A convenient connection for its passengers, however, was not the primary concern in the IC’s final choice of the lakefront route into the Loop, for this route led directly to the mouth of the Chicago River, the heart of Chicago’s commerce, that provided important commercial connections for the two main products of the NorthWest: meat and wheat.  Chicago’s meat-packing industry had grown as rapidly as had the city’s grain trade, leaving the city’s packers with little or no facilities for storing livestock.  The first makeshift cattleyard, the “Bulls Head,” appeared in 1848 at the corner of Madison and Ashland Streets.  This location, however, proved to be very inconvenient for dealers in getting their animals to the city’s various slaughterhouses that were dispersed throughout the city. This problem was greatly compounded with the arrival of the railroads, that not only brought livestock to Chicago for slaughter, but now could also ship livestock to the East, thereby extending the freshness of meat shipped since it would no longer need to be preserved in salt before it was shipped over land.  John B. Sherman, a livestock trader originally from central New York who had recently moved to Illinois with his cousin, Samuel Allerton, was the first to understand what the railroad could do for the meat-packing industry.  He purchased the old Myrick property near the lakefront between 29th and 31^st Streets, and commenced laying out Chicago’s first stockyard.  It was no mere coincidence, then, that as the Illinois Central tracks made their way into the center of town, they were laid immediately adjacent to the Sherman yards to facilitate the transfer of animals.

There was also not a more efficient location in Chicago to store harvested wheat for eventual transfer to a lake vessel than the site of Fort Dearborn at the junction of the river and Lake Michigan. In 1855, Solomon Sturges and his two brothers-in-law, C.P. and Alvah Buckingham formed Sturges, Buckingham & Co. to build the city’s largest grain elevator adjacent to the IC station. The following year a second monster structure was constructed immediately to the east of the first one.  These were best described by the Democratic Press:

“The buildings are one hundred and three by two hundred and four feet, and one hundred and twenty feet high.  In the operation of the machinery the grain is elevated one hundred and twenty-eight feet.  The cost of the buildings complete will be about $200,000 each… The brick walls are bound together by massive bolts only a few feet apart, and to give some idea of the amount of timber used, we state that twenty-nine ship loads were used during last summer in the construction of the building now being completed.  Two hundred and thirty-six car loads of grain were unloaded by one of the houses last summer in one day, and the amount of grain handled was between eighty and ninety thousand bushels.  It is safe to say that each house can handle a hundred thousand bushels per day.”

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Buckingham, Ebenezer. Solomon Sturges and his descendants; a memoir and a genealogy. New York: Grafton Press, 1907.

Chapman, Frederic William. The Buckingham Family; Or the Descendants of Thomas Buckingham, One of the First Settlers of Milford, Conn. Hartford: Case, 1872.

Wing, Jack. The Great Union Stock Yards, Chicago, 1865.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

The timing of the announcement of such an extravagant building, in that it came after Robert Schuyler, who on July 11, 1853, had passed the presidency of the IC on to William Burrall, and had also resigned as the president of the NY&NH on July 4, 1854, immediately once his sale of $2 million fraudulent, unauthorized NY&NH stock was uncovered, indicates not only a change of management policy pertaining to the quality of the IC’s construction, but also to a directed public relations campaign designed to restore confidence in the post-Schuyler IC. Schuyler had resigned from the IC, more than likely, following the worst train accident of the decade.  On May 6, 1853, an eastbound NY&NH morning express ran through an open drawbridge at South Norwalk, CT, killing 46 passengers.  Schuyler was also the president of this company at this time and probably felt he needed to focus on the resolution of this disaster, resigning from the IC within two months of the accident.  The railroad eventually would end up paying over $500,000 in damages.  

This may have been the reason that within five months of the accident, Schuyler had started to issue fake stock certificates in the NY&NH, as he was its Transfer Agent as well as its President, using three sets of accounting books in order to enable him to pocket every penny.  His fraud was caught by chance, after he had been taken ill on June 29, 1854, and was out of the office when a number of fraudulent certificates were innocently presented for transfer.   The Vice-President was, therefore called in to act as Transfer Agent, who needed to see the books to affect the transfer.   The following day Schuyler matter-of-factly resigned from the NY&NH, never to be seen again in the U.S. This was the first-time fraud of this magnitude had hit Wall Street, and although he had resigned from the IC the previous year, guilt through association once Schuyler’s fraud was publicized, resulted in the IC’s stock declining more than 40 points and its bonds dropping on the market to sixty-three.  The IC was forced to sell its last $4.5 million construction bonds at 35% under par (a loss of $1.55 million), in order to continue its construction and to meet its interest payments. In the face of this economic disaster, the erection of such a magnificent edifice at the mouth of the river speaks to a major public relations campaign on the part of the IC to restore public confidence.  Even so, such a costly building could have been afforded at this time by a private company only if it had been subsidized by the Federal government, which was exactly what the landgrant had done.  

The IC had achieved a major real estate coup with the acquisition of the prime lakefront property that Fort Dearborn had once occupied that had managed to elude private ownership since the founding of the town in exchange for the initial capital outlay of the breakwater. The station was designed in 1854 by the company’s architect Otto Matz.  Matz had been born in Berlin in 1830, where he had completed the traditional polytechnic training for architecture.  He had immigrated to the U.S. where he was hired in 1853 by the IC and assigned to Mason’s engineering corps.  He had risen to the position of company architect upon the death of his predecessor, just prior to the start of the design of the Chicago terminal that was to be erected at the foot of South Water Street, depositing passengers conveniently at the eastern edge of the Lake Street business district.  

The train shed was the longest clear spanned space in the U.S. when it was completed.  Matz employed arched iron-lattice trusses that spanned 166’ and rose 42’ from the ground.  (This structure’s span was second in the world only to the recently completed 211’ span of New Street Station in Birmingham, U.K.) To the north of the train shed, Matz placed the freight house, in which the company’s offices were housed on the top floor. So while the MS had won the race into the city, Common Council had kept its station at the far southern edge of the business district; the MC and the IC, with a little help from its friends Sen. Douglas, Rep. Wentworth, and the new aldermen elected in the municipal election of March 2, 1852, were allowed to lay tracks directly to the mouth of the river and to the foot of the city’s commercial center, Lake Street.  Nonetheless, Common Council, with the assistance of the trestle in the lake, had still managed to keep the IC’s locomotives out of the streets of the business district, while getting the IC to pay for the breakwater that reduced the erosion along Michigan Avenue.

Accompanying the erection of the IC station was the construction of a covey of hotels immediately to the west of the station to provide the railroad’s arriving passengers with appropriate accommodations.  The first constructed was the Richmond House, a six-story hotel located on the northwest corner of S. Water and Michigan.  The Massasoit House was constructed the following year one block farther south on Michigan Avenue at the northeast corner of Lake and Michigan. The Adams House was built in 1858 on the corner of S. Water and Central (now Beaubien Ct.).

FURTHER READING:

Ackerman, W.K., History of the Illinois Central Railroad Company and Representative Employees, Railroad Historical Company, 1900.

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Brownson, Howard Gray. History of the Illinois Central Railroad to 1870. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1915.

Harlow, Alvin F. Steelways of New England. New York: Creative Age Press, 1946.

Johnson, Arthur and Barry E. Supple. Boston Capitalists and the Western Railroads. Cambridge:     Harvard University Press, 1967.

Mahler, Michael, “Robert Schuyler’s Stock Fraud on the New York and New Haven Rail Road: the Paper Trail,” 2009.

Meeks, Carroll L.V., The Railroad Station, New York: Dover, 1995.

Pierce, Bessie Louis. A History of Chicago– 2. New York: Knopf.  1940.

Stover, John F. History of the Illinois Central Railroad. New York: Macmillan, 1975.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

On May 21, 1852, the MC’s route was completed to the city limits and the first MC construction train pulled into a temporary depot on the lakeshore, south of 22th Street.  For this to have occurred, the IC would have obviously had to purchase the 200’ wide right-of-way along the lakefront from 35^th to 22^nd from Douglas that it did for the handsome sum of $21,310.  However, construction had halted here because the city still had not yet approved the railroad’s conditions in its petition for permission to build tracks within the city limits.  Eventually enough council votes were procured so that a veto-proof majority approved the IC proposal on June 14, 1852, giving the IC the right-of-way to place its tracks in Lake Michigan.  

In September 1852, construction commenced at 12^th Street, where a temporary depot had been constructed in the meanwhile on the southeast corner of Michigan and 13^th, of the IC’s breakwater that consisted of a twelve-foot-wide timber crib, made with 12x12s laid horizontally upon one another, that was filled with stone and kept in place with timber piles driven into the lakebed at ten-foot intervals.   This preceded the erection of the timber trestle in the lake, upon which the tracks would take the trains to their final destination at the mouth of the river.  Therefore, while the city got the breakwater that would slow down the erosion of the lakefront along Michigan Avenue and also created a lagoon that at times provided quite pleasant recreation, and at other times, was the repository for the rotting carcasses of dead animals, the railroad for its initial expenses of the breakwater and trestle got the free and unencumbered use of the lakefront that it needed to bring its trains to the mouth of the river, next to the site of old Fort Dearborn.  

In the meantime, the IC had also finally managed to acquire the fort’s reservation from the Federal government on October 14, 1852, for the relatively inconsequential sum of $45,000.  (Thus began the long-standing litigation between the IC and the city over this land.  The IC argued that the fort’s reservation was to be included in the original Federal landgrant bill.  As the Fort Dearborn land was under the jurisdiction of the General Land Office, Chicago lawyer Justin Butterfield, who had been appointed by Whig Pres. Taylor as its Commissioner, somewhat surprisingly rejected this interpretation of Democrat Douglas’ IC landgrant bill.  However, Butterfield suffered a stroke and was replaced in Sept. 1852 with a more “sympathetic” individual who approved the sale of reservation to the IC for the “compromise sum.”  Douglas and Wentworth had smoothed the route of the IC once again.  Nonetheless, the IC would continue to litigate the issue during the foreseeable future.) The purchase agreement also allowed the company to extend its breakwater north of Randolph another 775′ farther east into Lake Michigan, that when backfilled, gave the railroad a very large tract of land upon which to build.  The IC Station to be built here was planned to be not only one of the nation’s largest, dwarfing that of the MS’s, but also, at a cost of a quarter of a million dollars, one of its most expensive stations. 

FURTHER READING:

Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago- vols. 1&2. Chicago, 1884-1886. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Brownson, Howard Gray. History of the Illinois Central Railroad to 1870. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1915.

Ericsson, Henry L. Sixty Years a Builder: The Autobiography of Henry Ericsson. Chicago: A. Kroch,    1942.

Harlow, Alvin F. The Road of the Century. New York: Creative Age Press, 1947.

Lewis, Lloyd and Henry Justin Smith. Chicago: The History of its Reputation.  New York: Blue Ribbon, 1929.

Pierce, Bessie Louis. A History of Chicago– 2. New York: Knopf.  1940.

Wille, Lois. Forever Open, Clear, and Free; The Struggle For Chicago’s Lakefront. Chicago: Regnery, 1972.

Young, David M. The Iron Horse and the Windy City. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)