Vintage Chicago Tribune: In late 1800s, Lake Bluff was a summer refuge for Chicagoans and the religiously minded
In recent years, the most likely disturber of the peace on a balmy day in Lake Bluff has been a rehearsal of its Precision Power Mower Drill Team, a crowd-pleaser in North Shore parades.
But many summers ago, the culprit was One-Armed Murphy, who woke everyone within hearing distance of his banging on a big, bass drum.
“All is not serene at the Lake Bluff summer resort,” the Tribune reported July 29, 1894. “There is some feeling between boarders at the Irving Hotel and the soldiers of the Salvation Army, who have been in camp there for the last week.”
Cultural crosscurrents — akin to the warm and cold fronts that TV meteorologists point to — had collided over a hamlet on the Lake Michigan shoreline, 35 miles north of Chicago.
The result was a unique summer colony on the North Shore that for decades provided Chicagoans a bucolic refuge from summer’s heat while also exercising their minds.
One of the winds that buffeted Lake Bluff was a British revival movement modeled on military organization that preached to the urban downtrodden: The ranks of the “slum brigade,” as the Tribune dubbed the Salvation Army, were filled with missionaries armed with Bibles and backed by brass bands.
Its founder, General William Booth, spoke to its character during a 1872 visit to Chicago.
“The Salvation Army religion, he said, is not a boxed up religion, nor hid under a bushel,” the Tribune reported. “It is heard in the drum, it proclaims itself in the streets and back alleys. It shows itself on the street corners and where ever man may be met with who is to be relieved of the burden of sin and brought to the knowledge of Christ.”
The other force affecting Lake Bluff was the gentler breeze of the Chautauqua movement: a loose network of summer camps for adults sponsored by Methodists and similarly middle-class, mainstream denominations.
The Lake Bluff Camp Meeting Association attracted a crowd more sober-minded and God-fearing than many of those who ventured north to get away from the city, the Tribune reported.
“Of many excursion picnics from the city into the country not much good may be said,” the Tribune reported in 1876. “They are too apt to draw the vile and the vicious which is found on the purlieus of society in all cities who seize upon these occasions to unbridle their passions.”
The Tribune saluted the establishment of the Lake Bluff summer camp as a sign of Middle America’s growing maturity. “For some years past, the East has been building up summer resorts where the religious element should predominate,” the paper noted.
One was in Chautauqua, New York, where a summer resort’s potpourri of lectures and musical offerings became the blueprint for the Chautauqua movement.
Lake Bluff’s version was founded by a group of Methodist ministers who bought 100 acres of lakefront property in 1875. The following year, the Bluff Hotel opened. By the middle of the 1880s, there were 30 hotels and boardinghouses. Summer cottages appeared on lots that sold for $250.
The Salvation Army held an annual encampment in Lake Bluff because, like other large organizations, it needed to bring its members together periodically to compare notes. Its tents and the summer camp’s Tabernacle, an assembly hall seating 2,000, provided an improbable compass of entertainments.
In 1894, the Salvation Army exhibited an example of its handiwork — Jimmy, a reformed hoodlum from Chicago’s South Side.
“Every few minutes something bubbles up inside of him and demands utterance,” the Tribune reported. “On these occasions Jimmy rises spasmodically to his feet and roars: ‘Hully chee! — No, Hallelejulah!’ Then he sits down and looks calmer. Jimmy is one of the newest recruits to the Salvation Army.”
That same season, summer campers at Lake Bluff’s Chautauqua event, entitled the “Congress of Civics,” heard a lecture on: “The Relation of the Home to the State,” while a paper on “Initiative and Reform” was read to them by the president of the International Cigar Makers Union.
Yet the Chautauqua’s Methodist directors occasionally pushed the envelope of decorum to titillate campers. In 1883, they offered a lecture billed as “My Separation From the Mother Church,” by James A. O’Connor.
Ordained a priest in Ireland, O’Connor had served in a parish in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood but “began to realize that he was unable to promote the spiritual welfare of his parishioners.” So he left his post, led a wandering life, and eventually became a Methodist minister.
“In the course of many conversations with priests, he found several who entertained views similar to those held by himself, but they could not make up their minds to abandon the Mother Church,” the Tribune reported.
In similar fashion, Tribune editors were attentive to gossip circulating in the Salvation Army’s tents. In 1892, the paper conferred the title of “war correspondent” on a reporter sent to check out a juicy rumor.
“A strange story had gotten abroad in Chicago — a tale that told of the desertion of a member of the army, and her subsequent recapture with thrilling bayonet point features by two of the officers.”
An uncle of Lt. Mary Billings claimed that his niece wanted to leave the Salvation Army because she was tired of babysitting her commander’s children.
But Billings told the reporter: “I didn’t desert. I wasn’t captured. I am here of my own free will and it’s nobody’s business.”
Her commander agreed: “It’s not true she was only a servant in my home,” Maj. Brewer told the reporter. “She’s a lieutenant in the army, but there are other ways of serving the Lord than speaking from a platform.”
Other summer camp news items were verifiably scandalous.
In July 1895, the Tribune reported that: “Last Sunday two city girls — names unknown, who just the day before come out from the city to spend the summer donned their bathing suits and plunged in old Lake Michigan right before the eyes of all the deacons, deaconesses, and preachers of the Bluff.”
Dancing was also an issue, and a few years later, the ministers planned a counterattack on changing mores, as the Tribune reported:
“The clergy of the Lake Bluff camp meeting say they will make no effort to stop the dancing which is indulged in by many persons in the camp, but will do all in their power to make the meetings more attractive than the dances.”
But the issue was shortly moot. “The camp grounds at Lake Bluff are to be cut up into building lots and sold,” the Tribune reported March 28, 1900. “The tabernacle and other structures on the grounds will be torn down in a short time.”
Economic reality had caught up with the dancers and divines. Camp attendance was down. Lake Bluff’s future was as a residential community. Yet summer’s memories aren’t vulnerable to wrecking crews, as Vera Flach noted in a 1965 Tribune essay.
“When I was three years old my grandfather Jervis Gaylor Evans built a five bedroom cottage at Lake Bluff,” she wrote. “We took off as soon as the Chicago schools closed for the summer.”
On a sentimental journey decades later, she saw that much had changed. But she recalled her grandfather, a Methodist minister, writing about the Tabernacle: “A great stream of spiritual power will flow out to the remotest bounds of the nation.”
She sat on the bluff. An autumn light was playing upon it.
“I listened to the hypnotic sound of the water which lulled me to sleep on those summer nights so long ago. To me, Lake Bluff is still the same.”
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