Chapter 6: From Settlement to Village

Niles Center (Skokie) was incorporated in 1888, and so named because it then occupied the center of Niles Township.

Its eastern limit was the Northwestern Railroad and its north boundary was Main Street. Adam Harrer was elected President. Trustees were Michael Harrer, Peter Blameuser Sr., Ivan Paroubek, Fred Rose, Fred Stielow, and Chris Baumann.

The town hall was the present fire engine house for the apparatus of the original Volunteer Fire Department organized May 6, 1881. The upper floor was the meeting place of such organizations as the village had: the Catholic Order of Foresters, the Plattdeusch Guild, the German Singing Club, and several lodges.

Morton Grove was incorporated October 24, 1895. George Harrer was its first President and served as such for fourteen years.

The village was named after Levi Parsons Morton, who was then Governor of New York but had been Vice President of the United States the previous term. The Americana Encyclopedia has an imposing list of the great financial institutions he founded in the East. He had assisted in floating the government war loans during the Civil War, was a Republican Member of Congress one term, and was Minister to France. His only connection with the village seems to have been his service on the Board of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad which passes through the town, and whose station became the nucleus for its growth.

The village of Niles had the earliest settlers in the township; the Shadigers, Perrins, Rulands, Ebingers, and John Ketchum. By 1884 it had two stores, two hotels, a drug store, harness shop, two blacksmiths, three churches, two schools, a doctor, and about 200 inhabitants. Andreas, the Cook County Historian of that time, makes it 250 inhabitants and adds six saloons.

Incorporated in l902, it took the name "Niles" from the township. Previously it had been known as "Dutchman's Point." That name was official, but was in general use. The origin easily seen. It lay in a point of the North Branch and its people were German. Until well after the turn of the century Germans were quite commonly known as "Dutchmen," probably from their own name for themselves, "Deutsch." Perhaps the disuse of the term begins from the first World War.

At any rate the old name, "Dutchman's Point" stuck long after the new name had been adopted. By the census of 1910 the place had 569 population, outstripping by just one its neighbor town, Niles Center, which had 568.

Tessville, (Lincolnwood) organized in 1911 had 365 by the same census. It was named, it has been mentioned, for Johann Tess, one of the early pioneers. The first president was Frank Meier, and his brother John was its first clerk. As in its three companion villages, all the earliest families had been German or Luxembourger, and the business was truck gardening and flowers.

The outdoor market made Niles Center really a center, not of Niles Township alone, but all the surrounding country. It reached from the intersection of Lincoln and Oakton to the fork at St. Peter's Catholic Church and around the bend of old Market Street, which has in recent years been renamed Warren.

Market days were the first Tuesday and third Thursday of each month. On those days farmers arrived from miles around with their vegetables and livestock, especially pigs and poultry. Merchants from the city sold a great variety of goods.

It was also a horse fair. Horses that had gone lame on the cobbled pavements of Chicago brought to work out many more valuable years on the soft soil of the fields.

On those days the village was full of strangers. Mingling with the crowd were Gypsies whose caravans camped at the edge of town and where women told fortunes. Farmer, merchant, beggerman, thief; the last two species being sufficiently numerous to require extra police protection.

A few random items gleaned from those who remember, may well find their place in the story at this point.

The three old churches in the center of the village were the first north of the city probably north of Bowmanville. The land for St.Peter's Catholic Church and its cemetery was donated by Peter Blameuser Sr., as was also the land for St.Peter's Evangelical and Reformed on Oakton Street. He contributed the bells for both churches; those in the Catholic Church were named for him and his wife, "Peter" & "Clara." He offered the land for St.Paul's on Carpenter Road, but Mr.Rohr's donation of a site had already been accepted.

Ferdinand Baumann was the keeper of the road gates at Niles Center Road. They were raised and lowered for trains by pumping. In his spare time he laid out a miniature park fifty feet square with little walks, and fashioned a zoo for it from odd-shaped slag picked up from the tracks.

Ice cream was first introduced here at a picnic about 1882. A large dishful could be bought for three cents. Later it was peddled from a wagon on Sunday afternoons. You ran out with your dish and it was ladled out for you at a penny a serving.

There was a picnic ground all the way from Harm's store at Lincoln and Oakton to the south end of the block. A picture of this area is one of those on the wall of Skokie's First National Bank.

An eventful occasion came to Morton Grove in the summer of 1897. The three-day convention of the Plattdeutsch (German middle class) Guild was held on August sixth to eighth in St. Paul's Park near the railroad station. It attracted first and second generation Germans from the entire Chicago northern area.

A German-language newspaper, Der Westen (The West) of August 8 of that year, devoted a full page to the celebration. It makes a vivid story of the thousands of German people, young and old, streaming from all directions to the picnic grounds.

They came, it says, by every means of travel, by "Dampfross und Stahlross" that is, by steam horse and steel horse (bicycle).

It describes St. Paul Park in glowing terms as the most beautiful spot near Chicago. Created and owned by George C. Klehm, it was a tract of land bordering on the North Branch, which had been dammed to form a pond large enough for boating. Klehm supplied the boats.

The reporter waxed poetic as he pictured the joy of drifting downstream between banks so heavily wooded that the sunbeams only flickered through. The park also contained a pavilion for picnickers caught in sudden summer showers. The old yellowed and wrinkled German paper, now in the possession of a Klehm-Harms family, proudly recounts the stories of the pioneers, tracing each on his long voyage from the Old World, through the hardships in the New, to their successes and triumphs as their toil and native perseverance paid off.

- Originally published in The Villager, Thursday, June 19, 1958, pp. 16-17

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