Mansions of the Harvester Dynasty
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The Cyrus Hall McCormick mansion, completed in 1879 .
By Megan McKinney
Towering over a section of Chicago known as McCormickville was a French Second Empire style mansion at 675 North Rush Street. The 35-room house—modeled after a pavilion of the Louvre—was built by International Harvester Company founder Cyrus Hall McCormick during the years from 1875 to 1879. The 14-foot-high dining room featured hand-carved Santo Domino mahogany woodwork and precious French tapestries from the reign of Henri IV. The awesome structure was thought by many to be the most elegant in Chicago, although it’s none too subtle ceiling painting depicted of sheaves of grain and reapers.
Cyrus lived there only the five years before his death in the house at 75 in 1884. His somewhat younger widow , the former Nettie Fowler, remained in the mansion to raise their five surviving children . The structure was demolished in 1955.
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Cyrus Hall McCormick
The great McCormick Harvester dynasty of Virginia dominated this section of Chicago—McCormickville—in the late nineteenth century with mansions so stylish that several became the ultra-fashionable restaurants of a century later.
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Chicagoans began patronizing Lawry’s on Ontario at Rush Street for Prime Rib in 1938 and probably would have continued beyond today if the pandemic had not closely followed a lease expiration.
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It’s difficult to imagine that the clunky four-story structure housing the L. Hamilton McCormick mansion directly above and graceful long, two-story building just before it—home of the restaurant Lawry’s—are the same building in separate phases.
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This Harvester family mansion—two side-by-side residences—was occupied by Leander McCormick and his son, Robert Hall McCormick. It then became one of the city’s great French restaurants under ownership of Paul Contos, followed by his son, Bill. The interior, at 660 North Rush, gained world-wide fame through replicas featured in two popular Chicago-based films, The Blues Brothers and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
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Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi in The Blues Brothers film of 1980.
Matthew Broderick in the 1986 movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
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Cyrus and Nettie McCormick’s second son, Princeton-educated Harold, hit the matrimonial jackpot in 1895 when he married John D. Rockefeller’s daughter, Edith, uniting two of America’s great dynasties. The forty-one-room mansion was diagonally across Michigan and Oak Street from The Drake. Treasures within the house included a six hundred-year-old rug made in Persia for Peter the Great of Russia, worth $125,000, and gilded chairs that had belonged to Napoleon.
The couple also owned Villa Turicum in Lake Forest—here turning to ruin—although it is doubtful they spent as much as one night there. And certainly not together.
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Ganna Walska
Harold was besotted with Polish opera singer Ganna Walska, who was great looking; however, so without talent that the late Roger Ebert, in his DVD commentary on the film Citizen Kane, suggested that Walska was the real-life model for the notably untalented Citizen Kane character Susan Alexander.
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A tiny vision of actress Dorothy Comingore as Susan Alexander in the film Citizen Kane
The mansion on the northwest corner of Astor Street and Burton Place was designed by architect Stanford White and built in the early 1890’s for Chicago Tribune owner Joseph Medill as a gift to Mr. Medill’s daughter “Nellie,” and her husband, Robert Wilson Patterson.
The estate joined the McCormick family when it was sold to Cyrus McCormick, Jr., son of the reaper developer. The younger McCormick hired architect David Adler to expand the great house to its current size in 1927. The mansion was converted to luxury condominiums in 1978.
When we set out to feature mansions from the great reaper and publishing dynasty in McCormickville and Beyond, we didn’t expect to leave the city, but here we are—out at Cantigny Park, the 500-acre Wheaton estate Colonel Robert R. McCormick of the family’s publishing branch occupied from the 1920’s until his death in 1955.
Author photo: Robert F. Carl
