The year was 1889. President Grover Cleveland signed a bill admitting North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Washington as U.S. States. Benjamin Harrison later succeeds him as the 25th president of the U.S., The Eiffel Tower is inaugurated and Adolf Hitler is born.
In Cicero Township, specifically Oak Ridge or what we now know as Oak Park, the founding family scion, Henry Austin writes an eloquent letter to another founding family scion, James Scoville, informing him of Austin’s sale of land north of Chicago Avenue bordered to the east by Ridgeland, the south by Chicago, the west by Oak Park Avenue and the north by Augusta. Austin himself sold the land parcel to several businessmen in what will later be known as the Fair Oaks district. Austin described them as “a company of ten very substantial men in the city”Kohlscot Brothers, Sopra Brothers of the Sopra Lumber Co., two Chalmers of Frazer and Chalmers, Kennedy of Oak Park, Hale, Street and Bryant; a class of men that will insure very fine and substantial improvements, anticipating their own residences which will be good. If you can see it to your interest to co-operate with them, they will establish beyond a doubt the first and most popular property west of Chicago and advance the present prices 100 percent.”
Austin had good reason to advise his friend: Scoville’s lands were next to the sold area and would be greatly impacted by such a transaction. So was born what is now the Fair Oaks subdivision of Oak Park.
With the signing of that letter, the many partners got busy subdividing the land, engaging architects to design the houses that the builders would create for sale as “prototypes.”
“It’s really the same as the real estate market today,” notes Frank Lipo, executive director of The Historical Society of Oak Park and River Forest, located in Pleasant Home, 217 Home Ave. in Oak Park. “Many businesses are involved”landowners, developers, builders and even investors.”
Following the Chicago Fire in 1871 and the subsequent re-building and expansion, along with events such as the World’s Fair in 1893 and continued affluence due to industrialization, the partners were capitalizing on a real estate boom.
Excellent transportation
“Oak Park in the late 1880s had a lot going for it,” says Lipo. “Again, like today, good transportation, schools, commerce and the like are attractive to prospective buyers.”
In a map/brochure promoting the Fair Oaks development, real estate businessmen Kennedy and Ballard tout Oak Park as being “8 miles due west of Chicago’s City Hall. It is conceded to be ‘THE’ suburb west of the city … without the city’s smoke and noise, out of reach of the lake’s raw winds and within TWENTY minutes ride of the heart of the city.” Eight trains daily on two railways offered dependable transportation and electric cars every five minutes on Lake and Madison connecting with the Lake Street Elevated and more extensions promised. Ironically, in contrast to Oak Park’s current promotion of economic diversity and fair housing, in promoting the Fair Oaks development, George Hemingway, a local Realtor and uncle of Ernest, was careful to note in a letter to the editor in the 1910 Oak Leaves that “there are no physical objections to this district, such as store or factor environment, and it is far enough from all railroads to be free from all of the disadvantages inflicted on property by railroads. People who are buying in this district are either willing to walk for the good of themselves to and from trains or are able to own their own horses or automobiles. I never can understand why any business man objects to a walk of fifteen or twenty minutes after breakfast or before his dinner in the evening when the fact is very true that such a walk is most beneficial to him.” Hemingway was addressing both the negative aspects of Chicago as well as the country atmosphere of Oak Park.
“You know, Oak Park, was really pretty rural even with the Fair Oaks development,” explains Lipo. “If you look at the photos, houses were on large lots and there was a lot of land in between”a street block might have one or two houses on it.”
Natural countryside and artesian water
Literature painted a rosy picture in flowery terms, luring patrons with “good fertile soil ripe for growing fruits trees and vegetables.”
Lipo notes, “Agriculture was still important then and the houses were on large lots of land where people grew their own gardens of flowers and produce and, of course, there were horses. Unlike housing developments today where many prototype houses are created and land lots sell quickly, the Fair Oaks development was very slow to grow”it was at the time of the World’s Fair, when the economy was in a slump, and there were other towns outside of Chicago that were also developing modern communities. It wasn’t just Oak Park.”
Also touted was “artesian water””distinguishing it from the polluted waters of industrial Lake Michigan. “Oak Park had natural springs that were accessed by wells, so it was similar to the pure bottled water people buy today,” says Diane Hansen of the Historical Society. The benefits also addressed people’s fears of illness. “Cholera and other water-borne diseases were prevalent,” she said, so advertising the high land”one of the first names of this area was Oak Ridge, referring to the high bank or ridge (hence the name Ridgeland Avenue)”would appeal to people’s heightened interest in sanitary conditions. “With Chicago growing in industrialization, to be away from the factories and smoke and soot as well as the close living conditions” would be beneficial to businessmen who could afford to buy land and build family homes, said Hansen.
Streets paved, unexcelled schools
and refinement
Cedar blocks, macadam and asphalt offered new residents dust-free, smooth riding on streets, whether by horse carriage, bicycle or automobile. Oak Park was promoted in the Fair Oaks development materials as being a town of “unexcelled schools, churches and refinement.”
“The Scoville Institute was located where the main library is now,” says Lipo. “Just like the Carnegie Institute, it was funded by a wealthy patron”the Scoville family.” The institute was open to all residents and housed books, meeting rooms and “even a gymnasium on the upper floor, but it quickly was used to shelve books and new acquisitions,” Lipo says. “The Prairie Club” was across the street and offered a private social organization with “cycling being very key”bicycling was very popular at that time.”
One advertisement placed by George Hemingway in the Oak Leaves in 1912 asked, “Are you alive to the Fair Oaks situation? A careful survey of this situation is interesting. Especially is it interesting to those who have had some desire to build a home in this very choice residential section of Oak Park. It will not be possible much longer to buy vacant property in this section.”
Lipo says, “It was very common to market the same way as today”with houses that were built and then sold, plots of land offered for building, for investment or personal use.” An accompanying map showed Fair Oaks as being about 90 percent sold. In a subsequent news article, the paper reports, “Only 25 lots remain unsold in the Fair Oaks district, according to George R. Hemingway. This tract of land has been a marvel to real estate men, and it is now common opinion among them that no other neighborhood in Chicago or vicinity has so many handsome homes in the same extent of territory. As the situation now stands, only 25 more families may have the distinction of residing in Fair Oaks.”
“It’s really unfair to call one area of Oak Park more prominent than another,” says Lipo of the lofty praise heaped on Fair Oaks. “At various points in history, many streets in Oak Park had huge mansions or large homes with outstanding citizens; many have been torn down in favor of condominiums,” he notes. “It depends on the time in history, style of housing. Fair Oaks had good timing because of the many prominent architects such as Wright and Van Bergen who were building at the time.”
In the 1920s, prominent Chicago stores including Marshall Field and The Fair joined Oak Park’s growing business district. By 1930, the village had a population of 64,000″more than the current population.
Prominent residents of the time
“As one of the growing towns of the times, the Fair Oaks development did attract many prominent businessmen,” says Lipo, such as the owners of Jewel Foods. Frank Vernon Skiff and Frank P. Ross were the owners in 1899 of Jewel Tea Company, today’s grocery giant. Skiff started the company as a door-to-door coffee delivery service. He later partnered with his brother-in-law in 1902. The two lived in neighboring estates designed by architect-to-the-wealthy Howard Van Doren Shaw in the Fair Oaks district on the 500 block of North East Avenue. Frank Lloyd Wright was a 22-year-old architect in 1889 when he began what is now the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio on Chicago Avenue. Several of his prairie style homes were built between 1900 and 1920 in the Fair Oaks district. Other notables of that era include Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs, dance impresario Doris Batscheller Humphrey; Ernest Hemingway who lived in several residences, two located in the original Fair Oaks district; and fast food entrepreneur Ray Kroc.
Marketing tactics were paramount to the success of the development then as now. Advertisements, brochures and the like were heavily employed, yet one thing was missing. The Fair Oaks development was Fair Oaks in name only”there was no street, park, building or even a prominent family with that name to give it credence.
Several of the investors, builders and Realtors banded together to propose that a Fair Oaks Avenue be created”ideally a street that was well developed and with houses and residents representing the level of class and prominence they wanted the Fair Oaks name to connote to potential buyers.
“Various sections of Scoville were called Fair Oaks before they finally settled on the area North of Chicago Avenue,” explains Frank Lipo, president of the Historical Society. “I read in some early newspapers that the Scoville family was not too happy about the suggestion”a founding family being bumped by a created name for a development.”
Other citizens responded with equal acrimony. One gentleman wrote a letter to the village board suggesting that if people were so in love with the Fair Oaks moniker “it might be well to tack it onto the name of every street on the north side.” On May 19, 1906, The Oak Leaves reported a heated village meeting in which “Another gentleman called attention to the fact that Daniel G. Trench’s (one of the proponents of the name change) horses are all named Fair Oaks ‘something or other,’ a cat is called Fair Oaks Bob while a dog revels in the name of Fair Oaks Spot. He thought they had had Fair Oaks rammed down their throats.”
Later that night, despite resistance, Scoville north of Chicago was permanently changed to Fair Oaks and remains so to this day. And that, as River Forest resident and radio newsman Paul Harvey might say, is the rest of the story.