Early History of Jackson Park

Although the five hundred acres which became the East Division (Jackson Park) of the South Park were marshy, largely uninhabitable and without much intrinsic value, much occurred on or about the land to add many colorful chapters and footnotes to the early history of development of the park and of Chicago and Hyde Park.

The Potowatamie Indians undoubtedly hunted and fished on this property south of the village of Chicago before the treaty of 1833 which ended the Black Hawk War and ceded the lands west of Lake Michigan to the United States. The lands went on public sale by the U.S. Government on June 15, 1835, and were bought for $1.25 an acre, in the wild speculation of the times in all western lands.

One of the few persons to actually live on this unappealing property was Charles Burton Phillips, a sometime Baptist preacher and full time real estate speculator. He purchased one hundred ninety-six acres in 1849 for $500, double the original price. To this acreage, which lay between 59th Street and 63rd Street and stretched from the Michigan Road (later Stony Island Ave.) to the lake, and was bounded on the west by a high ridge of timber, he brought his new wife, Elizabeth Wright. They named their home "Eglemont", built a barn and a two story frame house, painted it yellow, laid out a ten acre vegetable garden with a large strawberry patch, spent much money

placing fences to keep out the cattle and hired men to dig ditches by hand to drain the land. They sold corn from their farm to neighboring Hyde Parkers, but the farm was barely self sufficient. Due to an increasing number of creditors, including William Kerr who had a $6,400 lien against the land, a perennial lack of ready cash, the Panic of 1857, and Charles' eccentric and roving ways, they lived unhappily there until 1862 when the house burned down under mysterious circumstances and they separated. Lizzie returned to her father's home in Cincinnati. Little did they realize that their domestic troubles and their property would become the center of a controversy which would hold up the development of Jackson Park for almost fifteen years after condemnation of the land in 1870.

In 1867, the Illinois legislature passed a bill establishing a park in South Chicago and Hyde Park, and, although voted down by the people, interest in and around the proposed sites increased enormously. By February of 1869, another park bill had been approved by the voters. With considerable pressure from real estate speculators and Hyde Park landowners for determining which lands were to be put in or out of the park

(those just outside of the park being the more valuable), the legislature created the South Park Commission to oversee the development. The first South Park Commissioners, John M. Wilson, Paul Cornell, I.B. Sidway, J.T. Bowen and George Gage, hired the famed landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of Central Park in New York, as the designer.

The South Park Commissioners, with authority to sell bonds for $2,000,000, and to tax and assess the contiguous property to finance the purchase of lands for the park, hoped to yield enough revenue to pay for the entire park system within the first five years. The prevailing opinion was that parks always produce more than they cost, due mostly to the enhanced valuation of nearby property. What no one had counted on, however, was the length of time it would take to condemn and purchase the lands, the amount and cost of litigation, or the difficulty in collecting the taxes and assessments. Certainly no one could have anticipated the I 871 Chicago Fire which burned all the land records, along with the Olmsted and Vaux' original plans.

The land cost more than $3,500,000 for the entire South Park system by the time all was settled in the mid I 880's.

In the East Division of South Park, about half of rhe lands-contlemned were purchased in 1870 at prices ranging from

$I ,400 per acre to $2,000 per acre, already higher than the $700 per acre the Commissioners had expected to pay. Two parcels of land, however, were in dispute. One was a seventy-eight acre piece on the easterly side of a two hundred acre tract between 63rd Street and 67th Street, owned·'by forty four persons. The other was the one hundred ninety-six acre tract once lived on by Charles Phillips, its ownership clouded by numerous claims and pseudo claims, including that of William Kerr who had executed his judgment on the land in 1863.

The clearing of the title to Phillips' tract became a "Celebrated Case" - a tangled web of litigation, tried in the United States Courts, the Cook County

Courts, twice in the Supreme Court of the United States and several times in the Supreme Court of the State of Illinois over a period of fifteen years. The cases provided employment to numbers of lawyers, many of whom took their fees in titles to small portions of the disputed land or feescontingent on therfnal7and value. There were ten thousand pages of testimony in what one of the judges called the most "complicated" case he had ever tried. At issue was whether William Kerr, owner of the land by virtue of the lien, had title to homestead lands which had been abandoned when Charles Phillips

had deserted Elizabeth. This was finally resolved in 1885 when William Kerr was declared the owner of one hundred eleven acres, for which he received $1,450 per acre plus interest of 607o per year from August 27, 1870. Eighty acres was declared homestead land and therefore not subject to the lien on the rest of the property. Charles Phillips was declared the owner of forty five acres and Elizabeth Wright Phillips, the owner of thirty five acres of the homestead lands. The judge, striking an early blow for women's rights, ruled that since Charles had abandoned Elizabeth, she was "head of household" and had an independent right to the land. Charles received $800 an acre pl us 607o interest per year from 1870.

As for the other tract of seventy-eight acres, there were three different trials before the value of the land was decreed to be $1,800-$1,900 per acre. The judge threw out the first two verdicts as "excessive".

While this litigation stretched out from 1870 to 1885, the South Park Commissioners saw the costs of procuring the land rising and they chafed under the expense and delay. In 1873 they complained in their annual report, "In the East Division, Commissioners have met greatest difficulty in gaining title sufficient to warrant their proceeding in the work of improvement. The very fact that the surface of ground admits of no other way of laying out except in continuous lakes and lagoons as planned by Olmsted and Vaux in their original draught of the park, prevents them from beginning the work without possession of the whole tract".

Source: Hyde Park Historical Society Newsletter, 1988 written by Julia Kramer