measuring 7 to 12 inches in diameter was reported within the old enclosure. The repetitive scavenging of material from the fort by the inhabitants of neighboring communities contributed to the gradual disappearance of its last remains.
The ruins of Fort de Chartres / Fort Cavendish with powder magazine intact.
In 1913, the State of Illinois purchased the nearly 20 acres of land on which the ruins lay, probably giving in to the insistence of certain history amateurs and professionals, like Joseph Wallace, who, in his 1904 article, strongly suggested the preservation of this "relic." Henceforth established as a state park, work began in 1917 to restore the Powder Magazine, the only relatively intact structure in the fort and thought to be the oldest military structure in Illinois.

The partial reconstruction of the fort, undertaken through a governmental construction program, spread over many years: the storehouse was rebuilt in 1929; the gate in 1936; the guardhouse in 1940; finally, the foundations of anything that wasn't reconstructed were covered with a layer of cement to stop erosion.

Systematic archaeological digs at Fort de Chartres were only undertaken in the 1970s and 1980s. These first digs were held following public pressure insisting that the fort be rebuilt in the most authentic way possible; thus, the North Wall was reconstructed during the 1980s on its original foundations. Essentially carried out on the site of the third fort, these digs were followed by a second archaeological search, which confirmed the location of the first Fort de Chartres.

The efforts invested in research and reconstruction guarantee Fort de Chartres' place in the heart of the Illinois Country's French heritage.

The fort site was recognized as a National Historic Landmark in 1966. The fort site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

Currently managed by the Illinois Historic Preservation Society, the site is open to visitors with access to its museum and a library dedicated to the fort's history.

Fort de Chartres State Historic Site
Powder Magazine
 

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.
Photographs copyright © Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.



[1] Malaria was a common disease in Chicagoland and southern Illinois in pioneer days, wherever swamps, ponds, and wet bottomlands allowed mosquitoes to thrive; the illness was called ague, or bilious fever, when liver function became impaired; medical historians believe that the disease came from Europe with early explorers around 1500; early travel accounts and letters from the Midwest reports of the ague (a fever or shivering fit), such as those of Jerry Church and Roland Tinkham, the details of which are extracted from their writings:

From the Journal of Jerry Church, when he had "A Touch of the Ague" in 1830: ...and the next place we came to of any importance was the River Raisin, in Michigan. There, we met with several gentlemen from different parts of the world, speculators in land and town lots and cities, all made out on paper, and prices set at one and two hundred dollars per lot, right in the woods, and musquitoes and gallinippers thick enough to darken the sun. I recollect the first time I slept at the hotel. I told the landlord the next morning I could not stay in that room again unless he could furnish a boy to fight the flies, for I was tired out myself, and not only that, but I had lost at least half a pint of blood. The landlord said he would remove the mosquitoes with smoke the next night. He did so, and after that, I was not troubled so much with them. We stayed there a few days, but they held the property so high that we did not purchase any.

The River Raisin is a small stream of water, similar to what the Yankees call a brook. I was very much disappointed in the appearance of the country when I arrived there, for I anticipated finding something great, and I did not know that I might find the article growing on trees on the River Raisin! But it was all a mistake, for it was rather a poor section of the country. ...We then passed on to Chicago, and there I left my fair lady traveler and her brother and steered my course for Ottawa in Lasalle, Illinois. When I arrived there, I put up at the widow Pembrook's, near the town, and intended to make her house my home for some time. I kept trading round in the neighborhood for some time and, at last, was taken with a violent chill and fever and had to make my bed at the widow's, send for a doctor, and commence taking medicine, but it all did not do me much good. I kept getting weaker every day, and after I had eaten up all the doctor stuff the old doctor had, pretty much, he told me that it was a very stubborn case, and he did not know if he could remove it and thought it best to have counsel. So I sent for another doctor, and they both attended me for some time. I still kept getting worse and became so delirious as not to know anything for fifteen hours. I, at last, came to and felt relieved. After that, I began to feel better and concluded that I would not take any more medicine of any kind, and I told my landlady what I had resolved. She said that I would surely die if I did not follow the directions of the doctor. I told her that I could not help it, that all they would have to do was to bury me, for my mind was made up.

In a few days, I began to gain strength, and in a short time, I got so that I could walkabout. I then concluded that the quicker I could get out of those "Diggins," the better it would be for me. So I told my landlady that I intended to take my horse and wagon and try to get to St. Louis, for I did not think I could live long in that country. I concluded I must go further south. I accordingly had my trunk re-packed and made a move. I did not travel far in a day but, at last, arrived at St. Louis, very feeble and weak, and did not care much how the world went at that time. However, I thought I had better try and live as long as possible. 

From a letter by Roland Tinkham, a relative of Gurdon S. Hubbard, describing his observations of malaria during a trip to Chicago in the summer of 1831: ...the fact cannot be controverted that on the streams and wet places, the water and air are unwholesome, and the people are sickly. In the villages and thickly settled places, it is not so bad, but it is a fact that in the country where we traveled the last 200 miles, more than one-half the people are sick; I know, for I have seen it. We called at almost every house, as they are not very near together, but still, there is no doubt that this is an uncommonly sickly season. The sickness is not often fatal; ague and fever, chill and fever, as they term it, and in some cases, bilious fever are the prevailing diseases. 

Friday, October 13, 2017

Curt Teich & Company Postcard Factory was founded in 1898 on Irving Park Road and Ravenswood in Chicago, Illinois.

Curt Otto Teich (March 1877–1974) was born in Greiz, Thuringia (modern-day Germany), and, following his family's traditional career as printers and publishers, worked as a printer's apprentice in Lobenstein. He emigrated to the United States in 1895, where he initially worked as a printer's devil[1] in New York, a much lower position than he had held in Germany.

Teich moved to Chicago, Illinois and started his own firm, Curt Teich & Company (C. T. & Co.), in January 1898.
Vintage postcard of the Curt Teich & Company Works. Few people who pass the building today realize that it once housed the largest postcard publishing company in the country.
At the peak of production, the company could print several million postcards in a single day. Curt Teich & Company operated from 1898 to 1978, and saved examples of every image they produced. 

Teich is best known for its "Greetings From" postcards with their big letters, vivid colors which had originated in Germany in the 1890s. Teich successfully imported this style for the American market.
Teich employed hundreds of traveling salesmen, who sold picture postcards to domestic residences, and encouraged business to create advertising postcards; these salesmen also photographed the businesses and worked with the owners to create an idealized image.
The company closed in 1978. In 1982, the bulk of the collection—more than 500,000 unique postcard images relating to 10,000+ towns and cities across the United States, Canada, and 85 other countries was donated by the Teich family to the Lake County Discovery Museum in Wauconda, Illinois.

In 2016 the archives was transferred to the Newberry Library in Chicago.

I own the Chicago Postcard Museum, which presents some rare and interesting Chicago postcards from my personal collection of about 8,000 cards.

Compiled by Neil Gale, Ph.D.


[1] A printer's devil was an apprentice in a printing establishment who performed a number 
of tasks, such as mixing tubs of ink and fetching type.