Category Archives: Montgomery Ward

Mr. Ward, Mr. Field and Mr. Merrick

I have set aside every Friday morning to do research on Montgomery Ward at the Chicago History Museum, which has a huge collection of Montgomery Ward materials.  And every Friday morning I come across something new and surprising.

Recently I was going over the folder of materials relating to Ward’s legal battles over the lakefront. The Montgomery Ward & Co. headquarters was located on Michigan Ave. at the time and Ward got sick of looking out his office window at the mess and allegedly turned to his lawyer George Merrick and said “Damn, do something about it.”

There ended up being three separate cases involving the lakefront.  It should be pointed out here that Ward was not the only adjacent property owner to object to the presence of various structures, but he was the one basically footing the bills.

What surprised me about the cases was how sarcastic Ward and his lawyer could be.  They obviously felt that the powers that be were engaging in sheer boondoggles designed to use public land for financial gain or to garner prestige.

After winning the first case, which involved a so-called armory hardly used for that purpose, Ward described what he saw out of his office window:

The city has permitted the erection on the lakefront of a couple of so-called public buildings which, by the city political gang, were allowed to be used for circuses, dog fights, and even ‘Hinky Dink’s’ [a corrupt alderman] fashionable social assemblages [Hinky Dink threw political fundraisers  that involved outrageous costumes and behavior]. . .all for more or less private gain. The Illinois Central had five tracts west of their lawful right of way and at times the city used the property as a dumping ground for refuse.

His view did not change as further issues came up, most famously his opposition to the erection of the Field Museum in Grant Park.  In this he was going up against Daniel Burnham’s plan for the lakefront, which thanks to Ward, was now a cleaned up desirable piece of real estate.  Plans were made for building not only the Field Museum, but also the Crerar Library, municipal buildings, a possible site for the Olympics in 1904 and more.

But whether it was Hinky Dink or Marshall Field, all these plans in Ward’s mind involved taking land away from the people of Chicago that was rightfully theirs.  In a press conference in which Ward’s lawyer spoke, Merrick was as sarcastic as Ward had been earlier.  Slamming his fist on the table, he said

It will not be built if we can help it.  Mr. Field wanted a monument, and being a poor man he couldn’t afford to pay for a site.  Now it is proposed to secure a site from the City of Chicago by violating a trust, and we don’t propose to stand for it; the Illinois Supreme Court will not stand for it, and it will not be built there if we can help it.

And it was not built there. Amusingly enough, as soon as the verdict came down in the Field Museum case, some obviously angry state representative introduced a bill to allow the Field Museum to be built on an island in Lake Michigan, with no consideration given to how people were to reach it.

Ward and Merrick went up directly against machine politics and many of the most influential and powerful people in the city and won.  That Ward would not play ball with them and did it successfully is not something that happens often in Chicago.

 

How Do Old Family Letters Survive?

The flip answer is of course “very carefully.” But there is truth in that answer. If you think about it for a minute, for a family letter to even be written there had to be at least two people who were separated by enough distance to require written communication and who in fact wanted to communicate with each other. Today we routinely text or phone friends that we may actually be with shortly. Not so in the past.

This fact has led to some frustration in my research on Montgomery Ward.  He was never separated from his wife or daughter and not much given to writing personal letters in the first place.  So far I have only encountered one sent to a niece during a trip he and his wife took to Europe. It is a delightful, chatty letter revealing a great interest in seeing the sights and affection for this niece. I hope there are more such letters in the bowels of the Chicago History Museum.

Secondly, the people who are the recipients of the letters have to want to preserve them. My great-uncle John and his wife-to-be Lulu kept their letters to each other, but discussed in these self-same letters burning other letters to former love interests. These have obviously been lost to history.

Thirdly, once the original recipients have died, their survivors have to want to preserve them. Here as the letters pass down the generations are points where many are thrown out. Poor storage with possible insect, water and fire damage also take their toll.

So chances are that whatever survives is somewhat piecemeal. Of the hundreds of family letters which I have inherited I only have the (almost) complete correspondence between my grandfather Louis and grandmother Pearl in their courting days. So in this instance I can trace how they responded to each other’s feelings and concerns.

In other instances I unfortunately cannot. In writing Coming to Amerika,on which I am working now, I have letters of my great-great uncle Friedrich in Terryville, Connecticut to his relatives on the Plains of Kansas, but I do not have their responses. No one in Terryville saved the letters. The relatives in Kansas saved his even though they were written in Old German which they could not read. My grandfather Louis and my father saved them out of emotional attachment in the case of the former and an interest in genealogy in the latter. They have now been translated and once the book is finished, the letters and other documents will be donated to academic institutions to make sure they are preserved for the future.

 

 

Working with Family Documents and Other Primary Sources

If you are interested in your family’s history and are fortunate enough like me to have family letters, photographs and other documents available, here is some advice gleaned from my own experience about how to mine them for the interesting information about your family that they contain.

  1. Read Everything

And I mean everything.  I am in the process of writing Coming to Amerika which is based on family documents spanning over one hundred years. Just recently in looking over old photos I found one of my great uncle John in his 60’s wearing a uniform. On the back of the photo was the notation “Columbian Guard.” Obviously, he had not been in the Army of Columbia! I knew, however, that as a young man he had been to the World’s Columbian Exposition—the Chicago World’s Fair—in 1893 as I had a booklet he had collected at the time. Further research revealed that the law enforcement authorities at the time felt they needed to beef up security and so hired from around the country about 2000 young men to help keep the peace and deal with pickpockets and other such offenders. They were called the Columbian Guard.

I checked to be sure that the uniform great uncle John was wearing in the photograph matched the uniforms in the other photographs of Columbian Guards on the internet. It did. So great uncle John not only attended the World’s Fair in 1893, he was part of it—a good story to include in Coming to Amerika.

  1. If You Have Documents in a Foreign Language, Get Them Translated!

Such documents are mute unless people today can read them. It may be that you are fluent in the language in which they are written. If not, there are translation services available and a professor or graduate student in a foreign language at a local college might be a good resource. In my case, although I have studied quite a few foreign languages, including German, I could not read the letters written in Old German script. Before his death my father had had some of the letters translated, but there were many more. My brother and I researched translation services, finding it difficult to locate someone who could read the script. Then through perseverance on his part, my brother located a German professor in a small college in South Dakota who in fact taught the old German script. She and her institution were willing to have her translate the remaining documents for a relatively small fee and the donation of some of the original materials for use by students in her classroom. Translations done, she is now serving as a consultant for Coming to Amerika. Without her the book would not have come alive.

  1. Put the Documents in a Historical Context

Just from the content of the documents themselves, it is not always clear just what a reference means or how typical a particular circumstance is for the time when a document was written. So now you must dig. I am a historian by training and nature and have written a great deal about United States history, but I find myself learning new and surprising things as I try to place the documents in context. For example, a number of the letters speak of going to Pike’s Peak. As I researched this I learned there was a brief gold rush in the Denver area in 1858-1860. In fact, this was how Denver got its start.

My great-great grandmother in 1850’s Germany was deeply in debt.  She had only 150 Gulden to pay them off. I could find no solid information about the value of a Gulden so I looked for amounts for comparisons. It later cost her 300 Gulden to travel from Germany to the United States, funds raised by selling possessions and receiving money from a son who had already emigrated.  So 150 Gulden was not much.

  1. Go Through Your Letters and Documents Again and Again

This is important because what might have had little meaning when you first read the material may now be a significant piece of the puzzle. In my case, as I was riffling through some materials I came across, for the second or third time, a business card for an inn in New York City. With the information I had now gleaned I realized it was for the inn my newly arrived relatives stayed at when they first disembarked.

  1. Verify, Verify, Verify

Just because a document is a primary source does not make it accurate. It was written by a human being with a certain amount of knowledge, which might have been limited, and a certain perspective, which could be quite biased. So be sure to check statements out with other available sources. In my case, in addition to writing Coming to Amerika, I am currently researching a biography of Montgomery Ward. I encountered his brief memoir in the files of the Chicago History Museum in which he asserts that his name came from the name of a general who fought in the French and Indian War. Just a little research showed that there was no such general.

  1. Not Everything is on the Internet

There is of course much information on the Internet today.  Ancestry.com and familysearch.org as well as other sites have much family data as does fold3.com for those wanting to search military records. Many important historical books have been digitized and made available, often for free, through GooglePlay and other sites.

It is a mistake, however, to limit research to just the Internet. In gathering information about Montgomery Ward I have followed his path from Chatham, Massachusetts, where he was born, to Niles, Michigan, where he lived as a youth, and finally to Chicago.  All along the way there have been resources available that are not on the Internet. Local historical societies, run often by committed volunteers, as well as public libraries are amazing founts of information. The public library in Niles has an extraordinary genealogical section with information on Ward which I am not finding at the much larger and fancier Chicago History Museum.

 

Going off the Internet grid was most important for my book Examined Lives, which will be coming out this fall.  It is a no-holds-barred look at mental illness, narrated around the lives of my mother and me. I had family letters but I ferreted out much more by locating medical records and sources for information on Walter Freeman, the man who gave my mother a lobotomy and who famously botched the lobotomy of Rosemary Kenney. I was fortunate in having a major research library at hand at the University of Chicago, from which I graduated with a B.A. and M.A. in history. They had copies of materials written by Freeman which had been destroyed by many other institutions as well as the only copy of a work by another neurologist who was Freeman’s inspiration.

Special Collections at the George Washington University where Freeman had taught, archives his donated papers, which include an unpublished autobiography, which I paid to have digitized for myself and future scholars.

I hope that these pointers will make your own family research more fruitful and thus in the end more exciting and amazing!  Happy digging!

 

 

 

 

 

The Confusing and Confused A. Montgomery Ward

 

I have not blogged in a while but I have been busy on my book projects.  I am shepherding Examined Lives through the publication process and researching and writing Coming to Amerika.  I have written a great deal about United States history in my life, but working with my family documents I have learned much that I did not know before.  It is totally engrossing and I hope the product will be so to others.

I, however, have not forgotten Montgomery Ward.  Today I started working with the large amount of material available at the Chicago History Museum.  In just a few short hours I was in the midst of controversies about his birthdate and in which house in Chatham, New Jersey he was actually born.  The birthdate I had long ago settled; the controversy arose from sloppy estimate of ages in the early censuses.  The house is really not material.  But among the documents was a copy of a brief memorandum Ward had handwritten himself in about 1890 about his life.  Historians had quoted from this memorandum, but this was the first time I had read the whole thing.

In my blog post What’s in A Name? I had discussed the origin of his name.  Among all the accounts I had read which quoted from his memorandum, no one had quoted on this topic.  So it was a total surprise to me to find Ward saying that he was named after Gen. A. Montgomery Ward of the French and Indian War and brother to his great-grandfather Captain Israel Ward.  I of course have immediately investigated.  First, there was no General named A. Montgomery Ward who fought in the French and Indian War and second, Israel Ward did not have a brother named A. Montgomery Ward.  As I discussed in my abovementioned blog, Israel Ward had a son named Aaron Montgomery Ward, who was our Ward’s grandfather.  So what was going on here?

This is speculation on my part, but speculation based on circumstances.  As a young child we do not know what story our Ward was told and he may have gotten it garbled.  He never met his grandfather, who died in 1841, several years before his birth in 1844.  In addition, Ward’s grandfather was not in Chatham when he died, but for whatever reason he had gone westward and died in Chicago, Illinois.  There is obvious irony in this given what happened later.

What I said in What’s in A Name? still stands.  Even a primary source can be confused.