By 1890 DuPage County had been in existence for half a century. The county had a population of twenty-two thousand five hundred. Already the towns were growing and there were new demands for more services many of which involved major expenditures of funds.
The larger towns, such as Wheaton and Naperville, changed their form of municipal government from village to city in order to take advantage of the greater powers, conferred upon cities by the Illinois General Assembly, to issue bonds for public improvements.
This made it possible to build the first central water systems to replace the family wells and to develop more effective fire-fighting procedures. Sanitary systems and sidewalks were built. Street paving and gutters began replacing the dirt streets that were dusty in summer and muddy in winter.
At the same time citizens of the county began assuming roles of state, national and even international leadership. A man whose parents brought him to Elmhurst when the community was known as Cottage Hill was becoming prominent as a member of the Illinois General Assembly. Charles P. Bryan served as a member of the Lower House of the state legislature, representing DuPage County and adjoining areas, from 1890 until 1898. The Bryan family had come to DuPage County after the Great Chicago Fire had destroyed their home and the theater which Bryan’s father owned and operated in the city.
Thomas Bryan gained national fame as a vice president of the Colombian Exposition of Chicago held in 1893. He participated in the decisions to build "the great white city" that was one of the marvels of the 1890s for the entire nation. Bryan handled one of the most difficult jobs in planning and conducting the great exposition. He headed up a citizen committee of six thousand from whom ideas for the fair’s exhibition and promotion were secured and evaluated.
The fair, celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of the coming of Columbus to the New World, introduced so many of the marvels of this century ... mechanical refrigeration of ice, the ferris wheel, motorized fire-fighting equipment and Thomas Edison’s phonograph and kinescope (pictures that moved) to mention a few. Most citizens of DuPage County visited the great fair before it closed October 30, 1893.
Later Charles Bryan served as the American ambassador to Japan and gained an international prominence.
During the same years two men, born on farms less than two miles apart at Gary’s Mill in Western DuPage County, were engaged in sweeping nation-building programs. They were John W. (Bet-A-Million) Gates and Judge Elbert H. Gary. Their accomplishments are described earlier in this book, pages nine and fifteen.
Another DuPage County citizen whose name became well known both in the United States and Europe was Loie Fuller of Fullersburg (predecessor to Hinsdale). She made her stage debut in 1878 in New York and London. While working to conceive a new dance, she became enchanted with the beauty of the bright and airy color combinations which silk scarves offered. These were fashioned into a dance program which she entitled the Serpentine dance.
The debut of the dance at the new Auditorium Theater in Chicago was a thumping success. Miss Fuller traveled again to Europe and danced in Paris, Berlin, Constantinople, St. Petersburg (now Leningrad) and Moscow. One of her closest friends was Queen Marie of Rumania. Although Miss Fuller made visits to her home in the Fullersburg area, she made her home in Paris, France until her death in 1928.
The county had received its first telephone lines through the area in 1882 but telephones did not become permanent fixtures except in an occasional business until the 1890s. The original telephone offices were generally established in the private home of the operator or in an office of a business establishment in the community.
The poor condition of the DuPage County Courthouse in Wheaton gave cause for alarm among county officials, particularly the sheriff. Prisoners were often able to tunnel their way through the basement of the old building (constructed in 1868). One board committee reporter that the old structure was beginning to list from the many tunnels under the walls.
A group of DuPage board members traveled to Aledo (in Mercer County) where they inspected a new courthouse completed in 1895. After recommending that DuPage County build a similar structure, the board members sought the architectural plans. The new courthouse in Wheaton was built on those plans. While the Aledo structure had been built with beige brick and stone, the DuPage Courthouse that stands today in downtown Wheaton was one constructed of terra cotta stone and brick.
During the period of reconstruction of the courthouse, the county government was housed in what was then the Gary Wheaton Bank Building at 123 Front Street, Wheaton. Court was held on the second floor of the building which had as one of its prime owners, Judge Elbert H. Gary, former county judge and chairman of the bank. Jesse C. Wheaton, Jr., Gary’s cousin, took down the old courthouse built in 1868 to make way for the construction of he present courthouse.
DuPage County men, fifty-seven of them, took part in the Spanish American War which marked the first time that the United States had been involved in territory halfway around the world. The war lasted only five months and resulted in America acquiring its first territorial land rights overseas.
In 1895, the revolution broke out between the Spanish forces then claiming Cuba as its own and guerrillas representing the natives of the island. America sent the Battleship Maine to protect its armed forces in the area. The ship was blown up on January 25, 1898, resulting in the declaration of war against Spain in April.
In the Treaty of Paris which ended the war, Cuba was granted its freedom. The United States received the territories of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippine Islands from Spain. The war had proven the need for a shorter route to the Pacific Ocean from the eastern section of the United States. The war had made Theodore Roosevelt a national figure. He was elected as vice president in 1900 and became president with the assassination of President McKinley. It was during Roosevelt’s administration that the Panama Canal was built across Central America connecting the Caribbean Sea with the Pacific Ocean.
Five Glen Ellyn men who went to the Spanish American War were William and John Laier, Charles Christianson, John Ashby and Edward T. Barnard.
By 1900 the DuPage County population was a little more than twenty-eight thousand. Although agriculture was the county’s major industry, the population of people living in the DuPage towns was now greater than those living on the farms. An increasing number of persons living in the towns made a living working in Chicago. There was but one important business employer, the Naperville Lounge Company that in time became the Kroehler Company, manufacturer of chairs, sofas and lounges.
Until the early years of this century, most persons who were ill were cared for in their own home or in small nursing centers. Those in need of major medical care had to go to hospitals outside of DuPage County. A new era in medical care for the people of DuPage County began soon after the turn of the century.
In 1904, David Paulsen established Hinsdale Sanitarium and Hospital which is today operated by the Seventh Day Adventist Church. In 1907, Edward Sanitarium in Naperville was a gift from Eudora Gaylord Spalding to the memory of her late husband, Edward Gaylord. From 1905 to 1933 it operated as a part of the complex of small sanitariums under jurisdiction of the Chicago Tuberculosis Institute. The facility operated as a tubercular center until 1955 when the new Suburban Cook County Tuberculosis Sanitarium opened in Hinsdale. In the same year, the hospital reopened as a general hospital—Edward Hospital.
Another sanitarium for tubercular patients was opened in Winfield. This center was a gift of Charles Stonehill who was earlier president of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. This center was reopened to the general public in 1964 as a general hospital, Central DuPage Hospital.
Even by 1900 more DuPage citizens looked to Chicago for job opportunities, especially those living in the eastern section of the county. In 1902 there was a major development that made it possible for persons in western DuPage County and even across the Fox River in Kane, Kendall and McHenry Counties to be employed in Chicago. In that year a new electric railroad, The Chicago Aurora and Elgin Railway, began its service.
With its main switching yards in Wheaton in the area now occupied by the Wheaton Center with its two nineteen-story buildings, the new railroad operated frequent fast trains across DuPage County and on to Aurora in Kane County and Yorkville in Kendall County. Other trains went to Elgin in Kane County and on to Crystal Lake in McHenry County.
The new rail service also changed the buying and recreational habits of DuPage families. Now it was possible to go to Chicago to shop, attend a play or concert and return home during the holidays in 1903 when many DuPage persons, twelve from Wheaton alone. lost their lives in the great Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago, a disaster that claimed six hundred lives on December 30, 1903.
The new shopping opportunities in Chicago had an impact throughout the Chicago metropolitan area, including the numerous small towns in DuPage County. The local businessmen who had been serving the families in their communities for years began banding together in small associations of business men and women to offer better shop-at-home bargains for their customers as well as to make their business districts attractive for shoppers. From these small groups of businessmen would come the Chambers of Commerce of today.
One of the most active of the early local businessmen was the late Mayor William Gamon of Wheaton who had owned a grocery store in Wheaton prior to World War I. His stories of life in Wheaton as a native DuPager who served his community as mayor in both World War I and World War II have been recorded for future generations to hear.
On June 7, 1915, DuPage County became the second in Illinois and the fifth in the nation to form a county park district (forest preserve system). Two years later, the district acquired York Park which contained seventy-eight point ninety-seven acres at Roosevelt Road and Highway 83. Later, a parcel of this land was sold to the state highway department for construction of the new roadway and interchanges at this location. Today, the forest preserve owns more than forty preserves with more than fifteen thousand acres and various buildings to be preserved.
As the war clouds began to gather in Europe after 1914, many of the local German families felt ill at ease between loyalty to their new American homes and the allegiance one always carries for family members left behind, whether in a foreign country or in a town many miles away.
President Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1912 and again in 1916 to lead the nation in its fifth war since DuPage County had been settled. He had ordered all types of programs established by the German Americans to be dismantled. This included the teaching of German in the schools as well as closing the many social clubs which the Germans had established to promote various activities, including sports, gymnastics, singing and reading.
Many of the local men joined the services including the sons and grandsons of the Germans who had come to our county since the 1830s. Local American Legion Posts formed after World War I bear the names of many persons who served in the "War To End All Wars." When the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, the American troops headed for home with ideas they had seen on the battlefields of Europe.
Among the projects which were established when the young men returned were local park districts. While some efforts had been made to provide some green space, little had been done in busy, growing America to concentrate on small neighborhood parks where people of all ages could relax and enjoy the world around them.
They erected statues and memorials to the men and women who had lost their lives on the battlefields. One of the leaders in this field was Colonel Robert R. McCormick of Cantigny where there is located one of the most renowned museums dealing with World War 1.
There remained one mission for a ship named the USS Wheaton that would have a constant reminder of the war for all visitors to Arlington National Cemetery. Named for the City of Wheaton, the transport ship was designated after the war as the ship which would bring back the bodies of servicemen being sent home for burial. It was on the deck of the USS Wheaton that President Warren G. Harding stood when he selected three unmarked caskets to represent the branches of the service in the memorial to the Unknown Soldier.
May 27, 1927, is a date that can always have special significance in DuPage County. This is the date when the youthful Charles Lindbergh started his solo flight from New York to Paris, and there is a special interest in this historic event for DuPage people. But the date has DuPage importance for another reason.
This easily recalled date in the spring of 1927 can also stand as a chronological benchmark in the story of DuPage County. In the almost ninety years that had passed since the county was established, those brilliant first settlers and the children of those New England and German families had given DuPage the shape it retains today.
The churches, schools, hospitals, libraries and first forest preserves and park districts were in place. The railroads and major highways, many of them laid out on Indian trails, were built. Most of the present towns were chartered. Relatively, so little has been added since. One major addition has been the College of DuPage, founded fifteen years ago. An inter-state highway and a hospital have been added. Three new towns have developed.
Now, a special report on the Lone Eagle’s flight to Paris. He left New York at 7:30 in the morning and flew all day to get to Newfoundland. He was last seen at dusk flying into a cloud bank over the Atlantic east of Newfoundland about 5 p.m. Central Time. Arrangements had been made with ships on the North Atlantic route to telegraph the shore as they heard the plane. (It was the only plane over the Atlantic that night.)
But for reasons never known, no ship picked up the sounds from Lucky Lindy’s plane so there was no news to report on the flight. A third of the homes in the United States had radio receivers in the spring of 1927 ... crystal sets and tube sets operated by batteries. Thousands of house parties in homes equipped with radio were in progress so citizens could have the latest news, but there was none. Hour after hour passed.
At 10 p.m. a young station manager stepped to the microphone of Station WENR in Chicago, one of the most widely listened to stations in the era before there were broadcasting networks. The young manager talked to his vast audience, friend to friend, explaining that for five hours there had been no reports on the Lindbergh plane. He said that the tension was bearing down on everyone, including himself.
Then he said that we must have faith that this young American would arrive safely in Paris tomorrow. There was one thing which we could do to help him and Station WENR would become silent for a time to permit everyone in his own way to pray for Charles Lindbergh.
This was the first national radio prayer service in America. Mail came to WENR in Chicago by the sack full, expressing the appreciation of listeners from more than twenty states. Theodore White in his recent autobiography reports that on his crystal set in central Kansas he had "taken part" in the prayer service.
The young manager at Station WENR that evening was Everett Mitchell who has lived in Wheaton and DuPage County these last thirty years.