Tag Archives: local history

When suburban residents want their “nice town” to remain a “nice town”

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In the last two decades, I have studied the trajectories of a number of suburban communities. There is a common pattern in the paths these suburbs have traveled: even as they have grown and changed, current residents want their suburb to stay the same. Or at least have the same features and character that existed when they moved to the community.

I found another example of this recently in a local history of Lombard, Illinois. After describing decade by decade what had happened in what was first known as Babcock’s Grove, Mildred Robinson Dunning ends The Story of Lombard: 1833-1955 this way:

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So now you have the STORY OF LOMBARD, a conservative suburban community of some 16,000 folk at the end of 1955, neither very rich nor very poor, a town built on gently rolling ground at the top of the ridge between Lake Michigan and the Fox River Valley, twenty miles west from Chicago. It is a dormitory town, a very large percent of its gainfully employed men and women finding employment outside of the town. Walk or drive down its lovely old streets, noting its homelike appearance with its well kept homes and lawns, beautiful shade trees, churches and school, parks and playgrounds. Say a “thank you” to the folk who, with foresight, persistence and patience, have made it the town that it is. It IS a nice town. So much for the past; the future of Lombard is pretty much up to all of us. Let’s keep it a nice town. (62)

These sentiments are not unusual in local histories: the founders were virtuous, the community has slowly grown, and it should continue going the way it has been. There is a hint of major change on the horizon – the population was 9,817 in 1950 while in 1960 it would have 22,561 on its way to a current population of over 44,000 – but Dunning suggests “Let’s keep it a nice town.”

What exactly does this mean? When she was writing, Lombard was not the same place it was in the 1830s and most of the 1840s before the railroad arrived and few people lived there. It was not the same place in 1955 as it was in the 1920s. One way to read this argument is that suburban residents do not want their community to lose the fundamentally attractive suburban features it had. Dunning notes that it is a bedroom community. It has “lovely old streets” with “well kept homes and lawns.” It has amenities for residents to enjoy. The people who lived there cared for it.

Another way to think about this argument is suburban residents fearing change and what might happen. If the community quadruples in size (as Lombard does between 1950 and 1980), does day to day life fundamentally change? Do these bucolic suburban features go away? Who are the new neighbors who will move in? Will Lombard continue to be stable, quiet, conservative?

Suburban communities rarely stay exactly the same for long. External forces and internal decisions push them in different directions. Local leaders and residents have a sense of what they think the community was and what they hope it might be. And it is easy to give in to thinking the suburb had a golden era where it was truly a suburban paradise.

Lombard residents and leaders might very tell today describe their suburb as a “nice town.” How they do so might differ from Dunning as seven decades have passed and Lombard is a larger and different suburban community. They, too, might say that they want Lombard to remain the place that it is rather than becoming something else that they would not like.

How a closed church can live on for years in local and online markers and memories

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I recently drove down a local road and saw signs on a traffic light pole pointing different directions to nearby religious congregations. Several of the congregations are active but one has been closed for a while now. If a driver were to follow these signs, they would find the building put to another use after it was purchased by a local governmental body.

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This closed congregation is not alone: even as churches and congregations close, they can be found in numerous local and online spots. Here are a few other regular places to find or hear about closed congregations.

  1. Buildings present that may now be used by another religious congregation or are put to other uses. Some are demolished but many are transformed and some observation and research can find the previous congregation(s) that occupied that building.
  2. Online listings. There are numerous websites that continue to list congregations that closed years before. Some of them will tell you that they are closed, others will not.
  3. Obituaries. They can mention congregations people were connected to. Harder to find local print options for reading these; they can now be found online.
  4. Local history accounts. This might be particularly true for older congregations that date back the early days of a community. My experience is that congregations founded later are mentioned less in these accounts.
  5. Newspaper databases. Go back some decades and newspapers regularly ran lists of congregational services and activity and/or stories about existing congregations. Fewer local newspapers means less coverage of more recent years.
  6. Conversations with residents who have local experiences and memories.

While these are possible sources, it can be hard to look at a landscape and see what past churches and congregations might have been there. There may be some hints but there is also work to do to look further than the current built environment.

Local history and Illinois high school mascots

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With two bills proposed in the Illinois legislature regarding the names of high school mascots, one writer looks at the connections between local history and mascots:

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Nearly every high school nickname in Illinois, and across the country, is a product of a local history. Your nickname, blandly innocuous or a 300-year-old derogatory insult toward indigenous people, is not special. More than 30 schools in Illinois currently claim Native American-related nicknames. There are also 36 schools that are Eagles, 29 that are Bulldogs and 29 that are Tigers…

Heritage and lore are often behind nicknames: Outside Champaign, the Bunnies of Fisher Jr./Sr. High School took their name from a century-old tradition, when players carried rabbit-feet. The DeKalb Barbs nod to DeKalb as the origin of barbed wire. In Brighton, Southwestern High School — honoring the area’s Native background without making a whole group of people a caricature — are Piasa Birds, a reference to the mythical creatures found painted into cliffs on the nearby Mississippi River.

Some of the best Illinois nicknames play off a town’s industry: The Rochelle Hubs honor Rochelle’s history as a travel junction, where rail lines and several interstates converge. The Cornjerkers of Hoopeston — home of the National Sweetcorn Festival — is another example of a team turning an insult (here, against corn farmers) into a point of pride. There’s a similarly defiant streak about Farmington Farmers and Coal City Coalers.

Discussions of changing the mascot often invoke this history:

“My first death threat I ever got as a legislator was after I filed that first mascot bill,” West said. “You hear, ‘If I see you crossing the street, I promise to forget how to use my brakes.’ My goodness — over a mascot! You are coming for their traditions, they say. Tradition is always the main argument. Finances too — how much it will cost to get new uniforms and so on. But the energy, and anger, in these conversations is about history.”

Local history is important to many communities. But there are also plenty of moments in history where communities make decisions to go different directions. As they consider external pressures and internal pressures, communities come together and discuss how they would like to respond. My research considered decisions about development but this could also apply to mascots. Have the times changed? How do newer residents in a community feel? What is the broader purpose of schools? The discussion may be about the name of the high school names bu tit likely invokes broader questions about how communities think about themselves and the world around them.

Of the examples of high school mascots provided in the article, the names highlighting a local industry are intriguing. What might this look like in the twenty-first century? The Office Parks? The Hospitalists? The Data Centers or Warehousers? The Drivers? New traditions could begin with names fitting more recent work and industry patterns.

Local histories online and thrown into the AI training process

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Arcadia Publishing is presenting its authors of local histories the opportunity to join or opt out of their texts being part of AI processes:

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Such hyperlocal histories are a crucial resource, a way for particular communities to preserve and chronicle their cultures, as well as a means for marketing their regions to tourists and chance visitors. But their audiences are consequentially limited, so Arcadia does not usually approach its authors with hundreds of dollars on offer. In its email to Brown, the publishing house even pointed out that these opportunities for author compensation “could be very limited in the future,” pointing to summertime court verdicts that recognized the A.I. training process as fair use—even with copyright material. Arcadia was offering its authors a favor, while making clear it didn’t have to, and pointing out that this could be their only chance…

Arcadia is hardly the only book publisher to ink such opaque contracts with the A.I. overlords, despite the spirited objections and lawsuits brought by various authors. University and scholarly presses—which have been confronting the fallout from the Trump administration’s mass grant cancellations, higher printing and shipping costs from tariffs, and industry headwinds—are providing the model. Taylor & Francis, an academic publisher based in the United Kingdom, signed a $10 million deal with Microsoft last year to share a portion of its catalog for A.I. training, in exchange for annual payments from the tech giant through 2027. Authors were reportedly given no notice and their royalties were measly in turn; Bloomberg quoted one anonymous Taylor & Francis author who claimed to earn only $97 for ceding their book to the training maw. (A T&F spokesman told Bloomberg that the payments were “in accordance with the licensing terms and royalty statement periods in their contracts,” while parent company Informa declared in a press release that “the agreement protects intellectual property rights.”) Wiley, an over-200-year-old academic publishing house, has already struck multiple A.I. deals for licensing and product integration, offering up its works to inform the output of Perplexity’s LLM and Amazon Web Services’ chatbot.

For the publishers, the arrangements were lucrative. For the authors, the payouts were much less so. In July, Johns Hopkins University Press gave the authors of its 3,000-title catalog an Aug. 31 deadline to opt out of having their works become A.I. training fodder in a new tech partnership. If they opted in, they would receive a little under $100 per work. Like Arcadia, Hopkins Press did not disclose the A.I. company involved or the money it was hoping to earn. It did press the urgency of signing now while writers still had some agency, and reminded them who here really has the power. “In your contract, you provide us with the rights to go ahead with this kind of licensing,” Barbara Kline Pope, executive director of Hopkins Press, wrote to her writers. “However, we would like you to have the ability to opt out if you so choose.” The press was not suffering businesswise, she clarified, but it was “exploring how our financial model may need to evolve.” One author who went for the opt-out contract addendum with Johns Hopkins Press shared the resultant language with Inside Higher Ed; it warned that “sales and reach” of their work might suffer due to the A.I. opt-out…

A lot is still unclear, but a few things are apparent: A.I. companies are aggressively reaching out to book publishers to strike deals that will allow them to sidestep the litigation that led to the Anthropic settlement and avoid the heftier payouts. Whichever unnamed firm approached Arcadia, it took a particular interest in the wordier History Press, indicating that generative text remains the lodestar. And if the Theodore/Franklin Roosevelt mix-up is representative of other chatbot hallucinations, that perhaps indicates the need not just for these bots to brush up on history and text, but to ramp up the representation of local history in the mix in order to make the LLMs more universal.

It sounds like AI companies want large bodies of texts and academic publishing provides that.

It might just be about the words and texts but I wonder if any of the AI services actually wants the research information. Imagine one of them builds and advertises a specialty in local history. To look for local history online right now might require some digging (see steps for investigating suburbs here and here). What sources to trust? Where can I find specific information about people and places?

For example, I was recently looking at the different presentations about suburban communities between Wikipedia and Grokipedia. In some ways, the pages were similar in terms of their headings and the kinds of information presented. However, they drew on some different sources. Does a community’s website provide the best overview of a community? Where might published histories fit? Who can incorporate “official” overviews and the lived experiences of residents and those studying the history?

Perhaps there would be a market for accurate local history AI. Would it help people doing genealogies or interested in local development or looking to move to a new place?

Trying to remember the farm life that came before today’s suburbia

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I was recently looking at aerial photographs of our suburban area from nearly 100 years ago. The outline of suburban communities were there – small sets of houses clustered around railroad lines – but much of the land use involved farming plots. Today, hardly any of that farm land can be seen, let alone evidence of farming life. How can suburban communities remind people of that past?

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An editorial in the Daily Herald suggests preserving an old farmhouse and providing exhibits and demonstrations can help suburbanites today:

The Forest Preserve District of DuPage County is seeking formal statements of interest from individuals or organizations with a vision for rehabilitating and reusing the 1850s farmhouse at the southeast corner of Greene and Hobson roads…

Our hope is that it could pave the way for Oak Cottage — and a neighboring barn — to someday become an educational resource similar to Kline Creek Farm, a forest preserve district-owned living history museum in West Chicago that depicts what local farm life was like in the 1890s…

Restoring the farmhouse — along with opening the Greene Barn to the public — could help educate future generations about DuPage County’s farming past. We applaud forest preserve officials for at least being open to one of those ideas and wanting to partner with a group to breathe new life into Oak Cottage.

Such efforts can have multiple benefits:

  1. It helps people know their local history. If suburbs are sometimes characterized as “no places” as people move in and out or the landscape looks similar to any other suburbs in the US, such sites can remind people of a particular local history.
  2. It could remind people of a particular connection to land and nature beyond that of suburban lawns. Farming can involve intense agricultural and livestock activity but this is a different interaction with soil and creatures than what suburbanites typically experience.
  3. Land and places go through change. Prior to farming, Indigenous groups lived in the area. White settlers starting in the 1830s cleared much of the land for their preferred methods of subsistence. Sprawling suburbia picked up in the postwar era, leveling the landscape for single-family homes and roadways. The future use of land does not necessarily have to look like it does now.

New “Unvarnished” exhibit on Naperville’s exclusionary past

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A new project from Naper Settlement shows how Naperville – and several other communities – excluded people for decades:

https://www.unvarnishedhistory.org/local-spotlights/naperville-illinois/

For more than 80 years, Naperville was a sundown town. After working in a household, farm or factory during the day, people of color had to be gone from Naperville by sundown…

A historical look at how diversity in the city and five other U.S. towns grew despite decades historic discriminatory practices and segregation is featured in a free online exhibit spearheaded by Naper Settlement and the Historical Society of Naperville.

“Unvarnished: Housing Discrimination in the Northern and Western United States,” found at UnvarnishedHistory.org, was developed through a $750,000 Institute of Museum and Library Services Museum Leadership grant. The Naperville historical museum and five other museums and cultural organizations collaborated from 2017 to 2022 to research and present their community’s history of exclusion…

“It is our hope that this project will act as a model and inspire other communities to research, share and reflect upon their own history. It is through this process that we are able to engage with the totality of history to better understand today and guide our decision-making for the future,” she said.

In doing research on Naperville and two other nearby suburbs, I had uncovered some of what is detailed in this exhibit. However, the local histories of the community rarely addressed any of this. Instead, they focused on the positive moments for white residents, typically connected to growth, progress, and notable members of the community.

Such an exhibit suggests a willingness for Naperville and other communities to better grapple with pasts built on privileging some and keeping others out. The history of many American suburbs include exclusion by race, ethnicity, and social class. This could happen through explicit regulations and ordinances, through regular practices, or through policies and actions not explicitly about race, ethnicity, or class but with clear outcomes for different groups.

As noted in the last paragraph above, hopefully these efforts do not end with past history but also help communities consider current and future patterns. For example, decisions about development – like what kind of housing is approved – influence who can live in a community.

The Chicago Fire: a disaster to be celebrated?

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The 150th anniversary of the Chicago Fire is approaching and Rick Kogan highlights how the city came to celebrate the aftermath:

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The city, of course, rose from this disaster. But there is a thin line between celebrating and memorializing. One hundred and fifty years is a very long time, time enough, I suppose, for the fire to be viewed dispassionately, without alarm or pain or tears. But we are almost daily reminded that fires are ferocious and deadly, a realization that comes sweeping at us on television as Western portions of our country burn and burn and burn.

Yes, 150 years is a long time and we have grown so comfortable with — even proud of — our Great Fire legends that we don’t want them revised, even if such revision proves more historically accurate. The fire is among our most cherished, because it comes wrapped with enough historical substance to have withstood time’s test.

Perhaps turning attention to rebuilding was necessary to help stop agonizing over the tragedy. Perhaps this is an instance where American boosterism, promoting the growth and status of one’s community, ran and continues to run amok. Perhaps this is just the dominant narrative that we know now; of course the third largest city in the United States and an important global city came back from a fire.

The Chicago Fire was horrific:

The fire ran and it grew, swept by a strong wind from the southwest, eating its ravenous way north and toward downtown and beyond. People ran to the lake for shelter as the city became a vast ocean of flame. After that horrible night and the equally terrifying and destructive day and night that followed, the fire finally burned itself out. The city awoke Tuesday to find more than 18,000 buildings destroyed, much of the city leveled, 90,000 people homeless and 300-some people dead.

I am having a hard time thinking of a more recent urban tragedy that has followed a similar trajectory where despair turned to celebration of rebuilding and activity. Time might help but urban disasters or crises can strike quite a blow and the effects can linger a long time.

Co-presenting at the Wheaton Public Library on Race in Illinois: From Southern Counties to Northern Suburbs

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With DePaul professor Dr. Caroline Kisiel, I will be presenting via Zoom tomorrow night at the Wheaton Public Library:

Wheaton Public Library on Instagram

Register ahead of time for the Zoom webinar here.

My presentation will largely draw on the 2019 article I co-authored with David Malone titled “Race, Town, and Gown: A White Christian College and a White Suburb Address Race.”

Living in a community named after someone should prompt some curiosity about that founder

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Upon seeing news earlier this year about the death of Carol Stream, the daughter of a Wheaton-born developer who founded a suburb in the 1950s named after his daughter, I remembered that I live in a town named after someone (the Wheaton brothers, Jesse and Warren). I have also studied another town named after a person, Naperville, studied another community that started with a person’s name (Turner Junction which became West Chicago), and have some knowledge of an adjacent suburb named after another person, Warrenville.

If people live in a community named after a person, how much should community members know about that person? More broadly, I would guess many Americans have limited knowledge of the early days of their community. The founding could be decades, possibly centuries, earlier. Americans tend to look to the future, not the past. American communities do not always have local museums, plaques, or other markers that talk about the early days. Yet, a community with a specific name attached to it offers an opportunity to connect to a particular person who likely had some time in the area before and after the community got its start. (An aside: communities named after distant people who may have never visited, may not provide as compelling a story.)

On the flip side, other communities might appear to have mundane names. In the Chicago area, it seems like a variety of suburban communities that put together two words from a list: Oak, Forest, Village, Park, River, Hills, etc. These might also some research: what has behind the name choice?

At the beginning of a community, the founders choose a name. Even though that name may seem less relevant decades later, community members can do a little digging and connect the name to particular people, if applicable, or concepts. All of this could help create a great sense of shared history and community.

(See earlier related posts: Learning About a Suburb.)

Confronting and remembering Chicago’s 1919 race riots

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It can be hard for American communities to acknowledge bad moments in their past. Numerous museums in Chicago are planning to help the city and region think about the 1919 race riots one hundred years later:

One hundred years ago this summer, a black teen on a raft crossed an imaginary line into a “white” section of a Lake Michigan beach, was stoned by white bathers and drowned. The interracial battle on city streets that followed caused 38 deaths and set the stage for decades of segregation, discrimination and civic dysfunction.

Yet if you search the city for a commemoration of the Chicago Race Riots, as the events of July 1919 are known, you’ll find just one small marker, according to organizers of an upcoming series of events. Along the lakefront near 29th Street, affixed to a boulder there is a plaque — funded by suburban high school students — that says, “Dedicated to All the Victims of the Race Riot That Began Near This Place.”

The city’s collective neglect of this dark and seminal moment in its history is a topic that the Newberry Library and 13 other Chicago institutions hope to address with the yearlong project “Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots,” an initiative that the partners in the project will announce formally next week.

The goal is to use seminars, film, spoken word performance and even a bicycle tour to help “understand a history that frankly has been forgotten, has purposely not been remembered and certainly has not been commemorated,” said Liesl Olson, director of Chicago studies at the independent research library. “Most historians are kind of appalled by how little is discussed about this moment. There’s a lot of shame in it, really.”

My own research in suburban communities suggests this neglect of certain past events is often deliberate misremembering, particularly when these events involve race. Typically, a community’s history is presented as a collection of high points: the area was settled, the community was founded, good things happened here, here, and here, and all this helped make the great community we have today. Yet, communities are often shaped by negative events, moments involving conflict, disagreement, and even violence. Chicago’s engagement with race involves many of these moments and these exhibits have the ability to suggest much of that later activity – think bombings when blacks moved into white neighborhoods, riots in poor neighborhoods in the 1960s, virulent reactions to MLK marching in Chicago in 1966 – has its roots in the 1919 riots. The true measure of a year of exhibits may be how much the future retellings of Chicago’s history includes the 1919 riots as an important moment.