Chicago’s history sometimes feels like a series of legends: Abraham Lincoln, the Great Fire, two world’s fairs and Al Capone. The episodes are well-known but seem more like myth than reality.
The solution is to find the relics — the swords, flags, paintings, posters and locks of hair that bring the stories close to the touch. The Chicago Historical Society has the relics. And because the myths and legends and characters that populate the Chicago story are so intriguing, the museum on the edge of Lincoln Park has become more than a major local institution. It fancies itself, with justification, the nation’s largest and most important urban history museum.
The galleries cover a remarkable range of history, from the Boston Tea Party to hip-hop. New exhibits open regularly, focusing on the famous and the obscure: local architects, television pioneers and the true history of Chicago neighborhoods are examples. One objective of the curators is to tell stories from the past (the history of drug use was a recent exhibit) with relevance to issues of today.
History evolves and changes, and so does the Chicago Historical Society, but the most intriguing exhibits of this museum may be the things that have been there for a long time. These are the parts that go back to the beginnings of Chicago and even earlier, when French explorers landed here and found a place that represented the shortest distance between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River system.
This might be called Chicago’s “ancient” history, and even here, the exhibits that address the subject are hidden in far corners of the museum. But they’re among the most memorable. A manuscript from the explorer LaSalle, for example, goes back to the 1600s, when the Frenchman imagined a great French colony in the American West, with Illinois as the center of the world’s largest fur-trading enterprise.
Such plans, we see, were more than the musings of an eccentric. LaSalle’s compatriots, Marquette and Joliet, made a similar journey in our direction, and Father Marquette’s book about the voyage (a copy is on display) became a best-seller in Paris. The book, along with religious objects thought to have been carried by Marquette, do what museums are supposed to do: they give reality to episodes of history that otherwise seem remote.
In Europe, they call the ruins and cathedrals history’s “true stone.” In Chicago, it’s more like the “true timbers” — in this case, logs from old Ft. Dearborn, dismantled in 1850. Rough-hewn and authentic, they are assembled on a wall of the museum and recall a stockade and barracks once on the south bank of the Chicago River where the Michigan Avenue Bridge now looms.
Early Chicago was populated by a stimulating group, among whom was Jean Baptiste DuSable, the fur trapper who by the 1770s was Chicago’s first non-native settler. There are no true pictures of DuSable, only later drawings of him. But the museum has assembled photographs of Chicago’s next two or three generations, true pioneers, who included outdoorsmen, tavernkeepers, real estate entrepreneurs and even a family of Whistlers, ancestors of the American painter who might have found Chicago too rough for his taste even two generations later.
On display is an artifact called the Waubansee stone, a large boulder of granite carved with the likeness of a Potowatomi chief of the same name. On top is a surface for grinding corn. Lore has it that the stone was left here by Vikings; the truth is that is was in the first Ft. Dearborn as early as its founding in 1802.
The real wonder is how the Waubansee stone survived all these years. (The first inhabitants of the Ft. Dearborn were massacred.) Not just here but throughout this museum, old Chicago history says as much about those who saved artifacts and relics as it does about the Chicagoans who made and used them.
Respect for the past came early in Chicago; this historical society was founded in 1856. Its earliest collections were mostly destroyed in the Chicago Fire 15 years later, but the museum was quickly revived. (Excalibur, the nightclub at Dearborn and Clark Streets, occupies one of its former homes.) Such devotion to history suggests that Chicagoans were never in doubt that this was a city of destiny.
Many Chicagoans — merchants, bankers, builders and politicians — saved books, paintings, manuscripts and other objects that illustrated the history not just of Chicago but also of the nation that for a time regarded Chicago as its most explosive and ambitious city. Their collections, along with recent scholarship, form the basis of several other permanent exhibits, such as “We the People,” about the Colonial and Revolutionary period in the United States.
This exhibit chronicles early American history in detail, with hundreds of precious artifacts, including a 1771 painting by Benjamin West that depicts William Penn signing a treaty with the Indians. It has a Paul Revere-made engraving of the Boston Massacre, showing how revolutionaries wanted to be remembered. A watercolor of the first American flag; a July 4, 1776, printing of the Declaration of Independence; and a newspaper version of the Constitution the day after it was adopted — these are not just priceless relics of history. They also tell us something of the people who were witnessing these milestones for the first time.
Chicago was deeply involved in the passions and politics of the next cataclysm of American history, the Civil War. As reconstructed by the Chicago Historical Society, the collection of one particular Chicagoan stands out above all others. Charles Gunther, Chicago candy tycoon, had the interest, the money and the eccentricity to become one of the most amazing aficionados of Civil War history ever.
Gunther purchased documents connected to politics and artifacts connected to battles. So intense was his interest that he even purchased the Confederate’s Libby Prison, which came up for sale in Richmond, Va. Gunther then brought the building to Chicago, just about brick by brick and reassembled it on South Wabash Avenue, where it became the entryway to the Chicago Coliseum, an early stadium and convention hall.
By the time Gunther died in 1920, he had accumulated quite a horde, including the table where Lee signed the Confederate surrender at Appomattox and the bed on which Lincoln died in April 14, 1865. These and many other objects (newspapers, paintings, posters, photos, weapons, surgeons’ kits, uniforms) constitute the exhibit “A House Divided,” which chronicles and explains the War Between the States.
The exhibit focuses on the variety of ideas, events and phenomena of the war, such as the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, which defined the intractable issues; and the ghastly fact that the Civil War combined medieval tactics of hand-to-hand combat with new weapons of industrial efficiency. The result was man-made horror more grisly than anyone could have predicted.
In good museums, some messages come across with more power than they could come in books. For other messages, particularly those of more recent local history, there aren’t any books at all.
So some years ago, the Chicago Historical Society embarked on a series of exhibits, “Neighborhoods: Keepers of Culture,” that broke new historical ground by telling the story of Chicago neighborhoods from the ground up. Rarely have the plain folks of the city gotten recognition from historians like they have here.
The exhibit “Rooting, Uprooting: The West Side” (open through Oct. 25) profiles the range of ethnic groups who have lived, clashed, cooperated and progressed in a part of the city that has always been in flux. From matzo makers to Black Panthers, their stories — with photographs, newspaper, posters and artifacts from many family attics — constitute the kind of history that represents new ground for this, or any other historical museum.
History at the Historical Society takes on so many sides, so many looks. Another important and surprising exhibit, through mid-October, is “Here We Go Again! Kukla, Fran and Ollie” about the television show that began in 1947. The Kuklapolitan Players, as the mostly puppet troupe was called, were stars of the Chicago School of Television when Chicago was a production center.
“Here We Go Again” (the title is taken from a refrain from the show) uses old video, props, puppets and much more to demonstrate that the show appealed to kids — it has hand-on puppets for youngsters to try out — but was written with adults in mind as well. In one early film clip, the puppets spend several minutes discussing the new television medium, explaining in their wacky way that some stations got the show live via coaxial cable, and others got it recorded on kinescope.
The heterodox characters (with hostess Fran Allison, a lovely human) were strange creatures (Ollie was half-dragon and half-goose) but savvy enough to rail, in one case, against the stupidity of television executives. While many people remember “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” as a chapter from their youth, the exhibit explains in detail why those memories are so powerful.
Memory is evoked and illuminated in other ways at the Historical Society. It has performances, such as an the anniversary presentation of “The Great Fire,” with readings and dialogues of Chicago’s conflagration of 1871, in October. The museum also has “Voices From History,” with actors assuming the roles and performing monologues of significant people, like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe (these given on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and weekends, often in the galleries of “A House Divided”).
Tours outside the museum feature other slices of Chicago history, such as a look at Egyptian decoration in Chicago buildings, the architecture of Bertram (Marina City) Goldberg and Halloween cemetery visits.
The main thing to remember is that there is always something new going on at the Chicago Historical Society.
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The Chicago Historical Society is located at Clark Street and North Avenue. Hours are 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Suggested admission is $5 for adults, $3 for seniors and students, $1 for children 6-12 and free for children under 6. Free on Mondays. 312-642-4600.
