Before arriv­ing here in 1885, Pro­fes­sor Thomas E. Hill had been a teacher, a news­pa­per pub­lisher and a pub­lic ser­vant, hav­ing served two terms as mayor of Aurora. He also was the author of Hill’s Man­ual of Social and Busi­ness Forms, regarded by many as the pre-eminent eti­quette book of the age. He and his wife, Ellen, brought a new level of sophis­ti­ca­tion to our town. Both their dress and their man­ner were refined and they inspired oth­ers to fol­low their lead. Shortly after his arrival, Hill suc­ceeded Joseph R. McCh­es­ney as Vil­lage Pres­i­dent, serv­ing in that capac­ity from 1885 to 1889.

Hill also was a vision­ary and saw how the vil­lage, with its attrac­tive rolling ter­rain and sit­u­ated as it was on a train line just 25 miles west of Chicago, could become a mag­net for wealthy folks who wanted to escape the noise and clamor of the big city. To com­plete the attrac­tion, Hill and sev­eral local part­ners pur­chased much of the acreage north­east of the down­town area. They dammed a creek to cre­ate a beau­ti­ful 50 acre lake which Hill called Lake Glen Ellyn (“Ellyn” being the Welsh spelling of his wife’s name), built a 100-room hotel on the hill over­look­ing the lake, and con­structed a nearby pavil­ion where five dif­fer­ent nat­ural springs pur­port­edly offered heal­ing pow­ers for pretty much any­thing that ailed a per­son. The devel­op­ment of this sub­di­vi­sion coin­cided with, and arguably encour­aged, the build­ing of many of the grand Vic­to­rian style homes that also helped the Vil­lage to over­come its shoddy image.

Rec­og­niz­ing the con­tri­bu­tion that Thomas E. Hill and his wife had made, and pos­si­bly to cap­i­tal­ize on the appeal that Lake Glen Ellyn had brought to the com­mu­nity, the town fathers decided in 1891 to change the name of the vil­lage to Glen Ellyn.

With­out a doubt, there are mul­ti­ple can­di­dates for the acco­lade of best leader in the his­tory of Glen Ellyn. But Thomas E. Hill would have to be toward the top of most people’s list.

Men­tion the “S curve” to any­one who has lived in Glen Ellyn more than a few years and they know imme­di­ately that you’re refer­ring to that sec­tion of Park Boule­vard just north of the rail­road tracks. Few know, how­ever, that this pecu­liar twist in the road was very delib­er­ate and it was one of many con­tri­bu­tions to the Vil­lage made by Lawrence C. Cooper.

The Cooper fam­ily moved to this area from Clin­ton County, New York, in 1852 when young Lawrence was five years old. They trav­eled the Great Lakes by steamer to Chicago, and from there by train to the town then called Danby.

Cooper attended school in Danby before get­ting a law degree from the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan in Ann Arbor. Before mov­ing back to Danby he prac­ticed law in Chicago and lived briefly in a room on Chicago’s north side. Shortly before his mar­riage to Emma Yald­ing (daugh­ter of Jonathon Yald­ing, dea­con of the First Con­gre­ga­tional Church) all of his pos­ses­sions, includ­ing his wed­ding clothes, were destroyed in the great Chicago fire of 1871. The wed­ding took place anyway.

Soon after his mar­riage, Cooper moved back to Danby, joined the legal staff of the Chicago and North West­ern Rail­road, and became one of the early com­muters to Chicago using the train. Although he held this post in Chicago for some 50 years, his real con­tri­bu­tions were to the com­mu­nity where he lived. These included work­ing with Thomas E. Hill in 1889 to form the com­pany that cre­ated Lake Ellyn. Start­ing in 1902 he served as vil­lage attor­ney for sev­eral years, and at var­i­ous times served on both the vil­lage and county boards.

But before any of those involve­ments Mr. L.C. Cooper intro­duced the game of base­ball to Glen Ellyn, hav­ing learned the game while at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan. He and a friend orga­nized a team called the Rus­tics. Shortly after that, Cooper suc­ceeded in lur­ing the Excle­siors of Chicago (the club which later became the Chicago Cubs) to come here and play a game. It did not go well for the Rus­tics. They lost by a score of 102 to 2.

In 1893, Cooper and his wife built an expan­sive home on east side of Park Boule­vard just north of Anthony Street. In those days, the south end of Park Boule­vard stopped at Anthony because of a creek that ran through town just south of that point. In 1914 the vil­lage trustees passed an ordi­nance to chan­nel the creek into a storm sewer and to extend Park Boule­vard another block south to Penn­syl­va­nia Avenue. At his own expense, Lawrence Cooper paid to incor­po­rate what we now call the “S curve” into that road project because he thought that a curve was more inter­est­ing and grace­ful than the straight lines of most streets.

Shortly before he died in 1923, at the age of 76, Cooper pub­lished his mem­oirs, Rem­i­nis­cences of Old Glen Ellyn, a valu­able addi­tion to the his­tory of Glen Ellyn.

Car­pen­ter, trap­per, gun lover and choir boy … all of these labels applied to “Old Ketch,” one of Glen Ellyn’s orig­i­nal citizens.

Glen Ellyn’s early years were pop­u­lated with a num­ber of peo­ple who could be called “char­ac­ters.” Near the top of this list would be Eras­tus Ketchum, Jr. who, in 1834 at the age of eight, was a mem­ber of the first fam­ily to set­tle what would later become Glen Ellyn. His mother was Chris­tiana Churchill Ketchum, one of the four daugh­ters and five sons of Winslow and Mercy Dodge Churchill. Eras­tus was one of the 13 grand­chil­dren who made the ardu­ous trek from upstate New York to home­stead here.

In 1849, when Eras­tus Ketchum was 23, he mar­ried has cousin Mary Jane Churchill, a not uncom­mon prac­tice in the days when the pop­u­la­tion around Stacy’s Cor­ners was still pretty sparse and choices for spouses could be slim. They lived for more than 50 years in a house that Eras­tus built at the south­east cor­ner of St. Charles Road and Main Street. It was held together with hand-made nails and report­edly had beau­ti­ful hand-crafted doors. (The house stood at this loca­tion until 1970 when it was demol­ished to make room for a gas station.)

Ketchum was a farmer and an excel­lent car­pen­ter, but his great­est exploits were in hunt­ing and trap­ping wild ani­mals for food and fur. His skills were leg­endary even among the remain­ing groups of Native Amer­i­cans with whom he became friends.

His home was his armory where he kept an exten­sive array of guns and traps. His­to­rian Ada Dou­glas Har­mon described it as a “ver­i­ta­ble arse­nal.” He also main­tained a cider mill in one of his out­build­ings, and farm­ers would bring wag­onloads of apples every fall which he would crush into cider for them, hard cider being a favorite bev­er­age in that era.

Eras­tus Ketchum was mar­ried to the same woman for 50 years and was one of the founders of the Free Methodist Church in town, a church that actively sup­ported the abo­li­tion­ist (anti-slavery) move­ment in the pre– Civil War days. He also sang in the church choir and is said to have had a beau­ti­ful tenor voice that soared above the rest of the con­gre­ga­tion. Eras­tus Ketchum died in his home at Stacy’s Cor­ners in 1905 at the age of 79.

In the early 1900s, Glen Ellyn was enjoy­ing the pros­per­ity that comes from hav­ing been dis­cov­ered as a pleas­ant resort com­mu­nity by Chicagoans weary of the noise and bus­tle of the big city. It also was about that time when a reform-minded Chicago major, Carter Har­ri­son, ordered the clos­ing of Chicago’s numer­ous houses of ill repute. Among them was the lux­u­ri­ous Arena Hotel on Michi­gan Avenue owned by Emily Rieck (pro­nounced “Reeck”).

But Madame Rieck was a step ahead of Mayor Har­ri­son. She had vis­ited Glen Ellyn with its scenic lake and con­ve­nient rail ser­vice. She had found a home, Dr. Samuel Lundgren’s dark Vic­to­rian man­sion at the cor­ner of Cres­cent Boule­vard and Riford Road. She pur­chased it, remod­eled it exten­sively and added beau­ti­ful land­scap­ing. The house already had a ball­room for danc­ing. With a few tweaks, this ball­room dou­bled as a gam­bling par­lor, another rev­enue source for the enter­pris­ing Madame.

Faced with a grow­ing clien­tele, she soon expanded her oper­a­tion by build­ing a large and lovely guest house at Plum Tree Road, just east of the for­mer Lund­gren home. Both of these dwellings were a short walk from the Tay­lor Avenue train stop, a great con­ve­nience for gen­tle­men vis­it­ing from Chicago.

Accord­ing to Russ Ward, author of Images of Amer­ica — Glen Ellyn, “Plat­inum blonde Emily Rieck drew the stares of local boys, the ire of reform­ers, and the quiet grat­i­tude of more than a few res­i­dents.” Appar­ently, at least some of the local wives — many with more chil­dren than they could han­dle — viewed Madame Rieck’s guest house as pro­vid­ing a sort of birth control.

Ada Har­mon was born in Cham­paign, Illi­nois on August 16, 1860 and moved to Glen Ellyn with two of her sis­ters in 1892. Much has been writ­ten about Miss Har­mon. We know, for exam­ple, that she grad­u­ated from the Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois and the Art Insti­tute of Chicago. She was a painter, a stu­dent of Native Amer­i­can cul­ture and the flora of this area, a phil­an­thropist, and author of Glen Ellyn’s first defin­i­tive his­tory: The Story of an Old Town–Glen Ellyn.

She was one of the dri­ving forces in the orga­ni­za­tion of the first pub­lic library in the vil­lage and a char­ter mem­ber of the Anan Har­mon Chap­ter of the Daugh­ters of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion. She used her skills as an artist to cre­ate a pic­to­r­ial cat­a­logue of local flora in the form of 175 water­color paint­ings later donated to the Mor­ton Arbore­tum. She died in her home at 577 N. Park Boule­vard in 1943 at the age of 82.

Miss Harmon’s Glen Ellyn home still stands at the north­east cor­ner of Park and Glen Ellyn Place. It has received his­toric sta­tus from the Glen Ellyn His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety and the Vil­lage of Glen Ellyn. In 1892, this area was a new sub­di­vi­sion just one block from the recently cre­ated Lake Ellyn.

Alonzo Ack­er­man earned a place in the cast of col­or­ful char­ac­ters from Glen Ellyn’s early days thanks in part to the way he wore his hair. But as with sev­eral other char­ac­ters from our past, Ack­er­man did much more than just let­ting his hair grow.

Born in 1838 to pio­neer set­tlers John and Lura­nia Ack­er­man just four years after they set­tled here, “Lon” Ack­er­man early on fol­lowed in his father’s foot steps as a hunter, trap­per and farmer. In 1856 he mar­ried Mary Cof­fin and they went on to have seven chil­dren. In 1858 he heard Abra­ham Lin­coln make a speech at the Danby House in down­town Danby (now Glen Ellyn), and when the Civil War broke out he enlisted in the Union Army. His tour of duty included par­tic­i­pat­ing in Gen­eral Sherman’s march to the sea.

When he enlisted, Ack­er­man was a clean-cut lad. Either dur­ing or soon after the war he let his beard grow out and pretty much stopped cut­ting his hair. From then on he wore his hair in shoulder-length curls. Accord­ing to Glen Ellyn his­to­rian Ada Dou­glas Har­mon, he hosted an event every year on his birth­day when he would get his annual haircut.

Adding to his rep­u­ta­tion as a char­ac­ter was his habit of dri­ving down­town wear­ing a cream-colored hat and a navy blue coat with brass but­tons. Typ­i­cally he rode in a buggy drawn by a spot­ted brown and white horse that looked like it was right out of a cir­cus. A young girl in town described him as look­ing “… just like Jesus Christ.”

Char­ac­ter or not, Alonzo Ack­er­man was a well respected cit­i­zen in Danby. He helped with the very first pub­lic works project in town (in 1882) when he sub­mit­ted a bid of only 20 cents a yard to haul 262 yards of gravel for sec­tions of Main Street and Penn­syl­va­nia Avenue. In 1910 he was cho­sen to be one of the orig­i­nal trustees of the newly built For­est Glen School. And for many years, he and his wife, Mary, ran the “County Farm,” a facil­ity that housed and looked after the old and indi­gent in this area.

Lon Ackerman’s home was on St. Charles Road just east of Stacy’s Cor­ners and not far from where his par­ents first set­tled. The house orig­i­nally faced north toward St. Charles Road. Much later it was turned around to face south on Muir­wood Drive, where it sits today. Ack­er­man died in 1917 and is buried at For­est Hill Ceme­tery along with his wife of 61 years.