Theater party of two Carlson brothers: Arvid and Victor

There was only one newspaper reference to the Carlson brothers of Woodstock, IL at the Iroquois Theater.  It stated that they were employed by the Oliver Typewriter company and though first thought dead, they survived the fire.  I found evidence of other Oliver employees living in McHenry County in 1910 and 1920, named Carlson and immigrants of Sweden, but the only other specific references were to Victor in July 1905 when the Woodstock Sentinel reported that he'd returned from a visit to Sweden and in October 1909 when the paper reported he'd again returned from a year-long visit to Sweden and was living with friends in Rockford, Illinois.  By 1917 four men named Arvid Carlson and five men named Victor Carlson lived in Rockford but none of the Arvids lived with a Victor.

Party of three: Catharine Frame, her older half sister Ida Cavenaugh and Ida's friend Georgie Eckert, two of which would years later die in automobile accidents involving telephone poles.

Thirteen-year-old Catherine "Elsie" Frame (1890–1988)

EIsie Frame, pictured above,  was the only daughter of James and Mary Maloney Frame.  She taught school prior to marriage and again later in life, totaling fifty years at a blackboard.  She acquired teaching and masters degrees.  Her marriage in 1914 was to a wealthy realtor, William F. Corby (1884–1953) , with whom she had two daughters, Francis and Mary.  In 1917 she lost her half sister and her mother.  In 1922 she filed for divorce, citing extreme cruelty,^▼8 and petitioned the court to prevent her husband from disposing of his assets.  The judge denied her request on the grounds that a man shouldn't be prevented from working just because he may have been irritable or cross."  He'd thrown a chair at her.  He denied the charges.  Elsie left him and finally in 1925 the divorce was finalized with undisclosed alimony.  Once again she became Elsie Frame.  Later they remarried and it lasted until his death.

In a touching newspaper story about Elsie by Marney Rich Keenan, "Memories of Elsie," in the Chicago Tribune August 28, 1988, I found a nugget of information that escaped mention in 1903 newspapers, perhaps because it was the faulty recollection of Elsie at age ninety-seven but maybe not.  Hop on into the rabbit hole with me.

In her last years Elsie, or her family members, recalled that her companion at the Iroquois was her half sister, Ida Cavenaugh,^▼4 but did not mention Georgie Eckert.  The omission could have resulted from an aged memory bank or it may be that the 1904 story in the Woodstock Sentinel that refers to Elsie and Georgie could be read that they were together, or not:

They may have each gone to the theater with others who were not from Woodstock. Still another possibility is that the family's recollection of Elsie's description of her escape from the Iroquois or Keenan's research was inaccurate.  My conclusion is that the two older same-age women, Georgie and Ida, took Elsie along on their theater outing.  Elsie didn't remember Ida decades later because Ida was Georgie's friend and, many years older and did not live in Woodstock after her marriage to Richard Cavanaugh.  Ida was not mentioned in the Woodstock Sentinel story because she did not live in Woodstock and the editor had begun his paragraph with "Among the Woodstock people known to have been present ..."  I looked for other connections between Ida and Georgie. They were almost certainly in the same class in school, and were both friends of the Wheeler family. They do not seem to have associated after the fire but I've found that to be common among party members of Iroquois Theater survivors.  Don't know why.  In this case Ida's wealth might have interfered.  Ida's life was one of luxury, multiple homes, servants and her sons.  Georgie's life was a whirlwind of church socials, apple pie ribbons at the county fair and caring for her father.

Twenty-seven-year-old Georgia "Georgie" Eckert (1876–1939)

Georgie Eckert was the daughter of George and Amy Green.  She had lost her mother at age eleven and her stepmother (who was also her aunt) a year before the Iroquois Theater fire.  Her father was an emigrant from France who had served in the U.S. Civil War, several times as a sheriff and deputy sheriff for McHenry County, and as a city councilman for Woodstock, IL.  As sheriff during the six-month 1895 imprisonment of Eugene V. Debs in Woodstock, George and Debs became friends and even went hunting together. After the death of his first wife George married her sister Rhoda who went by "Rhodie."

A lifelong resident of Woodstock, Georgie was a clerk at the Woodstock Dry Goods store when she escaped from the Iroquois.  The following year she served briefly as city editor at the Woodstock Sentinel newspaper and later worked as a clerk in the McHenry County Clerks office.  She lived with her parents til their deaths.

I found no evidence that Georgie married but the 1910 U.S. Census reported that she and her father had a boarder in their house.  Frank Mero Gates (1876–1961) was described as a traveling musician and was the same age as Georgie.  In 1904 & 1907 they sang together at GAR (Grand Army of the Republic) gatherings.  (Georgie's father was an active member of the local chapter, even traveling to Boston to attend a national event, taking Georgie along.)  Frank vacated the premises in 1920 but in 1930 was back living with Georgie and her aunt Augusta Green Keese at 340 South Madison.  And when a teenaged driver ran into their car on Memorial Day twenty-nine years later, killing Georgie, Frank was driving.  They'd been enroute to place flowers on his parents grave when rammed by a truck.  Georgie was thrown from the car into a telephone pole and the car then landed on her, killing her instantly.

Gates' obituary twenty years later reported that Frank was a house painter and former municipal band member, and the 1940 Census gave his education as 5th grade.  Perhaps Georgie was his mentor, or her muse. Whether their relationship went beyond singing and sharing living expenses was probably known by 1930s Woodstockians, but I'm happy to leave it an unknown.  Like her friend Ida Frame Cavenaugh, Georgie may have had her secrets.

Her estate was finalized in November 1940.Georgie participated in a variety of women's clubs (including a Rebecca Lodge, Liberty Loan drives, county fair organization and bridge clubs) and performed as a soprano soloist in many local pageants.

Twenty-seven-year-old Ida Maria Frame Kellogg Cavenaugh (1876–1917)

In 1897, age twenty-one, Ida lost one husband, a fellow named Kellogg, and married another: prominent insurance executive, Richard A. Cavanaugh / Cavenaugh (1861–1941).^▼6   At the time of the Iroquois Theater fire she had two sons, five-year-old Richard Jr. and two-month-old Robert Cavanaugh.  (Her first-born child had died at birth and her only daughter died three years after the Iroquois fire, in 1906.)
 
In Chicago the Cavenaugh's lived in a large apartment at 1020 Ardmore, known as "The Ardmore."  Ida and the boys spent winters in San Antonio, TX 1915-1917, staying at the St. Anthony's hotel.  Reportedly Ida's life as Mrs. Richard A. Cavenaugh was filled with country clubs and social activities (more on that below) but it was to be a short life.  Ida was returning from a dance at an automobile club with friends in the early morning hours of January 6, 1917 when the car side-swiped a telephone pole.  The impact loosened the tonneau (fold-down roof) and she was injured by its frame.  Unconscious and with lacerations on the face and head, Ida died at the hospital.  Her companions were Dr. Paul M. Peck and his wife, Dr. Mary E. Peck; the driver of the automobile was not named and may have been a chauffeur.
 
In reporting her death, the Chicago Tribune remarked upon her popularity in San Antonio, information that must have been supplied by family, but I've been unable to verify it.  Neither Ida or her sons were mentioned in Texas newspapers from 1912-1917, not as Cavenaugh or Cavanaugh.   Her sister Elsie was gregarious and outspoken; Ida seems to have been very private.  I sense she took secrets to the grave.
Three months after Ida's death her stepmother died and in another three months Ida's husband Richard married his private secretary.

As the largest city in Texas, San Antonio offered a dozen taxi providers in 1917.

Party of four: brother and sister Arthur and Maude Hill, and their friends, Rebeckah "Ruby" Chapman and John Rains

The father of Rebekah "Ruby" Cordelia Chapman (1884–1918) and the father of Andrew and Maude Hill were fellow Masons in Dundee, Illinois.  So avid a Mason was Andrew that in 1865 he wrote a book on the subject, The Royal Arch Companion.  Ruby was the nineteen-year-old daughter of Andrew and Anna Wyatt Chapman of Dundee, Illinois.  In 1910 she married Clarence E. Sawyer and they had one child, a boy named Henry after his grandfather Henry Sawyer, before her death at age thirty-four.  I found nothing to explain her early death.  She died on May 13 and was buried the following day.  The 1918 pandemic appeared in the spring of 1918 but did not hit its height of fatalities until October.

According to a 1975 newspaper reference, Ruby's father had been a harness maker who became a prominent coal, feed and lumber in Dundee.  By 1904 he was president of the First National Bank.

Ruby and her family kept very low profiles.  Andrew was active in the Kiwanis club and Rebecca's son Henry Sawyer (1912–1984) became a fire captain in Los Angeles, CA.

Arthur H. Hill (1881–1970) and Maude E. Hill (1883–1976) were two of seven children born to European immigrants, David and the late Margaret "Maggie" Grant Hill.  The family enjoyed prosperity through an eighty-five acre tree farm in Dundee that David purchased from Maggie's uncle, William Hill.  The nursery grew evergreens, ornamental, forest and fruit trees, employing up to one hundred workers in busy years.  Margaret Hill had died in 1898 and the family, including three teenagers, continued living in the family home until at least 1900.  By 1903 David remarried and moved to California.  At the time of the Iroquois Theater fire, Arthur and Maude were twenty-two and twenty years old.

In the clipping at top of this page, that appeared January 7, 1904 in the Woodstock Sentinel newspaper, Arthur Hill described his theater party's experience at the Iroquois Theater. It must be noted that as harrowing as it seemed to him, of the seven hundred and fifty occupants of the first floor, fewer than a dozen, one percent, died.  Of the one thousand occupants in the balconies, however, the death count was sixty percent.  First-floor occupants experienced frustration and were impacted by mob emotion whereas balcony occupants experienced terror on an altogether different scale, followed by pain and agony. Hill's group was within sight of daylight at the front entrance at all times during their escape.  They were not pinned in place in the dark, the only light from the fire bearing down on them while their hair and clothing began to burn, breathing in black smoke, surrounded by children coughing, crying, screaming, pleading for help.

In the years after the fire Arthur married Ruth Barber and had three children.  Maude married George A. Shurtleff and had two children.  She married in 1910, the same year as her friend Ruby Chapman.  Arthur joined the Hill Nursery and served there as president for over forty years.  Maude's husband became assistant state's attorney for Peoria County in Illinois and was prominent in Kiwanis Club.  In 1914 he compiled and revised municipal ordinances for the village of Peoria Heights.  In the 1940s Maude operated an antique shop.  Extensive genealogy work has been done on the Hill family and can be found on Ancestry.


John Kenton Rains (1879–1926) was one of seven children born to Hezekiah Douglas Rains and Ella Wherritt.  In 1900 the family lived at the west end of Vance Avenue on the east edge of the National Chattanooga Cemetery; in 1910 at age thirty John's official address was still at his family's home, along with three of his grown siblings, then at 18B Missionary Ridge Blvd.

In terms of activity level and accomplishment, John's father, Hezekiah Douglas Rains (1848–1935), who commonly went by "D. H. Rains," may have been a hard act for his children to follow.  His obituary reported that he wanted to be a minister as a young man, and to that end attended the young Vanderbilt University as its first divinity student, which would have been around 1873-1875.  I failed to find verification of his time at Vanderbilt but he left an easy-to-follow trail in his next occupation as a newspaper bookkeeper and reporter.  He worked as a bookkeeper for the Republican Banner of Nashville, edited the Tennessee Journal of Education, was a reporter for the Nashville Banner, and a manager at Nashville World. While still in Nashville he also served as an officer in various city associations in art and music and worked at the library.
He next moved to Chattanooga and spent three decades as an officer in Soddy Coal and Iron (with a dozen mining operations in Hamilton County, TN), then around 1916 began a three- to four-year tenure as business manager for the Erlanger Hospital. He wasn't done with journalism, however, and in retirement while living in New York with his children wrote freelance articles for The New York Sun newspaper said to demonstrate his knowledge of Southern history.

Party of husband and wife John and Ruby Whiteside

Attorney John Jay Whiteside (1871–1933) and his wife Ruby Mae Cady Whiteside (1871–1939) were natives of Marengo, IL (twelve miles southwest from Woodstock) that relocated to Woodstock where they later lived in an apartment on Throop Avenue.  They'd married in 1895 while John was in Northwestern law school from which he graduated in 1900.  Following a two-year internship with attorney Vincent S. Lumley (1867–1944) of Woodstock, John passed the bar exam and became a partner in Lumley, Whiteside & Murphy.  Helping the young couple get started was John's $100k (inflation adjusted) inheritance from an uncle in 1898; on the flip side they lost their only child at two months of age in 1901.

As was a custom of the era, from 1898 to 1904 John kept local newspapers apprised of his activities as religiously as any contemporary social media enthusiast.  In addition to references to his involvement in clubs (Columbian Knights, Woodstock Gun Club, National Union) were near weekly mentions that Mr. and Mrs. Whiteside had been to Marengo, to Chicago, to Marengo, to Marengo... forming a picture of a relationship that seems lopsided by contemporary standards.  John was outgoing while Ruby's life was limited to their visits back home to Marengo.  No mentions of her involvement in charity events or women's clubs.   In terms of public mention, she didn't exist except as the Mrs. in "Mr. and Mrs. John Whiteside" references.  In 1915 Ruby traveled to California with her parents and stayed on for several years living in Los Angeles, during which time John occasionally visited her parents in Marengo.  It wasn't surprising when the 1920 U.S. Census reported they were divorced and she was living with her parents in Marengo.  By the time she remarried in 1926 she'd blossomed a bit and was involved in the Women's Club ^▼9 and the Presbyterian Church.  She married a fellow Woodstock resident, feed store owner Herman Henry Bosshard (1864–1934).   

In 1906 John moved to Chicago to take a job as legal counsel for the Chicago Record-Herald newspaper.  Nothing was reported that explained his departure from the practice in Woodstock with Lumley.  Around 1920 Whiteside married a woman half his age.  Rosa Robertson, who went by her middle name, Inez, had married on a Tuesday and by Saturday was a widow, her husband having died on their honeymoon the day after Thanksgiving.

Lengthy 1903 description of John J. Whiteside's
ancestry pg 717

Party of two National Guardsmen: George W. Field and James Sullivan

The common interest between lawyer Field and farmer Sullivan was their involvement in Woodstock's Company G Third Regiment state militia (National Guard).  They were fellow officers, George as captain, Sullivan as first lieutenant.

George Walton Field (1870–1946)

George was the son of Albert and Ada Walton Field.   As a young man he worked for his father who was station agent for the Chicago and Northwestern Railway station in Woodstock.

George got his law degree from the University of Chicago and after interning with Vincent S. Lumley was admitted to the bar in 1896.  He remained with Lumley during a portion of Lumley's time as State's attorney; unlike John Whiteside (above) George chose to go out on his own rather than joining Lumley's law practice.  He became Woodstock's city clerk then city attorney.

George married twice, first to Catherine F. Murphy in 1891, then from 1925 until his death to courthouse secretary Dorthea Blanche Ely Levin Pitts Field.  (He was Blanche's third husband but she remarried after his death.)
Catherine bore his only known surviving child, a son named Edward Field, their first-born child having died as a toddler.  Though Catherine sometimes reported herself as widowed in the U.S. Census, her obituary cited George as her late spouse.  They lived together until at least 1920.

George served as captain of Company G until 1904 when he relocated to Washington DC. to assume an appointed position as a member of the board of pension appeals^▼10— but was soon back in Woodstock to recover from a three-month bout of typhoid fever and vote for Teddy Roosevelt.  A year later he returned to Woodstock for good and went into a law practice with — who else: Vincent Lumley.

Around 1907 George relocated to Waukegan, Illinois, an hour east of Woodstock, and became a criminal defense attorney.  One of his best-known clients was named Wilbur Glenn Voliva, an evangelical who believe the earth was flat.  Couldn't make this stuff up.  A short version is that a Scottish faith-healing con man in Chicago named John Dowie^▼10.5 in 1900 founded a large evangelical church and built a town around it that he named Zion, Illinois.  While living the good life out of the United States (paid for by his fast-collapsing ponzi operation in Zion), Dowie asked Voliva to look after his church in Zion.  Voliva swooped in, saved Zion from bankruptcy, tossed Dowie out and took his place.  Voliva set himself up as Zion's replacement dictator, magnifying oppression of Zion citizens, and imitating Dowie's luxurious lifestyle, including his crriminality.  George Field served as Voliva's personal attorney for over twenty years. 

George and Blanche built a new home on Stewart Avenue in 1925 and a vacation home in northern Wisconsin.  Decades after Field departed Woodstock, Sentinel newspaper editor/manager Charles Lemmers  (1863 —1943) found opportunities to mention him in retrospectives.

James Sullivan (1844–1928)

As a sixty-year-old farmer James Sullivan was not the average Iroquois theater goer.  He was the son of Irish immigrants married in 1888 to Gertrude "Gertie" Kwallek.  They had one child, a daughter named Vera.  Some genealogy reports mention a second daughter born in 1904 but that would have made Gertie fifty-six years old.  Not impossible but improbable.

In 1900 the Sullivan farm was located in Hartland Township northwest of Woodstock but by 1910 the family moved to the downtown area of Woodstock, living at 327 Johnson.

In 1901 a James Sullivan began doing electrical wiring in Woodstock and that evolved to an interest in electric equipment.  In 1907 he purchased half interest in the Kinodrome movie theater on Main Street from William E. Soles and installed an Edison projector.  They renamed the theater The Vaudette.  Was is electric hobbyist the same James Sullivan that survived the Iroquois Theater?  Can't say.  Nor can I determine if he and Gertie separated at some point.  Is he the same James Sullivan that in  January 1902 was feted with a fond farewell party by a large group of friends as he set off to a new life in the state of Washington?  Where did their family disappear to in 1920?  There are big pieces missing in James Sullivan's story. 

Enlarge to read George Field's descriptions of
he and Sullivan's escape from the Iroquois Theater.

Party of husband and wife Frank and Mamie Jackman

Frank R. Jackman (1867–1907) and his wife Mary Elizabeth "Mamie" Munroe Jackman (1870–1949) married in 1892.  They did not have children — to Mamie's sorrow, friends reported.

Frank passed the bar exam in 1891 and formed a partnership with William Maxwell who later became a judge in a Chicago city court.  After a few years solo Frank added Fred Bennett to the practice and they focused on real estate.

A native of Louisville, KY, Mamie was one of three girls born to William H. Monroe and Agnes Goodwillie  Monroe. The family relocated to Ridgefield, IL and Mamie attended school in Crystal Lake.

In addition to involvement with the Elks and Masons fraternal organizations, Frank was an avid duck hunter and automobile enthusiast. He drove a Cadillac in 1903, a Moline in 1905 and a Rambler in 1906.

Mamie was a charter member of the Eastern Star in Woodstock and sometimes participated in local theater productions but her name otherwise rarely appeared in newspaper notices of social or club activities. She visited and entertained her parents and siblings many times a year.  She was described as a woman of grace and modesty who wrote poetry and plays.

Frank suffered from intense headaches for several years and they sought time away from his demanding work as source of relief, often traveling to visit friends in Nottoway, Virginia.  He and Mamie had returned from their 1907 Virginia trip days before his death.

Mamie remarried after Frank's death, to another Frank.  Frank Hendricks moved into her home on Jackson Street in Woodstock (where they remained for the next forty years) and in 1911 Frank D. Hendricks was born.  He would go on to graduate from college, obtain a masters degree and build a successful career in school administration.  He also produced three children Mamie was said to have showered with the attention she'd like to have given a house full of children.

Mamie passed away in her sleep at age seventy-nine.

Party of Reid Pratt and unknown companion(s)

The theater companion of twenty-four-year-old Reid / Reed Pratt (1870–1937) is unknown.  His name was listed in the January 7 1904 Sentinel newspaper story about Woodstock survivors.  Unlike the others, however, the story did not then offer details of Pratt's experience that revealed his companions.  George Field was most likely but two published accounts of Field's and Sullivan's escape from the Iroquois , both long and detailed, made no mention of Pratt.  In an unrelated story just a column away from the Sentinel's Iroquois story, was the somewhat peculiar paragraph at right.  Reid was number nine in a light-hearted list of Woodstock's available bachelors.

In the late 1890s, as indicated by frequent blurbs in the Sentinel, Pratt was rather frenetically social and dated several young women.  He slowed down some around 1905 when he became interested in politics and in 1907 began a thirty-year career on the fire department.

As owner of a Cass Street meat and ice shop on Woodstock's square, with employees to manage the counter,^▼11 Pratt had the time and schedule flexibility to serve as mayor in 1927, and several times as an alderman. 

Reid married at age fifty-two in 1922. He was the son of a farming family from New York — Auvergne B. and Adelaide Lowe Pratt.  He had three siblings.  Auvergne joined Reid in the meat market in 1892.


Reid Pratt died of heart disease.

Party of David C. Haeger of East Dundee and ?

When climbing on the backs of seats to escape from the front of the ground floor at the Iroquois Theater in 1903, twenty-four-year-old David Carl Haeger III (1879–1944) still lived at home^▼12 with his parents and several siblings in Dundee, Illinois. His parents were David Henry Haeger II, founder of the Haeger Pottery Company, and Mary Weltzien Haeger.

Nothing was reported about his companion(s) but it's unlikely it was a woman because climbing over seat backs would have been difficult in an ankle-length dress.  Only David's overcoat was lost.

In the 1870s David Haeger II had purchased a brick manufacturing company in Dundee, IL  His ownership coincided with the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 and his new company supplied bricks that helped Chicago rebuild.  David II also purchased Elgin Brick and Tile in 1889 and accumulated several thousand acres of dairy farm land.   At his father's death, David Haeger III, having spent a couple years at Purdue University in Indiana, became executor of his father's estate and in 1908 incorporated the various operations as Haeger Brick & Tile.  In the early years he was president and his brother Edmond H. Haeger was Secretary-Treasurer.  In 1919 Edmond purchased the Dundee plant from the corporation and formed Haeger Potteries, the company that made Haeger a household brand and for over one hundred years produced the ubiquitous ceramic vases, bowels, ashtrays and dinnerware that graced our homes.  In my childhood, gifted plants for illness and funerals often came in Haeger vases and pots.  Saved for "just in case," they were moved from under the sink to a shelf in the garage or basement, eventually tossed away after becoming chipped or cracked. We have one still.

David continued as president of Haeger brick and tile operations and was active in the Illinois Tile Manufacturers Association. He and a friend formed the Dundee State Bank.  Mostly he kept a very low profile.

In 1907 David married Mary Newhall (1879–1919) with whom he had one child, David N. Haeger IV.  After Mary's death, in June 1922, David Haeger III married Jessie L. Ferris (1891–1955) who bore two children, Robert and Helen.  The family lived in Aurora for a decade or two, and in 1940 he managed a residential hotel in Chicago while the family lived in a lakefront apartment.

In 1927 David was one of many Chicago men who were victims of a land swindle involving promises of a South American gold bonanza. The con men asserted that a theretofore unknown race of white men had been found in the wilds of Columbia who rewarded the con men for curing a small pox outbreak by revealing their mountain of gold. The con men purportedly acquired an exclusive contract with the Columbians to build a railroad with which to transport their products made of gold.

Before David Haeger II's death the company had begun to manufacture simple clay pots.  In 1912 son/brother Edmond Haeger introduced glazed artware and in 1919 purchased the Dundee plant and incorporated it as Haeger Pottery.

Discrepancies and addendummmmm/p>

1. "Woodstock area" refers to several communities in northeast Illinois: Woodstock and Marengo in McHenry County, and East and West Dundee in Dundee Township in Kane County.  Though Woodstock today extends into several townships, in 1903 the surrounding countryside was often referred to by newspapers as Dorr, as though Dorr was a separate city rather than one of several townships containing a portion of Woodstock. 
Rockford is shown on the map above because it may have became the home of the Carlson brothers and Marengo because it figured importantly in the lives of the Whitesides.

2. Pleasure clubs were also known as "culture clubs" and "social clubs."  The Femina Pleasure Club, its membership made up of high school girls from prosperous families in the Humboldt neighborhood of Chicago, lost four of its members to the Iroquois Theater fire.

3. One of which was owned by Elsie Frame's grandfather, Norman Frame.

4. The Tribune's Elsie story contained some scrambled genealogy information.  Norman Frame was Elsie's grandfather, not her father.  Her father's name was James Anderson Frame (1848–1918 who went by his middle name, Anderson.  He was first married to Elizabeth A. Chestnut (1852–1878), with whom he had daughter Ida Maria Frame.  Four years after Elizabeth's death, James married Mary Maloney who eight years later gave birth to Elsie Frame. 

5. Ida Frame Cavenaugh appears to have married a man named Kellogg around 1896.  In '97, in Kenosha, WI, as Ida Frame Kellogg, she married Richard Cavenaugh.  (Notes to self: Find Kellogg.  Check Kenosha and South Dakota (where Elsie's family lived for several years between 1911 and 1916). 

6. Richard A. Cavenaugh was one of thirty co-founders and served for over twenty years as Secretary for a fraternal organization known as the Illinois Commercial Men's Association.  It was a club of insurance executives that met in the Masonic Temple building in Chicago.  In just over a decade the club grew to 45,103 members and its annual gathering was attended by over four hundred delegates. By 1920 the membership had more than tripled and Richard was still its Secretary.  He helped pilot the club's $125,000 purchase of the former Northwestern University Chemical Building in Chicago at 117 North Dearborn that year, while also serving as president of the International Federation of Commercial Travelers with it's 600,000 members and as a director of a bank.  (Nine years later the structure was razed to construct a handsome subway station for Edison Electric that still stands.)
Ida's experience at the Iroquois stirred Cavenough to use the reach of his office in the club to urge vigilance to its members, and informed his response to another fire.  The Iroquois fire prompted him to ask the membership to report hazardous hotels they found in their travels.  His request met with a lukewarm response and there was no mention of the Aveline Hotel in Fort Wayne, Indiana, despite it having been condemned in 1898.  The forty-five-year-old facility at the corner of Calhoun and Berry, once been the city's most luxurious, had become a fixture for offices and the drummer trade.  In 1908, an elevator-shaft fire quickly spread up to all six floors, killing eleven, three of them insurance men. Cavenaugh sent a letter to the club's membership and copied newspapers.  In it he urged insurance agents across the country to report and help him expose firetrap hotels.

7 Also identified as Shanahan and Casparis, the Louisville-based company was one of the lowest bidders on seven sections of the Western Aqueduct system that extended drinking water to Boston communities north of the city, and won contracts on four of the sections (2, 3, 6 & 12).  The company was contracted for $575k to build 24,955 feet of aqueduct, including 5,879 feet of 10-ft and 13-ft wide tunnels in four sections.  The project began on May May 9, 1901.  Denis A. Shanahan (1830–1913), an Irish immigrant, maintained a home on Second Street in 1900, with sixteen occupants, including his four sons and grandchildren, and three domestic servants.  The Shanahan family had lived in Covington, Virginia for several generations prior to locating in Louisville where their firm focused on railroad and bridge construction.  His two oldest boys, Dennis Jr. and Cornelius were in charge of the  Western Aqueduct project in Boston.  Dennis Jr. died early in 1903.   Sylvio A.  Casparis (1849–1921) owned a quarry in Columbus, OH.

8. In eras prior to no-fault divorce, to end a marriage required an initiating petitioner to submit proof of wrong-doing on the part of their spouse, each state using its own definition of legal cause.  Abuse and cruelty were legally acceptable causes in most states and commonly cited, as was abandonment.  Divorce carried enough of a stigma in the Edwardian era (1901–1919) that in the U.S. Census people often reported their marital status as widowed rather than divorced.

9. In 1936 Ruby and her sister-in-law, Alice Rasmussen Cady, donated Alice's former home at 308 W. Grant St. in Marengo to the city's Women's Club chapter, of which Ruby was a member.  Alice had been married to Ruby's late brother, Edwin James Cady (1882–1936).  Until Ruby's death the club accommodated her request that the clubhouse be named after her mother and it was known as the H. Mary Cady Memorial.  From 1941 to 1978, the large two-story structure operated as a two-unit apartment house and provided revenue to the club to fund high school scholarship programs. The Women's Club sold it for $37,000 in 1978 and it remained residential until at least 1985.  Today is a large corner lot opposite a McDonald's restaurant, vacant but for the remains of the original concrete from the sidewalk to the front entrance.

10. In 1902, with a thirty-month backlog of pension appeals, that had grown from an eighteen-month backlog since 1900 when the number of cases was thirteen thousand, the staff was increased from twelve to thirty-two.  Members of the Grand Army of the Republic met with president McKinley to propose creation of a tribunal dedicated to appeals.

10.5 Dowie was one of the clergy who railed that the Iroquois Theater fire was God's retribution for people going to plays and would cause people to avoid theaters in the future.  His church's policy was to expel members who attended a theater.

11.  Two of those employees — John and Charles Asmus — purchased the meat market from Pratt in 1937.

12.  According to the 1900 U.S. Census there were eight Haegers living in a home on South Street.  So why, I wonder, were they not living in the mansion on Hill Avenue?  Was South Street renamed?  Must have been; can't find anyone else in Dundee living on Hill Street in 1900.

Story 2977