Do people settle in Du Page County or do they merely alight, staying just long enough to join the Newcomers Club and throw the Board of Education’s boundary studies into confusion? The 1990 census revealed that 27 percent of the people in Du Page County had lived here five years or less. With that in mind, real estate agents advise prospective buyers to consider resale value for the same reasons a lawyer advises the affianced to consider a pre-nuptial agreement: Separation is highly probable.
But not everyone is a transient. Among us are families who’ve stayed here generations, some continuously since the area was first settled, shortly after the Black Hawk War of 1832 cleared the area of Indians.
These longtime residents can give us a sense of continuity, not only through their family ties to the area but through their own memories. They all know that history is made not only of famous people, treaties and diplomacy but by small details, unimpressive in themselves, that reveal a way of life.
Don Wehrli’s family has been in Naperville ever since his great-grandfather Joseph Wehrli came to Naperville from Alsace-Lorraine in the 1840s. Don’s wife, Jean, comes from settler stock, too. Her family, the Knochs, came from Alsace-Lorraine at almost the same time. And of their seven children, six are still living in Naperville.
Dorothy Graue of Elmhurst also claims pioneer heritage. Her great-grandfather Frederick Graue built the Graue Mill in Hinsdale, and her mother was a Marquardt who grew up on a farm that is the present site of Marquardt School in Lombard.
Alben “Pete” Bates is fourth generation Elmhurst. His great-grandfather Gerry Bates settled there in 1842. He was the postmaster and a tavern owner and is often referred to as the founder of the town in recognition of his organizational abilities. Bates’ grandfather was one of the town’s first doctors, and his great-uncle Henry Glos was a banker and prominent citizen who built the impressive Romanesque stone house that now serves as the Elmhurst Historical Museum.
Lucille Bush, formerly of Downers Grove and now of Lombard, descends from the Stanleys and the Bushes, who both came to Downers Grove in covered wagons in the 1830s, finding only a sprinkling of three cabins.
Ann Pritchard’s folks came later, arriving in Glen Ellyn from downstate Illinois in 1892, but she still lives in Glen Ellyn, where she was born in 1900, when the town and the county were at the peak of their Victorian glamor.
Wehrli, born in 1928, remembers Naperville as a farming town with a population of only 4,000 or 5,000. The town was mostly German and mostly farmers, ethnic diversity being provided by the lone Chinese man who laundered white shirts.
“The success of Naperville is based on the spade work that was done years ago by our fathers and grandfathers,” Wehrli said. “They set up a good community, well-organized, and other people would see how nice it was and would stay.”
So many Wehrlis stayed that the family holds a twice yearly get-together, which draws about 100 family members. And Don’s daughter Mary Lou regularly publishes a professional-looking family newsletter.
Don grew up in the Pre-Emption House, a tavern and inn that was torn down in 1946 and is now being reconstructed on the grounds of Naper Settlement, where it will serve as the visitor orientation center.
“My grandfather bought it in 1893. After the war, no one wanted something old. There was no interest then in preserving it, especially the way the business area was developing.”
When he lived there, the inn was no longer operating, “but the tavern was active. We could hear the jukebox at midnight on a Saturday night. All the farmers would come in on Saturday night with their families for chicken and coleslaw.”
Money was tight for the Wehrlis, and Don shined the shoes of tavern patrons for 10 cents a pair. The building was cold in the winter, with no insulation or storm windows. Don remembers ice a quarter-inch thick on the inside of some windows. The family paid for its gas heat by feeding quarters to a meter in the basement, and his brother rigged up a form in which they froze water in the shape of a slug. The ice would trigger the gas, then melt, leaving no evidence (except rust) for the meter man to find.
Then, as now, the West Branch of the Du Page River was the recreational heart of Naperville. “We could fish and skate,” Don said. “Centennial Beach was built in the ’30s, and so in the summertime we always had a place to go. In the winter, we’d skate up to Warrenville and back. It was colder then and the river was clear and full of rock bass and bluegills. When the ice would break up we’d ride the icebergs and jump off. Sometimes we’d get wet and have to build a fire. We’d bring potatoes to cook.”
Both Don and Jean remember having more freedom to roam town and country than kids have today, but still their parents worried. “The biggest danger about the river was that the farmers would put barbed wire across it at night to keep their cows from mingling with other farmers’ cows,” Jean said.
“You’d go down in a boat and all of a sudden there’d be wire and it could knock you right out of the boat. But you’d learn. You learned never to go jumping icebergs by yourself. And you learned by the sound of the ice if it’s safe,” said Don, remembering a type of savvy that few Naperville kids today would have.
“Girls like Jean (whose dad was Judge Win Knoch) had bicycles, but we had to go to the city dump and find pieces of bicycles and put them together and make them work,” Don said.
“There certainly were no Schwinn shops,” Jean said. “We bought our bikes at the meat store.”
“We also used to have a great time shooting rats at the dump. In fact, my first rifle was made from parts I found at the dump,” said Don, who used to hunt at his grandfather’s farm, now a subdivision near Pioneer Park.
When the Wehrlis were young marrieds, it was hard to find housing, not so much because of expense, but scarcity. When they did find a house, it was the last house on the southeast end of downtown. “Now, it’s surrounded,” Jean said.
–
Dorothy Graue has lived in her family home in Elmhurst since 1906. Her great-grandparents came here in 1834, and their oldest son, Frederick, built Graue Mill. Her own father was a postmaster of Elmhurst and later ran a grocery and dry goods store in town that delivered free by horse and wagon.
She has seen her neighborhood change drastically. Her own house, with its gleaming woodwork, leaded glass windows and high ceilings, is little changed, but most of the other big old houses on her street have been replaced by squatty brick apartment buildings. She can remember when nearby Wilder Park was a cow pasture belonging to the Wilder estate house, which is now the Elmhurst Public Library.
She remembers an Elmhurst before Dutch elm disease, when the glorious, arching elm trees gave stature to every street. “All the lots were large, and everybody kept chickens and a kitchen garden,” she said. “Dad had an orchard in the back with apple, pear and cherry trees. We had currant bushes and even bees.”
Like Pete Bates’ family, her family was friendly with the prominent Glos family. “We played cards together. In those days there were a lot of card clubs,” Graue said. “The women had their own clubs. This was in the days before radio, which drastically changed everything.”
–
Bates was born in 1912, a block away from his present law offices where he practiced with his dad for many years and now his brother. He remembers a gracious Elmhurst, a Gatsby Elmhurst, at least before World War II. And, indeed, the whole county from the late 19th Century to before the Depression was marked by estates on large acreages, the development of parks and golf courses and a definite leisure class.
“I caught just a piece of the real old age,” Bates said. “But my father can remember the wealthy men coming home on the train and being met by carriages, sometimes liveried. But my whole life is divided in two: before the war, and after. After, the old way of living was gone and we never went back to it again . . . the country club dances, the regattas on Lake Geneva, little old-fashioned things. New economies came in and there wasn’t the money around, for some reason.”
Bates is now a commissioner for the museum, a house where he used to stay when his folks went on vacation. “Aunt Lucy and Uncle Henry had vineyards and a gardener’s house,” Bates said. “After Henry died, Aunt Lucy would go over to his mausoleum (which stands in front of the museum) and sit on her rocking chair and read, rocking on old Henry’s grave. She must have seemed like a strange old lady. But she was a down-to-earth person who liked her pinochle club.”
“I guess we’re a family that has never been caught up by the American trend of mobility. Maybe because Du Page County is a prosperous place and we haven’t had to move away to make a living,” said Bates, who spends much of his time attending to the family interests in real estate built up over the years.
–
Lucille Bush, born here in 1899, whose great-grandfather came in 1835 and established a blacksmith shop, and whose father was the Downers Grove Village president and then a state representative, is relentless in pursuit of her family’s history. She has written family histories and made several trips east, researching the genealogy. “It makes me so mad to slow down,” said the 94-year-old Bush, although the visitor can see no evidence of it.
“I’m the last Bush, and the last Stanley in Downers Grove, but the place used to be full of them.”
Her dad, whose family farm on Finley Road was bisected when the railroad came through in 1865, knew about mushrooms and used to take the family out in the nearby countryside on mushroom hunts: “We’d take a steak and cook it with the mushrooms right on the spot and serve it with watercress we’d find in the stream. We ate fairy ring and meadow mushrooms, the two types we knew. And my grandmother grew mushrooms in the basement of her house on Carpenter Street, so our family’s enjoyment of mushrooms has always been considerable.”
Bush had her own pony and cart, and used to drive with her friends on picnics. The bumpy ride would agitate the homemade root beer they brought along so it would explode upon opening. She also remembers sledding down Main Street: “At night, there were no cars at all.”
–
Ann Pritchard, too, remembers sledding down what are now busy streets in Glen Ellyn: “At night, we’d get a sprinkling can and ice the street.”
Like the other longtime residents, she remembers a much woodsier town, and Lake Ellyn was an even more prominent feature of the town then than now, although the fancy 100-room hotel on its shores burned down when Pritchard was only 3.
“It was all woods,” she said. “We had a little path to Lake Ellyn, and I used to skate there until I was so cold I could hardly walk home. The lake (which is now more of an ornamental lagoon) was larger then, and there was an island at the south end where the football field is now. Back then there was a sandy beach at the north end, but it wasn’t a very good swimming beach. I had a cousin who dived off the diving board there and got stuck in the mud. The Free Methodists used to have a camp meeting every summer in town and the last day of their meeting they’d bring the converts over to the lake and baptize them. My father raised chickens for our use, and he used to joke that some of his chickens always disappeared during the camp meeting.”
When Pritchard was ready to start high school, there was none in Glen Ellyn, so she went to Wheaton High School for her freshman year. Then a high school was started in Glen Ellyn over the bank building on Main Street. After graduation, she worked in the post office, getting to know everyone, since they had to come in for their mail.
One of her neighbors was Ada Harmon, known for her wildfowers, paintings and her book “The Story of an Old Town.” “Ada’s fiance was struck by lightning (and killed), and she never did marry,” Pritchard said.
Pritchard and her husband raised five children, three of whom are still in Glen Ellyn. One of her sons lived for a while in an apartment in what is now Stacy’s Tavern, Glen Ellyn’s national landmark museum, when he came home from the service. “That apartment was very old and rickety,” Pritchard said.
Like all the people interviewed for this story, Pritchard had little interest in or sense of her place in the town’s history until she was older. “If any of my kids are interested in the history of the town, I’ve never heard about it,” she said.
Family history is not only a force in the lives of Wehrli, Graue, Bates, Bush and Pritchard, but also a resource for the communities in which they live. They all get regular calls from local historical societies, history students and even local cable TV stations.
“People think I know a lot, but I don’t,” said Graue, “I just grew up.”
