The neighborhood around Clark Street and Armitage Avenue is one of night clubs, trendy bars and restaurants and high-rise apartments skirting the heart of Lincoln Park. Because of the park, it`s a hot-ticket, high-rent area. Young, single professionals favor it as a place to live; it`s within walking distance of nightlife, jogging paths and lots of public transportation into the Loop. The intersection may be seen as the convergence of four
neighborhoods. Here the north end of Old Town, the south end of Lincoln Park and, with just a slight stretch
of the imagination, the north end of the Gold Coast and the east end of the De Paul area come together.
As quintessentially urban as any city environs that may be found anywhere, it has a delicious little quirk that adds to its ambience. Part of the neighborhood noise that wafts up to the high-rise residences comes from the Lincoln Park Zoo. Seals bark in their salt-water pool. African lions and rare Siberian tigers roar from their rocky outdoor perches. Barnyard milk cows low in their pens at the Farm-in-the-Zoo. It is a bizarre chorus of beastly voices from the far corners of the Earth mixing with the rumble of autos, buses and jet planes.
Sitting quietly amid all this, just where Armitage runs into Clark, is a handsome, if small, three-story building of gray Lake Superior granite on an inconspicuous edge of the park. It is the Chicago Academy of Sciences. Had history turned out a little bit differently, the building might have lent its name to the area, making it the ”Academy neighborhood.” Had history gone that
way, this small building would have been merely the north wing of a great, world-renowned edifice stretching for more than a city block south of Armitage along the east side of Clark.
That was the dream, formed 130 years ago this year, of the academy`s founders, who hoped to make it into a world-class scientific institution. Its great building would have housed the offices and workrooms of a host of scientists mounting expeditions to the Earth`s far corners, studying the habitats and cultures of the lands from which the zoo animals came.
As it is, Chicago has such a place. It`s the Field Museum of Natural History on South Lake Shore Drive. And, as it is, the academy`s small building is passed daily by tens of thousands of commuters on their way to and from their jobs downtown, most of them unaware of what is inside.
What is inside the academy, the city`s oldest organized scientific institution, is a small but highly informative museum of the wilderness in the Chicago area as it existed before it was tamed and settled. The museum is compact enough so that it is possible to tour it all–the ecological exhibits and the lifelike, life-sized wilderness dioramas that are perhaps unexcelled anywhere–in a leisurely two or three hours.
But the real heart of the museum is in its attic and basement. There, along narrow, jumbled aisles under bare, dim lightbulbs and exposed ductwork, sit boxes, bureaus, crates and cabinets of every conceivable size, shape and construction. They contain some 320,000 plant and animal specimens, most of them from the greater Chicago area.
In terms of sheer numbers, the academy`s collections are, in truth, pretty much small potatoes. In Illinois alone are far larger and more impressive collections, collections that number their specimens in the millions. The Field Museum`s, of course, are worldwide in scope and world-famous in value. Even the more localized collections of state flora and fauna at the Illinois Natural History Survey in Champaign-Urbana and at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle dwarf those of the academy`s in numbers and in scope.
What makes the academy different from the larger, better-endowed institutions is the age and the history of its specimens. Most of the items in the museum`s storerooms are specimens of the plant and animal life gathered from Chicago and Illinois environs between the 1850s and 1900. It is a rare and priceless gathering of the remains of all manner of living things that thrived here before the explosion of cities, towns and farms and the spread of urban and industrial pollution.
Among the academy`s treasures are 100,000 river mollusks, 15,000 plants, 40,000 each of birds and mammals, 30,000 insects, 2,000 clutches of birds`
eggs and 25,000 reptiles and amphibians. Of the plants and animals gathered in the early days of Chicago and Illinois, some are rarely seen living here anymore, their habitats forever altered or destroyed. Some are not seen at all, having been driven, like the prairie wolves, completely out of the state or, like the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet, into extinction.
We can know from books what once existed here, but in the specimens at the academy we have at hand not only a record but the actual physical remains of the plants and animals. Scientists call such material ”baseline data,”
and it can be a boon to their work.
Certain native lichens, now gone, can provide clues to research on urban air quality. Certain river mollusks, now extinct, can provide clues in research on water pollution. A 100-year-old eggshell of a bird species now threatened with extinction can provide clues of genetic alteration by pesticides. A collection of dried prairie plants gathered in what was a field 130 years ago before it became a factory site can help an ancient but surviving prairie patch elsewhere to survive and thrive.
”Biologists are interested in tracking plants and animals over extremely long periods of time,” says Lorin Nevling, former director of the Field Museum and now chief of the Illinois Natural History Survey. Nevling last year made what was probably the first outside assessment of the academy`s collections done in this century.
”The establishment of historical records through specimen collections, with dates and locations of where they were collected, can determine what kinds of changes have been taking place in an environment,” Nevling says.
”You can track through such collections such things as the introduction of a non-native weed and calculate how and how fast it spread. The academy`s plant collection is very small, but its value is very great because it is perhaps the earliest collection in existence from the Chicago region, beginning in the 1850s.”
Nevling similarly rates as ”very great” the historic worth of the academy`s collections of mollusks gathered before 1910, birds gathered before 1915 and mammals gathered between 1860 and 1930. If this collection of dusty, old specimens is extremely valuable in scientific research, it is just as valuable in tracing the social history of the city and the state. The reason the academy`s earliest specimens were collected and the way in which it was done provide a fascinating look at Chicago in its early years.
Late in the summer of 1855 the short, slight frame of Robert Kennicott alighted from a passenger train at the Illinois Central Railroad`s cavernous station at South Water Street on Chicago`s lakefront. Kennicott, then just
19, was returning home from an exhausting but exhilarating three-month trip along the railroad`s newly completed 700-mile track that stretched from Chicago south to Downstate Cairo and northwest to Dunleith, now East Dubuque. It was then the longest rail line in the world.
He was bringing home bizarre luggage–boxes and crates packed with hundreds of skins and specimens of birds, mammals, rodents, snakes and insects. A brilliant young naturalist, Kennicott had many specimens of species never before known to science.
There is no reason to believe that anybody in the station took much notice of the young man and his possessions. The station, a two-acre area covered by an arching, 66-foot-tall roof, was a dazzling place for its day and age, jammed with freight and humanity day and night. Chicago, with its 40,000 citizens, dirt streets and wooden sidewalks, was already a city of destiny, a hub and distribution center for the new world, then just opening, of the western United States.
Daily the ships of the Great Lakes arrived at the port just north of the station. Among the ships` cargo was lumber from the forests in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Some of the lumber was used to construct the booming city. But a great deal of it went straight to the Illinois Central Station and from there to the hinterlands to build the houses, churches and stores of pioneer villages springing up all over Illinois like wildflowers.
Other boats brought steel from Pittsburgh and Cleveland to the mouth of the Chicago River and fed the maw of the new McCormick reaper factory, whose output, like the lumber, flowed into the railway station and from there to the same pioneer communities all over the state.
The boats, along with the trains, also brought human cargo, the thousands of desperately hopeful settlers who were lured by the promise of cheap land in the west. To meet this demand for land, the Illinois Central Railroad opened a land office at its Chicago station and sold prime acreage along its route at easy rates.
It was a neat arrangement for the railroad. Each day its trains headed south full of settlers and all kinds of supplies and equipment. And each day the trains returned north loaded with cattle, hogs, fruits, vegetables, corn and wheat grown on the astoundingly rich Illinois soil at yields never before known to man.
The land being opened up by Illinois Central and other rail carriers in the surrounding states of the emerging Midwest represented the largest, most fertile biological environment in the world. It was still mostly untouched in 1855, but a scant 40 years later it was totally settled and subdued by man. The wealth tapped by the conversion of the Midwest from wilderness to farmland became the basis of the industrial and agricultural might that made the United States the richest and most powerful nation on Earth.
Kennicott, gathering his crates and boxes together amid the clangor of the Illinois Central depot, was a willing agent in the conquest of the land;
he was working for the railroad as a naturalist collecting and cataloging the flora and fauna along its newly opened Chicago-to-Cairo route.
Under terms of his contract with the railroad, Kennicott received free passage with privileges to stop and board the trains anywhere he wanted. The data he gathered were then used by the Illinois Central advertising department to publicize the wealth of plant and animal life on the land along its route. To write the copy for its advertising pamphlets, the railroad hired Augustus Dickens, the brother of the great English novelist Charles Dickens. The pamphlets, which were sent off to New York and New England and to Germany, Scotland, Norway and Sweden, extolled the virtues of Illinois land, available at an average cost of $10 an acre on easy credit terms.
Kennicott was born in New Orleans but grew up in the Chicago area. He was the son of Dr. John Kennicott, a prominent but semi-impoverished country doctor who worked out of his home, which he called ”The Grove,” in what is now suburban Glenview. Dr. Kennicott was an amateur horticulturist and editor of the Prairie Farmer, a weekly publication out of Chicago that dispensed invaluable agricultural advice to the growing hordes of pioneer families pouring into the Middle West.
Young Robert, sickly all his life, was educated mostly at home by his father, who also instilled in his son a love of nature and the outdoors, teaching him, for instance, how to drape himself in deerskins to creep up on the wildlife that abounded near The Grove. As a boy Robert enjoyed such sights as a single flight of millions of passenger pigeons, collected and skinned the carcasses of exotic green Carolina parakeets, gathered the eggs of whooping cranes, thrilled to the soar of the bald eagle, witnessed the ferocity of the peregrine falcon.
As Kennicott grew into his teens, his quick, incisive mind and his talent for natural history began to make an impression on others. His father sent him off to Cleveland and to Kenosha to study under more formally trained naturalists. At 17 he became a protege of Spencer Fullerton Baird, then assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and a 19th Century giant in natural history.
When the chance of the railroad expedition came along, Kennicott leaped at it. Because it allowed him to collect specimens for the Smithsonian and himself, it was an opportunity to make a wider name for himself and his work. Eager to get specimens from the largely uncharted state, his mentor, Dr. Baird, supplied Kennicott with letters of introduction and the necessary supplies and equipment–nets, knives, bottles, boxes and chemical
preservatives. Kennicott, in turn, was excited by the prospect of discovering still unknown species and perhaps attaching his own name to their scientific nomenclature.
The young naturalist satisfied his goals, sending a set of invaluable specimens to the Smithsonian and keeping duplicates for his personal collection. While he traveled, he recruited anyone he could find in the pioneer towns and villages who showed an interest in biological sciences to help him collect specimens. As Baird and his assistants in Washington pored over the young naturalist`s specimens, names like kennicottiana, kennicotti and kennicottii began to appear in the nomenclature of newly discovered species.
Through articles he wrote for Prairie Farmer, Kennicott tried to interest farmers in studying the impact of farming on native wildlife. He was disturbed by the way homesteaders regarded wildlife as dangerous pests and enemies of their livestock and crops.
Rather than killing the foxes, coyotes and snakes and driving off the owls and hawks in the interest of farming, he argued that these animals should, in fact, be preserved. They were natural predators that reduced the rodent populations that would wreak even greater havoc on the emerging farms. In 1856 he produced a landmark report for the federal government on the mammals of the Northwest Territory that detailed the benefits of wildlife to farmers.
In the spring of 1857 Kennicott was hired by the infant Northwestern University in Evanston to make a second trip through the state. The university wanted to start its own natural-history collection, and Kennicott happily complied, collecting again for himself and the Smithsonian as well as Northwestern.
His experiences on the two Illinois expeditions were enough to set the pattern of the rest of his life. Having
gone through several false starts at medical school, he gave up medicine for good after the second expedition. The two years of traveling and writing had transformed him from an awkward, insecure youth to a man with his own agenda. He had become confident enough to hold his own with learned men in the intellectual circles of city life and had proven to himself that he could survive the rigors and dangers of wilderness life.
The frontier was a risky place for an intellectual youth as physically frail as Kennicott. There was the danger of incurring illness or serious injury far from trained medical help. There was the danger of running into bad weather, carnivores and poisonous snakes. And there was the danger of encountering the meanest of creatures, the hard-bitten frontiersman who didn`t like intellectual, citified weaklings. Kennicott wrote to Baird during his 1857 trip that occasionally he had had to rely on quick wits to fend off such perils, particularly the last.
At one time, anxious to get as many specimens as he could out of the marshy forestlands near Cairo, he offered a $2 prize to whichever of the local youth brought him the largest collection of the day. The area, then one of the oldest, longest-settled areas of the state, was populated by rough and rugged backwoods families who had migrated to the region from Tennessee and Kentucky in the 1790s. For unknown reasons but as a matter of local pride, they called themselves ”suckers” and were not particularly open to strangers.
”A big loafer went out with us,” Kennicott recounted in a letter to Baird. ”He didn`t get the prize offered for the best collection–was mad and pretended I was unfair. I invited him to `dry up` on that, but he threatened harder and threatened to whip me. He was a big fellow–I am small and pretty much a coward, in fact.
”But when I was scared, having in mind to let the fellow have his demand, I remarked to the boys I would show them the length of a copperhead`s teeth. I was carrying one alive in a snake bag, intending to skin it. I took him out, and holding him by the neck so he could not hurt me possibly, I held him till he opened his ugly mouth and showed his fangs. My fighting assistant stared aghast and for the time `dried up` his bluster.”
The most awe-inspiring thing Kennicott saw as he poked through the state, however, was a spectacle no man will ever see again. It was the prairie.
The great American prairie once swept for tens of thousands of square miles, running west from Ohio through Nebraska and south from Canada to Texas. On it were big bluestem, little bluestem, Indian grass and switchgrass rising 5 and 6 feet tall–a stupendous, waving sea of flowering vegetation. It was an incredibly pristine environment so robust that no weeds and only a few trees could find room on it.
Interspersed with the grasses were woody shrubs–redroot, sumac and prairie rose. A host of other plants, too, laced themselves into the prairie fabric–sunflowers, goldenrod, wild onions, mints and lilies, which, each in its own season, made the prairie one immense tapestry of riotous color.
