The two diminu­tive white-haired women sat side by side in their rock­ing chairs, wear­ing black lace caps and silk ‘ker­chiefs draped around their necks. The date was Feb­ru­ary 15, 1893, their 91st birth­day. They were dressed in their fin­ery to chat with a reporter from the Chicago Tri­bune. At the time, they were thought to be the old­est twins in the world.

Born in upstate New York in 1802, Chris­tiana Churchill Chris­t­ian and Lura­nia Churchill Ack­er­man uprooted to Illi­nois in the 1830s, along with their par­ents Winslow and Mercy Dodge Churchill and a large clan of sib­lings, nieces, nephews and chil­dren. The Churchills were the first fam­ily to set­tle in the area that would later become Glen Ellyn.

“I sat in this rock­ing chair, up in the wagon, all those long and tedious weeks,” said Lura­nia of the ardu­ous jour­ney, pat­ting the straight-back rush-bottom rocker on which she sat. Lura­nia was accom­pa­nied on the trip by her hus­band John D. Ack­er­man and their three chil­dren. Chris­tiana, whose first hus­band had passed away 11 months after their mar­riage, came to Illi­nois with her son Eras­tus Ketchum. [See “‘Old Ketch’: a Col­or­ful Char­ac­ter in Glen Ellyn His­tory,” on page 6.]

The two women, mem­o­ries still intact, talked about some of the hard­ships of grow­ing up in the early 1800s. Chris­tiana recalled how she walked to school bare­foot as an 8-year-old child, with just stock­ings to cover her feet, because the trav­el­ing shoe­maker had yet to pay a visit to town. “We had very lit­tle school­ing, the schools being poor, and the near­est one two miles away,” she said. Soon after arriv­ing here, Lura­nia and her hus­band allowed school classes to be con­ducted in their home while the first log school­house was being built.

After com­ing to Illi­nois, the twin sis­ters lived on adjoin­ing farms near the East Branch of the DuPage River for 50 years. How­ever, they were described as “unalike in dis­po­si­tion” and “oppo­sites in the mat­ter of dress.” One fash­ion trend Chris­tiana par­tic­u­larly despised was the hoop skirt. “Hoops!” she said with con­tempt. “Yes, I wore them–I was such a fool. I’ve been read­ing in the papers about the leg­is­la­ture pass­ing a law against the wear­ing of them, and I’m glad of it.”

Although frail in appear­ance, the ladies dis­played a spir­ited sense of humor through­out the inter­view, as they shared their wry obser­va­tions about life in the 1800s. When asked to reflect on the boys of that period, Chris­tiana com­mented: “O, I guess boys were about the same then as now–they liked to be where the girls were.” Lura­nia was equally suc­cinct in sum­ming up the peo­ple of “present day” (1893) Glen Ellyn: “I think folks are smart and like to dress, and they have a lit­tle of everything.”

Lura­nia passed away a month after the birth­day cel­e­bra­tion, but Chris­tiana lived to the age of 97 (dying in 1899) and was still active at 94. The aver­age life expectancy of peo­ple born in the United States in 1850 was 39, accord­ing to the ear­li­est data avail­able from the U.S. Cen­sus Bureau.

The sum­mer of 1891 in Glen Ellyn was espe­cially hot and dry. The drought per­sisted into the autumn. Old timers likened it to the weather 20 years ear­lier that had pre­ceded the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which burned for two days and con­sumed every­thing in a path nearly a mile wide and four miles long.

John Elick, a local baker, had the job of light­ing the kerosene street lamps along Main Street in Glen Ellyn. On the evening of Novem­ber 6, 1891, as Elick lit the lamp in front of his bak­ery, it slipped from his grasp and crashed in flames on the wooden side­walk. Within sec­onds the blaze was beyond what could be smoth­ered with over­coats or a nearby bucket of water, and it quickly spread to Elick’s own build­ing, a wood-frame store front.

A gen­eral alarm was sounded, but there was lit­tle the towns­peo­ple could do. In those days, Glen Ellyn had no fire com­pany of its own. A rider was dis­patched to Wheaton two miles away, and the Wheaton Hook and Lad­der Com­pany responded as promptly as horses could pull the equip­ment. By the time they arrived, the fire was com­pletely out of con­trol. Fur­ther­more, Glen Ellyn had no munic­i­pal water sys­tem to sup­ply water for fight­ing the fire.

The fire started on the west side of Main Street, one build­ing north of Cres­cent Boule­vard. As was the case with the Great Chicago Fire, strong southerly winds pushed the fire north–toward Penn­syl­va­nia Avenue. Boyd Broth­ers Hard­ware Store was the next vic­tim, fol­lowed by the office build­ing of George M.H. Wag­ner, the drug­store of W.S. Ryder, the gro­cery store of John Mertz, and the W.H. Myers Meat Mar­ket. The fire burned all night until it had con­sumed every build­ing on the west side of Main except for one just south of where the fire started.

Prac­ti­cally every­one in town turned out to help, but their efforts were lim­ited to remov­ing mer­chan­dise and fix­tures from the build­ings in the path of the blaze and dous­ing sparks car­ried by the wind to busi­nesses across the street. While the build­ings on the east side of Main were spared destruc­tion, sev­eral suf­fered blis­tered paint and charred wood.

The Glen Ellyn fire of 1891 didn’t make head­lines around the coun­try the way the Chicago fire had 20 years ear­lier, but pro­por­tion­ally it destroyed as large a por­tion of this com­mu­nity as the Chicago fire did for Chicago. And, like Chicago, Glen Ellyn imme­di­ately set about to replace the wood build­ings in its cen­tral busi­ness dis­trict with masonry struc­tures, many of which still stand today.

Local his­to­rian Ada Dou­glas Har­mon once described the early wooden side­walks in Glen Ellyn as a “…first-class ren­dezvous for snakes. When we walked along at night, the snakes would stick their heads up through the cracks and wig­gle under our feet.”

The wooden side­walks along Main Street in the down­town area were much higher than else­where in town–as much as three to four feet above the street level–allowing shop­pers to step directly to them from their horse-drawn car­riages and high-wheeled buggies.

Unfor­tu­nately, these side­walks weren’t always kept in the best repair by the vil­lage. In 1893, a man from another town came to Glen Ellyn to trans­act some busi­ness. He fell through the side­walk, broke his leg and sued the vil­lage for $500. He won, and vil­lage offi­cials were forced to pay, which was quite the joke at the time because they were noto­ri­ous for being cau­tious in money mat­ters. It was reported that after this inci­dent, the side­walks were kept in bet­ter repair.

Clarence Cur­tis, grand­son of Amos Churchill (one of the orig­i­nal set­tlers here), told the fol­low­ing story involv­ing these high side­walks: “One Sun­day we were out for a ride when a heavy rain came up. Grandpa Churchill had a lum­ber busi­ness on Cres­cent just west of Main Street. We stopped in his barn, wait­ing for the rain to stop. North­east of the barn was the William Wag­ner store fac­ing on Main. The wooden side­walk in front of the store was level with the entrance and was set on posts sev­eral feet high.

“My dad noticed some boys going under the walk in front of the store, so he sent for Uncle Joe Clark [the town con­sta­ble]. Dad knew there had been thefts from the store. Mr. Wag­ner and Uncle Joe and my dad went into the store. They found one boy hid­ing under a counter. Mother and I saw another boy come out and run away. I knew who he was, and when he was caught he con­fessed. There were quite a few boys involved. They had a cave in Hon­ey­suckle Hill, where they were tak­ing their loot and hav­ing a good time.”

Today, the build­ing that housed the William Wag­ner Gro­cery Store on Main is long gone, while Glen­bard West High School sits atop Hon­ey­suckle Hill. Con­crete side­walks replaced the wooden ones in 1906.

The First World War had a pro­found effect on British soci­ety, upset­ting strict class dis­tinc­tions and turn­ing Vic­to­rian Eng­land on its ear. Curi­ously, the Civil War (1861–1865) had a sim­i­lar effect on the lit­tle vil­lage of Glen Ellyn, which then was known as Danby.

Danby sent 70 of its young men (more than 20 per­cent of its total pop­u­la­tion) off to fight in the Civil War. Most of them joined the 8th Illi­nois Cav­alry, a reg­i­ment that saw action in sev­eral major Civil War bat­tles. For many of them it would have been the first time they had trav­eled more than 25 miles from home. They went off to war as boys; those who sur­vived returned to Danby as men, wiser about the ways of the world. They had learned not only how to fight, but also how to drink, dance and chase women. While not exactly admirable skills, they cer­tainly were portable, and the young men trav­eled back home to Danby ready to show off their new abilities.

Before the war, Danby had been a sleepy farm town, a lit­tle shabby even. After the war, the rep­u­ta­tion went from sleepy to rowdy. Barn dances in sur­round­ing com­mu­ni­ties would be vis­ited by the boys from Danby, who were known for drink­ing and flirt­ing with girls. Soon they would be clear­ing the dance floor with their fists when boyfriends objected. Dur­ing this period, deservedly or not, Danby became known for its saloons and houses of ill repute.

In his Rem­i­nis­cences, Mr. Lawrence C. Cooper, a lawyer and town his­to­rian who com­muted into Chicago on the train, tells the story of rid­ing home one evening when he saw the con­duc­tor con­front a very ine­bri­ated pas­sen­ger. In an effort to col­lect the right fare, the con­duc­tor repeat­edly asked the pas­sen­ger where he was headed. The drunk finally replied, “I’m going to hell.” To which the con­duc­tor replied, “Then I’ll put you off at Danby. That’s about as close as we come.”

In an appar­ent effort to improve the image of the town, the vil­lage changed its post office des­ig­na­tion to Prospect Park in 1874, and for­mally incor­po­rated under that name in 1882. The town’s rep­u­ta­tion began to improve after that, but it may not have had as much to do with the name change as with the aging of those rowdy boys from Danby.

If you can pause for a minute between rush­ing the kids to soc­cer games and cheer­leader prac­tice, you may enjoy a brief look at how our young­sters expended energy in Glen Ellyn’s early days, when it was basi­cally a small farm­ing community.

The vil­lage was called Danby dur­ing much of that period (1851 to 1874). The town itself had only a few hun­dred res­i­dents, and many of its busi­nesses served the farm­ers whose lands sur­rounded the town. Life was sim­pler, but prob­a­bly not slower. There were too many things that needed to be done–and for teenagers, too many fun things beg­ging to be done.

Take corn husk­ing for exam­ple. Sounds pretty tedious. But if you were a young man among a group of teenagers at a Sat­ur­day after­noon corn husk­ing bee, and if you hap­pened to come across a red ear of corn, tedium became tit­il­la­tion. The rule was: “he who finds a red ear gets to kiss the girl of his choos­ing.” Accord­ing to the rec­ol­lec­tions of one old timer, red ears were quite rare. But after the first one was dis­cov­ered, oth­ers (or pos­si­bly the same ear) seemed to pop up pretty fre­quently until all the girls had been kissed and it was time to move from the chilly barn to the warm con­fines of the farm­house for a glass of cider and gin­ger­bread cook­ies or pump­kin pie.

Another favorite pas­time was ice skat­ing. But it wasn’t on Lake Ellyn in those days, because that lake didn’t exist until 1889 when a creek was dammed to cre­ate it. The creek that later fed Lake Ellyn actu­ally ran through the down­town area (it still does, but it’s buried in storm sewer pipes now), through what is now Lake Ellyn, and on to the East Branch of the DuPage River. Young­sters would strap on their skates in down­town Danby and then glide all the way to Lisle and back on the DuPage River.

This, of course, was after they had done their “chores” at home, and some­times before head­ing to a barn dance for the evening. Cen­sus data from the 1800s didn’t include any­thing about aver­age height and weight, but it’s a fair guess that teen obe­sity wasn’t much of an issue in those days.

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

The Village’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. Chris­tiana lived to the ripe old age of 97, pass­ing away only six years before her son Eras­tus. [See “Old­est Twins Dish About Boys and Hoop Skirts,” on page 16.]

Eras­tus was one of the 13 grand­chil­dren who made the ardu­ous trek from upstate New York to home­stead the area along today’s St. Charles Road, east of Main Street, soon to become known as Stacy’s Cor­ners. In 1849, when he was 23, he mar­ried his 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. It was held together with hand­made nails and had beau­ti­ful hand-crafted doors. The house stood at this loca­tion until 1970, when it was demol­ished to make room for a gas station.

Eras­tus was a farmer and an excel­lent car­pen­ter, but his great­est exploits were in hunt­ing and trap­ping wild ani­mals for food and fur. His ter­ri­tory ranged east to the Des Plaines River and beyond. His skills were leg­endary, even among the remain­ing groups of Native Amer­i­cans with whom he became friends. Sup­pos­edly, a group of Indi­ans once saved his life.

Eras­tus made his home 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. 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.

On the other side of the ledger, Eras­tus 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 died in his home at Stacy’s Cor­ners in 1905 at the age of 79.