South Tour
Lake Michigan and railroads are central to understanding development south of downtown Chicago. Waterways and harbors have been created, straightened, reversed, and dredged to improve the transportation advantages of particular sites. Multiple rail lines crisscrossed this portion of the region by the early twentieth century.
Stephen Douglas was one of the very first to grasp the importance of the railroad to development south from Chicago. He purchased land along the proposed path of the Illinois Central Railroad, established a residence there in the early 1850s, donated land for the first University of Chicago in 1860, and surveyed two residential subdivisions. His house was torn down and the university burned, but the Illinois Central still runs through the South Side, and one of his subdivisions is still visible at 3300 S. Cottage Grove. Groveland Park (S1) consists of a center square park surrounded by residential lots, with a small guardhouse at the entrance to the private park. After the Civil War, wealthy Chicagoans like Joy Morton lived in large new houses in this area. Today only some of the residences remain, just to the north of the Stephen Douglas monument.
What began with Douglas’s investment evolved into the African American community of Bronzeville by the early twentieth century. South on King Drive, which was developed as part of the boulevard system after 1869, are large residences once home to prominent black Chicagoans, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett (3624 S. King Drive). At 51st Street, King Drive becomes the western edge of Washington Park. At 60th Street, the Midway Plaisance (S2), links Washington Park to Jackson Park. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux did the initial landscape designs for the South Parks. By 1892, both the University of Chicago and the World’s Columbian Exposition were under construction alongside and on the Midway Plaisance. The Ferris wheel and other attractions at the 1893 fair stood on the Midway, which later served as the front yard for the University of Chicago.
Further south from the Midway along Stony Island, is an area where Paul Cornell saw the industrial potentials of Grand Crossing (at 64th and State streets), where several rail lines converged by the mid-nineteenth century. Settlements in the railroad age skirted low-lying marshes and sought out transportation advantages. Early iron and steel production also took advantage of harbor and rail connections (such as the former South Works of U.S. Steel in the South Chicago neighborhood just north of the mouth of the Calumet Harbor). Some of the largest industrial enterprises in the region located in this area. The bridges over the Calumet River (including the Skyway) provide a marvelous vantage point to take in the substantial industrial region that surrounded the Lake Calumet Harbor.
At 95th Street, go west to Cottage Grove. At 111th Street and Cottage Grove, George Pullman created an industrial town between 1880 and 1884. Near both the Illinois Central Railroad and the Lake Calumet Harbor, Pullman built both a plant to manufacture and repair his sleeping cars and a town for industrial workers on low-lying land that had little value for farmers. To the north, Dutch farmers raised crops and built homes in the Roseland community along Michigan Avenue.
Only a small part of the Pullman Administration Building (S3) still stands on the northeast corner of 111th and Cottage Grove. Across the street the Hotel Florence (S4) serves as an entrance into a neighborhood which contains many of the features designed by S. S. Beman in the 1880s. The red brick of townhouses contrasts with the green stone of the one church built by Pullman, in a misguided effort at fostering interdenominational mingling.
From Pullman travel west on 115th Street and then south on Halsted (SR 1) to 154th Street and west to Harvey. South along the Illinois Central Railroad, beginning in 1889, the Harvey Land Association built a waterworks, a sewerage system, and electric works as an incentive for industry (and residents) to locate in this temperance town. In order to maintain these systems, the residents and owners of industries in Harvey incorporated as a city in 1891. The Harvey City Hall (S5), on 154th Street in downtown Harvey, which for many years housed the Thornton Township Historical Society, was the first seat of local government.
South on Wood Boulevard and South Park the combination of meandering streams (here Butterfield Creek) and a rail stop on the Illinois Central out from downtown Chicago led to a very different kind of development: golf courses. The Flossmoor Station (S6), which now houses a local restaurant, was built in 1906 by the railroad to accommodate members of the country clubs developing around the station. Golfers came in the summer months for weekends and longer getaways from the more hectic pace of the central city. By the 1920s, this recreational area was becoming a residential commuter suburb, as club members took to commuting to Chicago to their jobs instead of commuting to Flossmoor for their golf.
From the Flossmoor Train Station head north and east to South Holland, a very different nineteenth-century landscape: a farm center on the Little Calumet River founded by Dutch farmers in the 1840s. Truck farming continued in the area into the late twentieth century, but the nineteenth-century rural landscape is preserved at the Paarlberg Farmstead (S7) just north of the Kingery Expressway and east of SR 83 at 172nd Place and Paxton. The Paarlberg family came from the Netherlands in 1846. Peter and Cornelia Paarlberg established this farmstead in 1870, making additions to the house in the 1890s.
Travel east from the Paarlberg Farmstead on Bernice Road to 760 Wentworth Road in Calumet City, where the Thomas Agge Schrum Heritage Cabin (S8) draws visitors back to the 1830s. The lower portion of the cabin dates to the early 1830s, while the upper section was built in the 1860s. The Schrum family emigrated from Hamburg, Germany, in 1860 and lived in the cabin. Members of the Schrum family donated the cabin to the Calumet City Historical Society, which dismantled and rebuilt it along the banks of the Little Calumet River west of Burnham Avenue where it stands today.
East from Calumet City, our south tour moves into Indiana. The Calumet River system links sites in Illinois and Indiana despite the political divide. Hammond, with access to the Grand Calumet River (and Indiana Harbor through a short canal) as well as rail lines, grew in the second half of the nineteenth century as an industrial center with a bustling business district. A substantial stockyard and many smaller factories fueled economic growth well into the twentieth century. The Straube Piano Company (S9), off Hohman, still stands as an example of the many factories that underlay the economies of Hammond and other industrial towns in the Calumet Region.
Northeast of Hammond, the planned industrial city of Gary is now nearly a hundred years old. The U.S. Steel Company chose an undeveloped site on Lake Michigan for a large steel production center in 1906. The Gary Works (S10), still in operation today, stand north of the Indiana Toll Road (I-90) at Broadway (SR 53). South of the rail lines (and now the interstate highway), the city of Gary developed quickly. U.S. Steel laid out a town in a gridiron plan and built some housing, but most residential development was done by private speculators and builders.
South of Gary off Old Lincoln Highway (and just east of I-65) stands the Nathan Wood Gristmill (S11). A gristmill and sawmill were built here in 1838. Nathan Wood purchased the mills in the 1850s and constructed the extant brick gristmill in 1876. It is now operated as a museum and part of the Deep River Valley County Park.
Traveling northward takes us to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, operated by the National Park Service. The Bailly Homestead and Chellberg Farm (S12) are both located east of Route 49 in Chesterton, Indiana. The Bailly Homestead is located on a bluff above the Little Calumet River near the old Michigan City Road. The National Park Service has rebuilt several of the log buildings that comprised the trading post of Joseph and Marie Bailly after their arrival in 1822. The site also includes the frame Bailly House built in the 1830s during the transition from Indian to American settlement.
The Chellberg family began farming in this area in the 1860s. With the arrival of the railroad in the late nineteenth century, the family switched from grains to dairy production. The farmstead contains an 1880s farmhouse, outbuildings, and garden plots and pastures.
East along Lake Michigan, Beverly Shores was one of the last railroad towns founded in Chicagoland. Frederick H. Bartlett Company purchased 3,600 acres of lakeshore west of Michigan City in 1927. The town was sited between Lake Michigan and the Chicago, South Shore and South Bend Railroad (today the region’s only surviving electric interurban line). The developers constructed the Beverly Shores Station (S13) to transport visitors and residents back and forth into Chicago. The site was envisioned as a recreational haven, with gardens, a golf course, and a hotel. Today this resort community is surrounded by the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.
This tour south from downtown Chicago shows the great importance of industry in the development of the region. However, it also shows that even in areas of heavy industrialization, agricultural, recreational, and residential sites are still part of the mix.
