Naper Settlement site tour

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Built west of Chicago, the Pre-Emption House was named after the Pre-Emption Act. The Pre-Emption Act of 1834 allowed settlers to purchase the land they were squatting on for just $1.25 an acre if they had improved that land with a home and crops the previous year. The original structure, which stood on Main Street and Chicago Avenue, was demolished in 1946. You are now standing in a recreated Pre-Emption House, opened to the public in 1997. This reconstruction of the Pre-Emption House is a perfect example of early balloon frame construction. Carpenters used long 2x4 studs for exterior walls that extend continuously from foundation to roof. This new technique made buildings lighter, cheaper, and faster to construct than previous framing methods. The balloon frame method gets its name from its critics, who declared that its long thin studs were as flimsy as a balloon on a windy day. The Pre-Emption House had nineteen bedrooms, an office, kitchen, dining room, sitting room, maid's room, and large sample room. For only 35 cents a night, guests received a bed, breakfast, and a drink, as well as feed and stables for their horses. Not only did the Pre-Emption House serve as a hotel during its long history, but it also acted as a gathering place to conduct business. Before the construction of the first DuPage County courthouse in Naperville in 1839, the Pre-Emption House hosted official government business. Beginning in the late 1800s, Monthly Horse Market days in front of the hotel drew farmers and dealers from all over to haggle and show off their horses. This is represented by the statue outside of the current Pre-Emption House. As one settler put it, the Pre-Emption House was “the biggest thing between Chicago and the Mississippi.”

2. Blacksmith Shop

In the 1800s, no wagon train or growing town was without a blacksmith, and Naper’s Settlement was no exception. A blacksmith was the jack of all trades, the “father of craftsmen,” with the knowledge to forge iron, a black metal, to make hardware we take for granted today. It was in shops like this recreation where the blacksmith and farmer invented tools to speed up production, free up labor, assist in housework, and even help soldiers. Immigrants arriving from Europe could find work if they were smiths. In 1833, George Martin’s father sent a letter to his family back in Scotland, saying, “No person need come here if they cannot work—or bring work people with them…. Paid a Smith two dollars for putting four shoes on a horse…. Immigrants from east and Europe could find work if they knew how to smith.” It’s no coincidence that early steel plows, like those made at the Naperville Plow Works, were often the inventions of smiths. John Deere was himself a smith from Western Illinois. By the end of the nineteenth century, industry had advanced to the point that tools were being manufactured in factories and sold in hardware stores. However, this development did not mean the end of business for blacksmiths. Resourceful as ever, smiths became even more specialized, making mechanical repairs and continuing to shoe horses. The blacksmith shop here at Naper Settlement is a recreation of an 1880s Naperville shop owned by John Frederick Strohecker.

3. Print Shop

In 1849, the town was growing as Joe Naper had planned—churches and schools were springing up, business was booming, and settlers cultivated successful farms. As the town developed, Naperville residents sought to encourage the growing business and cultural interests by creating a local newspaper. They bought presses from the Chicago Journal, turned a shed into a print shop, and furnished it with inks, paper, and type; and searched for a publisher, eventually settling on C.J. Sellon. In December 1849, Sellon began publishing Naperville’s first paper, the DuPage County Recorder. Unfortunately, Sellon was a man who could easily be bought. Politicians paid him to turn the Recorder into a partisan paper called the Democratic Plaindealer, but after just a few issues, Sellon took the paper’s funds and left town. The DuPage County Recorder was only the first of several early Naperville papers to fail. During the 1850s and 1860s, a succession of local newspapers quickly folded until, in 1867, David Givler, a long-time resident of Naperville, purchased the DuPage County Press. Under his direction it became a reputable paper called the Naperville Clarion. David Givler published the Naperville Clarion from 1867 to 1905. Like many small-town publishers, Givler served as both editor, reporter, and master printer for his weekly paper., Upon his death, the paper passed to his son, Rollo N. Givler. The Naperville Clarion continued to publish local news until it was discontinued in the 1970s. This print shop was originally a garage, built in 1929, but was transformed into a print shop when it was moved to Naper Settlement in 1981.

4. Stone Carvers

German immigrant Henry Miller opened his stone carving business in this building in 1884. Naperville limestone quarries provided local stone carvers like Miller, who transformed it into intricately carved mantelpieces and gravestones. Originally located on Main Street, the building became local favorite Andy's popcorn stand before it was moved to Naper Settlement in 1969.

5. Fire House

For the first few decades of its existence, Naperville fought fires by passing buckets hand-to-hand from a water source to the fire. It was not until Naperville residents could see the glow of flames from the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, just 28 miles away, that they decided to invest in a hand-pumper. They named the newly purchased pumper the “Little Joe Naper.” A Hook and Ladder Company, composed of a fire marshal and volunteers, was formed to operate the pumper. When the fire bell rang, the volunteers rushed to the firehouse, which was often just a shed or garage large enough to store the pumper. There, they harnessed the ropes on the side of the pumper to their shoulders and hauled it to the fire. The intake hose was hooked up to any nearby water source, perhaps a cistern, stream, or well. The outtake hose, pressurized from the hand pumping of the firemen, blasted out 250 gallons of water a minute—smothering flames with a force that no human chain of buckets passed hand-to-hand could match. The “Little Joe Naper” was used until 1916 and came to Naper Settlement in the 1970s.

6. Log House

In 1831, Captain Joseph Naper, a former captain on the Great Lakes, led a party of 50 to 60 settlers from Ashtabula, Ohio, to a parcel of lush prairieland along the DuPage River, land that would become known as Naper’s Settlement. These first settlers lived in crowded log homes like this one. Swedish and Finnish colonists who settled the Delaware Valley in Pennsylvania brought the style to America in the 1630s. Settlers built log homes of readily available natural materials like wood, stone, and mud. To build a log home of this size (18 feet by 16 feet), a settler would need to cut down seventy to eighty logs of equal size. Log homes could be built of logs that were either hewn, cut and shaped, or unhewn, left whole. After cutting, builders made notches at the ends of the logs. Notches held logs in place and eliminated the need for nails or pegs. Builders filled the gaps between logs with clay or mud. This process, known as chinking, weatherproofed the exterior walls. Many settlers built their log cabins with holes in the roof to vent smoke, greased paper windows, and a dirt floor. A settler might turn his log cabin into a log house by adding a hinged door, glass windows, a plank floor, and a fireplace with a chimney. The finished product was a log home any early settler could be proud of. Log homes were never intended to be permanent structures. Settlers would live in the simple log home for only a few years until they built a larger frame house like those they lived in back East. Living quarters were tight in log cabins, with settler households averaging six people. Life inside the log home revolved around the fireplace, which was the main source of heat, light, and fuel for cooking. No day passed when the fireplace went unused—even in the summertime. Life in a log house was hard work and little play. Every member of a frontier household, including children, was responsible for daily chores essential to the family’s survival. Men and older boys cleared and cultivated fields, chopped firewood, and tended livestock. Women were responsible for cooking, cleaning, sewing, laundering, and related tasks. Children carried water, gathered fallen branches for kindling, and minded their younger siblings. The log house at Naper Settlement is the only building on the museum grounds which is not originally from this area. This log house was brought to Naper Settlement in 1978 from Jonesboro, Illinois.

7. Meeting House

In Ashtabula, Ohio, where Naper lived before moving to Illinois, religious revivals were commonplace—as they were all over the new country. The consensus was that religion was good for democracy. Although not an evangelical himself, Naper, being a man of his time, donated the land in 1841 for the construction of this church—the first to be built in DuPage County. The Germans who built Zion Evangelical Church were pioneers from Lancaster, Pennsylvania and immigrants fleeing the 1848 failed revolution in Germany. Although it housed a German speaking congregation, the building, in the spirit of 19th century evangelicalism, was open to preachers from other denominations and used as a community meetinghouse. Originally standing on Van Buren Street, this building was moved to Naper Settlement in 1971.

8. Naper- Haight

When Joseph Naper arrived in Illinois in July 1831, it was too late in the season to plant wheat to get him through his first winter. He planted buckwheat instead, which by autumn was a bountiful field that attracted prairie chickens who had never tasted the likes of such a grain. Over the years, his farm thrived and required farm labor to break new ground, seed, harvest, and mend fences. This simple house was built on Naper’s property on the east bank of the DuPage River in the 1850s and is believed to originally be the home of a farm laborer and his family. The building was moved to Naper Settlement in 1983.

9. Halfway House

The Stanley family built this farmhouse in 1843. All the early settlers needed to grow their own food in order to survive. Without proper food preservation, the food they spent so much time and effort growing would be lost or even worse, make a person deathly ill. Most farms had a smokehouse—a masonry structure similar to the one you’ll find behind the Halfway House, where a fire could be built on the dirt floor and kept smoldering for up to two weeks. The smoke would slowly cook the meat and infuse it with flavor. Also behind the Halfway House, there is a milk house. Milk houses were used to store milk before transportation to a creamery in the early 20th century. While this milk house was built adjacent to a barn, earlier milk houses were built on top of a creek or a river to keep milk cool. In the 1800s and early 1900s, Naperville was a dairy town, with cows outnumbering people for several decades. The Halfway House also had a root cellar. Cellars, like the one you’ll find on the northwest side, were the ideal place to store the harvested food like fruits and vegetables, along with dairy products and preserved meat. The underground location provided insulation, keeping food cool in summer and preventing it from freezing in the winter. Helena Zentmyer Wackerlin gave it the nickname "Halfway House," based on her childhood memory of the house as the halfway point of the two-hour carriage ride between her family's home in Naperville and her grandparents' home in Aurora. The Halfway House was moved to Naper Settlement in 1975 from its original location on Aurora Avenue, west of Route 59, near the Fox Valley mall.

10. Daniels House

Hamilton Daniels grew up in Naper’s Settlement and built his white-pillared house across the river on Washington Street in 1852, a few years before he attended Rush Medical College in Chicago. For 40 years, Dr. Daniels worked as a family practitioner, bringing babies into the world and treating their ailments, along with those of their elders, with his special line of patent medicines. At the time Dr. Daniels practiced, the approach thought to be most scientific promoted bloodletting, purging, vomiting, and blistering. For obvious reasons, this approach was not popular with patients. Another option was surgery, but prior to the Civil War, whiskey was the leading anesthetic, and infection seemed inevitable; this method was also unpopular. After his death, Dr. Daniels' sons published a catalogue of his medicines, legitimizing the scientific basis of the prescriptions, at a time when medical practitioners were scrutinizing patent medicines in favor of regulated treatments. In the catalog preface, they wrote, “It is a recognized fact that in well-defined ailments, the remedies prescribed by practitioners of the same school of medicine are practically alike, repeated tests having proven their potency, making them specific remedies and the healing art a positive science.” In 1974, Dr. Daniels’ House arrived here at Naper Settlement.

11. School House

By the 1840s, a community called Copenhagen Corners had developed south of Naper’s Settlement.To serve the growing community, townspeople built a clapboard schoolhouse. The one-room schoolhouse at Naper Settlement is a reconstruction of the Copenhagen Corners clapboard schoolhouse, originally located on what would become the intersection of Route 59 and 83rd Street. Since the builders were local farmers who knew very little about constructing anything grander than a simple wood frame structure, they relied on other schoolhouses in the area as architectural inspiration. This schoolhouse is made of lumber, but in areas of the Midwest where trees were scarce, sod was often used to build schools and homes. Some of the original materials were salvaged—you can even still see the graffiti carved into the siding in a few places. Lester Peet, the first schoolmaster in Naperville, was paid twelve dollars a month. The Copenhagen School was a subscription school, meaning each subscriber agreed to “pay his proportionable part of the teacher’s wages, according to the number of scholars that he subscribes for or send.” Copenhagen School’s enrollment varied, ranging from as many as 22 pupils and to as few as four. First grade through eighth grade students were taught at the same time in this one-room schoolhouse and learned reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, civil government, and science, among other subjects. Like other rural schools in Naperville, the academic calendar of Copenhagen School revolved around planting and harvesting times when children were needed at home to help with farm work. For many students, this was the only education they would receive. Today, Naperville students attend over 30 schools in two different school districts.

12. Paw Paw Post Office

Built in 1833, the Paw Paw Post Office was one of the first frame buildings in Naper’s Settlement. Serving as both a family home and mercantile business, Alexander Howard, a carpenter by trade, was named postmaster in 1836. With this new position, the Howard home became the post office and stagecoach stop, which in turn attracted more customers to his mercantile business. Mail in the mid-1800s came by wagon, stagecoach, and even steamboats. In Naper’s Settlement, the sounding of the post horn announced the approaching delivery. Upon hearing the horn, residents would gather by the paw paw trees surrounding the Howard house to read and listen to letters. This structure experienced two additions, one in the 1860s and one later in the 19th century, to make the Howard’s original home into the structure visitors see today. The Howard family house came to Naper Settlement in 1977 from its original location at Webster Street and Jefferson Avenue.

13. Murray House

“Let each state mind its own business and let its neighbors alone! If we will stand by that principle, then Mr. Lincoln will find that the Republic can exist forever divided into free and slave states.” Ideas such as this, expressed by Democrat Stephen Douglas to a crowd in Quincy, Illinois while campaigning for state Senate, were quite likely a topic of conversation around the table of this house owned by Robert Murray. Murray, a friend of Douglas’s and an avid supporter of states’ rights, was already actively involved in Illinois politics when he built his house on Main Street in 1842. It was here that Douglas stayed after he delivered a campaign speech at Naperville’s New York Hotel, another of Murray’s enterprises, in 1856. Public service was an early calling for Murray, who at age sixteen swam ashore from Captain Naper’s schooner that carried the first settlers. Within a year he had joined the Illinois Mounted Volunteers to defend the settlers during the Black Hawk War. He spent the next two decades in a variety of occupations, including constable, sheriff and student of law, before being admitted to the bar in 1851. Around town he was known simply as “Judge,” an endearing as well as professional title for a man respected in town for his fairness

14. Century Memorial Chapel

Built in 1864 during the Civil War, the Century Memorial Chapel served the congregation of St. John’s Evangelical Church until the 1960s. The Century Memorial Chapel is designed in the Prairie Gothic style popular in Illinois at the time. Fashionable architects in the Northeastern states popularized the Gothic Revival style in the U.S., and it quickly found favor among American builders between 1840 and 1870. In rural areas like Naperville, timber was more accessible than stone, the typical material for many classical Gothic structures. Carpenters applied the same styles and principles of Gothic revival architecture that were typically done on stone to wood. Builders encouraged churchgoers to look up to the heavens by adding details that draw one’s eye upward. The vertical siding of the Chapel brings your eye up to the pointed windows and the steep pitch of the roof. The windows are shaped like a pointed arch, also called a lancet, with some even extending into the gables of the roof. While Civil War battles were not heard in Naperville, the war weighed heavy on the hearts of its citizens when this church was built in 1864. 365 young men from Naperville volunteered during the war; some of those young men did not live to see home again. However, along with devastation, the war also brought prosperity to agricultural towns like Naperville. Demand for grain and livestock was high. Business was good—so good that the congregation of St. John’s Episcopal Church could finally afford to build their own church. Consecrated in 1865, only days after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the Chapel served as a place of worship and community for the congregation of St. John’s. When the building was scheduled to be demolished in 1969 to make way for a new professional building, a group of Naperville residents organized a group to “save the chapel” and succeeded, resulting in the creation of the Naperville Heritage Society and the chapel’s move to Naper Settlement in 1970. The Century Memorial Chapel continues to be a cherished gathering place for residents with dozens of couples choosing to hold their wedding in the Chapel each year.

15. Martin- Mitchell Mansion

Both immigrants from Scotland, George Martin III and his wife Sibelia met in Naperville, married in the 1850s, and had four children together. Operating a limestone quarry business, Martin saw a boom following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Almost a decade after the business boom, George Martin began constructing his three-story brick house in 1883. The new house was situated on the rural edge of downtown Naperville. Surrounded by 212 acres, this new structure stood like a castle, overseeing farmland and Martin’s rock quarry pits, which had also furnished many of the foundations upon which the town’s buildings rest. Martin hired Joseph A. Mulvey from Aurora to design a house that celebrated his success as a businessman. The mansion shows a variety of popular Victorian architectural styles. When used together, they are commonly referred to as Victorian Eclectic style. The Italianate style is the most dominant on the exterior façade of the mansion. This style was inspired by Italian villas and was popular in the United States from the 1860s through the 1880s. Other popular Victorian architecture features on the house include the porch’s overall High Victorian Gothic appearance, similar to the Century Memorial Chapel at Naper Settlement. The roofline is a Second Empire style, best characterized by a mimicked mansard roof, or a four-sided roof with two slopes, with the lower slope at a steeper angle than the upper. In honor of their Scottish heritage, the Martins named their estate Pinecraig. After his father died when he was fifteen, George Martin not only tended to the family farm, but also expanded his family’s land to include a quarry on the DuPage River. In the 1850s, Martin had developed a commercial quarry that was advertising lime and building stone in the local paper. Following the Chicago Fire in 1871, stone and gravel were at a premium. By 1872 Martin, along with partner Ernst von Oven, had developed another business, the Naperville Tile and Brick Works. The timing was perfect. The Martins themselves represented a typical Victorian success story. While most Naperville residents still ate in the kitchen, Martin, his wife, and their three daughters, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Caroline, could leave behind the dynamite blasts and dust of the quarry for fine, formal meals in a dining room. Their house featured new technologies of the day as well, such as electricity, the telephone, and indoor plumbing. George Martin died five years after the completion of his house, leaving his businesses to his daughters. The estate was eventually left to his youngest daughter Caroline, who deeded it to the city of Naperville as a museum and park in 1936. Pinecraig and its carriage house are the only buildings on Naper Settlement grounds that are currently standing in their original location.

This Tour is a Walking Tour.