1st settlers found pastoral Wilmette ideal for family life

(originally published in the Chicago Tribune, 8/31/1988)

Anton Schneider came to America from Prussia in 1847 and pioneered his way west to a homestead along what is now Old Glenview Road in western Wilmette.

"He bought 133 acres of land for $900," says his great-grand-daughter Marge Schoenbeck, 84, who lives with her husband, Joseph, 86, on the two acres of the homestead that have stayed in the family.

"They lived in a log cabin just across the street. My grandfather was Joseph Schneider and he built this house in 1875."

The Schoenbecks still live in the rustic stone house on a pastoral oasis of trees and flowers where Schoenbeck keeps an immaculate vegetable garden, and Mrs. Schoenbeck still cans the produce as she has done since girlhood.

More than 100 family members from across the country gathered at the homestead in 1986 and again this July for a family reunion.

J.B. Lauermann's Dry Goods Store, at the site of today's Mallinckrodt College, 1041 Ridge Rd., marked the central business district of Gross Point, incorporated as a separate village in 1874 but part of Wilmette since the 1920s.

The steeple of St. Joseph's brick church at Lake Avenue and Ridge Road, later replaced by the present-day church built in 1939, already crowned the horizon in the 1860s when Father William Netstraeter celebrated his first mass there. The church, just within the western boundary of Wilmette, served the German Catholic farmers of Gross Point, Winnetka and Evanston. Wilmette was still mostly Protestant in those days but residents elected Netstraeter, St. Joseph's pastor from 1872 to 1923, to two terms as village president.

Wilmette already was taking shape as a community of spacious homes, with a business district along Wilmette Avenue near Railroad Avenue (now Green Bay Road)--and even a pickle empire.

The Ouilmettes sold most of the 1,280-acre reservation in the 1830s and '40s. The entire south half of the reservation sold for less than $2 an acre. John Westerfield, who first saw Wilmette in 1847 while on a business trip from New York, bought the section with the Ouilmette cabin in 1857. He built his own home but preserved the cabin until 1865, when he razed it due to erosion damage.

Developer John Gage bought a tract of timberland just north of the old reservation. By the 1870s, his son Ashael was developing homesites for families eager for a country home in close proximity to Chicago. The Gage Mansion Ashael built on Elmwood Street remains one of Wilmette's oldest and grandest residences.

Development of Wilmette was underway in earnest. Westerfield platted the city and became its first village president in 1872, when it incorporated. He also opened a pickle factory near his home where he grew cucumbers and developed a special strain of seed purchased by other growers.

Meanwhile, his two brothers-in-law, Squire and Samuel Dingee, grew cucumbers on hundreds of acres within present-day Wilmette and processed them into pickles at a plant they owned on Chicago's North Side starting in 1858. The Dingee family donated the land for Central School, 910 Central Ave., which opened as a one-room schoolhouse in 1871.

Gross Point remained largely agrarian, where couples such as Joseph and Katrina Schneider and their eight sons and two daughters harvested vegetables and fruits they sold at the South Water Street Market in Chicago along what is now Wacker Drive.

"Farmers out here would leave at 11 o'clock at night to get produce to the market for the next day," recalls Schoenbeck, who made the trip many times from his family farm in Niles Center, now part of Skokie.

The Schneider family prospered, and soon a dynasty of Schneider farms flanked Old Glenview Road.

"My father took over this farm. Uncle Peter had the next farm up, and Uncle Anton had the next farm up from him," Mrs. Schoenbeck recalls. "We walked to St. Joseph's for school every day; Once in awhile, if the weather was really bad, my father took out the big sled and took us to school. All the kids up the road piled in. Most of them were Schneiders, too."

The children spoke German as well as English at St. Joseph's. Many of them didn't graduate 8th grade but left school after the 6th grade to help on the family farms.

Mrs. Schoenbeck's parents, Anna and Joseph Schneider Jr., had 12 children. As the oldest daughter, she took care of all the younger children while her parents and older brothers worked the fields. She took on the whole household at 16 when her mother had a stroke two months before the youngest of the Schneider children was born.

"I used to bake six pies and two cakes on Saturday, and by Monday night it was all gone," she says. "I baked six coffee cakes on Saturday and bread on Saturday and Tuesday. Monday was laundry day. There was no electricity, so you rubbed the clothes on a wash board. There were at least 15 white shirts to scrub because my brothers wore white shirts for church and the band.

Her uncles formed the Gross Point Band, and her brothers joined it, playing for holidays, weddings and local dances. It remains a community tradition, drawing musicians from beyond the Schneider clan now and playing for events such as the Wilmette Memorial Day Parade and Wilmette Days.

The brothers squired Mrs. Schoenbeck to dances at the old Gross Point Village Hall, built at Ridge Road and Washington Street in 1896, where the Wilmette Newspaper Distributors have offices now. The band played polkas and popular German songs and drew a crowd from all the neighboring towns.

The Gross Point business district continued to expand at the Ridge Road and Lake Avenue intersection, and by 1910, the business district at Central Avenue and Wilmette Avenue in Wilmette had taken on its present-day contours. A second business district budded at Fourth Street and Linden Avenue in 1912, when rapid transit service was extended there.

Sheridan Road had opened in 1900 as a broad, picturesque boulevard connecting Chicago and the North Shore. It was built along part of the old Green Bay Trail used by Indian and pioneers, but the new road became a must for Sunday afternoon horse and buggy rides and, later, joy rides in automobiles. Landfill left after the Metropolitan Sanitary District carved the North Shore Channel to the lake in 1909 gave the town Wilmette Harbor and 22 acres that is part of 59-acre Gillson Park.

Groundbreaking for the Bahai House of Worship took place in 1912. Construction began in 1920 and took 33 years to complete because the Bahais paid cash for all construction with contributions from Bahais around the world.

Wilmette's population had grown to 7,814 in 1920 from 2,300 just 20 years earlier. But on Palm Sunday of 1920, a tornado ripped through the town and caused the worst disaster in the community's history. It badly damaged businesses and tore the roof from the Village Hall. Clothes and linens hung from treetops along residential streets where 15 homes were completely demolished and dozens of others were damaged. Families lived in tents near the rubble of their fallen homes.

Miraculously, no lives were lost. The town rebuilt quickly and filled in with homes that could be built for less than $6,000 in the 1920s. Wilmette incorporated most of what had been the village of Gross Point in the 1920s, with the southern-most section of that town becoming part of Evanston.

Now farms in the Gross Point area began to give way to development. In 1922 Joseph Schneider Jr. and his sons opened the New Trier Garage, an auto repair shop. The red brick shop, now housing an excavating company, stands just east of the farmhouse.

Chicago restaurant owner Melville Brown helped develop downtown Central Avenue as it stands today, building the Brown Building at 1159 Wilmette Ave. in the 1920s.

His daughter Elizabeth Brooks, 87, lives within a few blocks of the house on Central where she was born, though the house was later moved. She recalls attending kindergarten in space rented in a store when Central School, rebuilt with eight classrooms in 1891, once again had reached capacity.

When she was a student at New Trier High School, where she later taught for awhile, "the faculty gave a Christmas party and put on skits about the students. They mimicked things students would do, like painting on a beauty mark or wearing your galoshes with the buckles open. That was quite the fashion."

The place the youth of the 1920s and '30s was forbidden to go was No Man's Land, an unincorporated part of the old Gage subdivision along Sheridan Road where Plaza del Lago now stands. A courtyard of shops called the Spanish Court opened there in the 1920s and introduced the concept of the shopping center to the Chicago area.

Soon, a movie theater called Teatro del Lago opened at the court's south end, and an Art Deco dance hall called the Miralago was built across the way on the east side of Sheridan Road. Many Wilmette residents found both establishments disquieting, to say the least. The popular Teatro featured some of the steamier movies of the era, and the Miralago became notorious as an illegal gambling house, where rowdy drunks caroused into the night.

After the Miralago burned in 1932, a number of gas stations and food stands occupied the site that became called the "Coney Island of the North Shore."

With the authority of new state legislation, Wilmette forced annexation of No Man's Land in 1942. But the Teatro and other businesses hung on until 20 years later when new owners restored and expanded the Spanish Court on the west side of Sheridan Road.

With its exotic Spanish architec-ture and belfry, Spanish Court had been the high note of class in No Man's Land. It was the second-oldest shopping center in the country and reopened as the posh, eclectic Plaza del Lago in the 1960s.

Jewel Food Companies took over the old Teatro building vacated by the movie house in 1967. Prestigious high-rise condominiums erased all evidence of the Miralago. With the metamorphosis of No Man's Land, Wilmette and its neighbors to the north completed their unbroken face of graceful elegance.