Ralph Lowrie Wheaton is proud of the old walnut desk in the den of his apartment. The desk is small, designed for a schoolboy and a bit scratched, but it`s a reminder of a time long gone.
Wheaton, 80, says it`s about 175 years old and was found in a barn that had been owned by a City of Wheaton founding father, Erastus Gary, when the Wheaton family bought the property almost 60 years ago. The Wheatons established a lumber company, F.E. Wheaton and Co., on the site, at Front and Wesley Streets.
The antique desk isn`t the only reminder that he has of the nearly 60 years he lived in Wheaton (he lives in Glen Ellyn now). He has pictures of his great-grandfather Jesse and Jesse`s brother Warren, who built their tiny settlement into a city that is now home to more than 40,000 people.
Like many Midwestern communities, Wheaton was first discovered by Indians, mostly Potawatomi. The area was used for Indian hunting grounds, says Louise Spanke, assistant curator at the Du Page County Historical Museum in Wheaton. ”There`s no record of an Indian settlement.”
Indians may have been in the Wheaton area as early as 7,500 B.C., writes Carol Stream resident Jean Moore in ”From Tower to Tower,” a book on the history of Wheaton that she wrote in connection with the Gary-Wheaton Bank`s 100th anniversary in 1974.
When the Blackhawk War forced the Indians out of the Midwest in the early 1830s, white settlers, mostly from New England, made their way to what would become Du Page County.
Schoolteacher Erastus Gary discovered the farmland of Winfield Township in 1831. His brother, Methodist Episcopal minister Charles Wesley Gary, joined him shortly after his arrival, and the Wheaton brothers followed in 1837, Moore writes. Both families had left their homes in Pomfret, Conn., for the dream of a more prosperous life in the Midwest. The early white settlers developed farms on the land.
Carpenter Jesse Wheaton, Moore writes, was two years younger than his schoolteacher brother, Warren. He married Gary`s sister Orinda in 1839, the year Du Page County was established, and Warren married Orinda`s niece nine years later, the same year he was elected a state representative.
Together the Gary-Wheaton clan used their foresight to make major decisions that were critical to the community`s development.
One of these involved a railroad. In 1848 the Wheaton brothers told Chicago Mayor William Ogden and West Chicago founder John Turner they would give free right-of-way to the Galena & Chicago Union Railway if the original route were moved south to include their community. (Ogden was president of the railway and Turner served as president later.)
The Wheatons` donation, as well as additional land given by Erastus Gary, proved a boon to the community and ”insured the future of their New England town in the northern Illinois prairielands,” Moore writes. (The town was then known as Langdon, the first postmaster`s name.)
When the railroad (now the Chicago & North Western railway) came through the village in 1849, Moore writes, railroad officials hung a ”Wheaton, Illinois” sign on the depot, and that`s how the town got its name.
With the advent of the railroad, which linked Wheaton with Chicago to the east and with an increasing number of communities to the west, businesses began to open. The first commercial business, Moore writes, was a grocery opened in 1850 by Irishman Patrick Lyman that also sold whiskey and provided a bed for those traveling through Wheaton.
Horace Fuller`s general store, hotel and stagecoach office followed, as did the grain warehouse started by Erastus Gary and the Wheaton brothers, and the Wormwith blacksmith shop.
Several years after Wheaton`s Wesleyan Methodist Church was started in 1843, the Illinois Wesleyans held a conference in nearby Batavia.
”The Wesleyans decided they wanted an institution of higher learning in the Midwest where their children would receive an education more in tune with their philosophies than they were receiving in the Methodist Episcopal schools of the East,” Moore writes.
With significant land contributions and fundraising support from Erastus Gary and the Wheatons, Illinois Institute was opened in 1853. The school was renamed after Warren Wheaton in 1860 by college president Jonathan Blanchard. With 500 residents, two public schools, the college and about 200 buildings (including a hotel, 12 stores and 12 factories) in 1853, Wheaton was the hub of Du Page County. That was the year that the Wheatons filed a plat for the town`s first few blocks.
The Wheatons and Erastus Gary soon sought another feather for their community`s cap, trying to take the position of county seat away from nearby Naperville. A proposal to move the county seat failed in an 1857 county referendum but succeeded when put to the voters 10 years later.
Wheaton was incorporated as a village on Feb. 24, 1859. It was incorporated as a town in 1869 and as a city in 1891 because the powers that were assigned to these various types of municipalities varied and offered different benefits to Wheaton residents.
The main reason Wheaton was incorporated as a city was its need to issue bonds to pay for building a water system, Moore says. A fire in the business district on Front Street in 1871 and several fires in the 1880s, including one in 1885 that ”destroyed a good portion of the downtown businesses,” made the need for a water system more urgent, she says.
”The city`s water system had proved a blessing to the community in firefighting since its completion in 1894,” Moore writes.
The Chicago Aurora & Elgin electric railroad lines came to the city in 1902, and a new municipal building was constructed on West Wesley Street in 1911, Moore writes. (A parking lot is on the site now.)
As Wheaton entered the 20th Century, several local boys began making names for themselves. Erastus Gary`s son Elbert, a county judge, founded U.S. Steel in 1901; Gary, Ind., was named for him. Former Wheaton resident John
”Bet-a-Million” Gates became a steel, iron, oil and railroad magnate and founded a Texas oil company that later became Texaco.
But perhaps the most beloved of Wheaton`s famous sons is one who surfaced not long after Wheaton High School`s first official football team was formed in 1912: Harold ”Red” Grange.
”He was the most fantastic football player that they ever had in this country,” says Ralph Lowrie Wheaton, who goes by the name of Lowrie Wheaton. Grange was a senior when Wheaton was a freshman at Wheaton High School in 1921; both men also attended the University of Illinois in Urbana. Wheaton residents took the train to see Grange play college ball Downstate, he says. Grange worked in the summers carrying ice to Wheaton residents as a young man. ”The whole town was fascinated by `Red` Grange.”
Grange was recruited in his senior year at Illinois by coach and owner George Halas of the Chicago Bears. The Bears` ” `Red Grange tour` established professional football,” Wheaton says.
Grange is now 83 and a Florida retiree.
Lowrie Wheaton worked at his family`s lumber company after graduating from the University of Illinois in 1929. The firm was started in 1892 by his grandfather, Franklin Emory Wheaton, as a coal supplier. His grandfather had a law degree but wouldn`t practice because, he said, ” `I can`t be a Christian and a lawyer, too,` ” Wheaton says with a laugh.
Franklin Wheaton soon ”discovered that he needed to do something in the summertime,” so he started the lumber business, Wheaton says. It proved successful, and today Wheaton`s son, Ralph, runs the business.
Lowrie Wheaton says his city ”had just about as many things (to do) then as there are now.” He went to the movies, went on dates and drove the family car his father bought in about 1910.
The family occasionally would drive to Chicago ”just for fun,” Wheaton says. The drive via Roosevelt Road was long, and sometimes the street would flood. After one such flooding, the family started out to Chicago and his father stopped driving because he didn`t know where the street was, Wheaton says. So his aunt got out of the car, hiked up her skirt and led the way on foot, making sure the water wasn`t too deep.
Roosevelt Road ”was a beautiful road” when he was a child, Wheaton recalls. When the street was widened to two lanes about 70 years ago to accommodate the growing number of residents west of Chicago, the maple trees that his ancestors had planted were torn down, he says.
Wheaton was in grammar school at that time. He remembers when he and some friends were playing in the family barn and discovered apples buried in the grain. Wheaton and his friends gathered the apples and sold them, for 10 cents a bushel to the men who were working on Roosevelt Road, to get money to go to the movies, he says.
Wheaton later found out that the farmhands who worked Wheaton`s land had put the apples there to store them for the winter. The missing apples were thought to be stolen, he says, and he and his friends ”didn`t say anything” about their mischief.
One resident of whom many speak proudly is the late William Gamon, who served as mayor in 1917 and again from 1955 to 1958. He motorized the fire department and started the Wheaton Businessmen`s Association in the early 1900s. He also organized the Wheaton Community Association, which began sponsoring city 4th of July and Christmas events in the 1940s, says William Carlson, 71, a lifetime resident who is president of Carlson Paint and Glass Co. in Wheaton.
Carlson recalls the prosperity of the 1920s, a decade when many homes and Wheaton (Central) High School were built and the city got a movie theater equipped to run talking movies. (The former Wheaton High School is now Longfellow Elementary School.)
In the 1930s, ”Wheaton had its difficulty like the rest of the country during Depression days,” Carlson says. People couldn`t find work, and development in the community was slow. Carlson remembers that only one home was built in the city and that three banks closed (two were able to reopen soon after) in a particularly bad Depression year.
”There was some pretty good recovery in 1937 and 1938,” Carlson says. It wasn`t until after World War II that the building boom hit again. Wheaton native Jay Stream, founder of nearby Carol Stream, built many homes there, Carlson says.
As the community and Du Page County grew, municipal and county buildings were needed. The city police department headquarters was built at 119 N. Wheaton Ave. in the late 1950s, and the county jail was built on County Farm Road at about the same time. A county youth home and new county offices were built on County Farm Road in the early 1970s. A new county jail opened on County Farm Road in 1984.
Wheaton residents won`t forget the roots that were planted more than 150 years ago by Erastus Gary and Jesse and Warren Wheaton. The city plans to celebrate the 150th anniversary of its founding by the Wheatons with a yearlong celebration kicking off on the 4th of July.
”The whole town has reminders of those people,” Carlson says, referring to the names of streets, banks, churches and schools. ”There`s a lot of history based on those names.”
