A Gracious Southern Lifestyle in Chicago
Chicago’s mid-19th century Kentucky colony settled on the city’s lovely West Side.
By Megan McKinney
Like the Harrisons and Honorés to whom they were related, the Wallers were a Kentucky family that prospered handsomely in Chicago real estate. In 1849, James Breckinridge Waller, on a visit to Chicago, discovered the immediate and immense profits being made through property investment in the burgeoning city. After a decade of participating in this process from afar, he moved to the Lakeview area.
At the same time, three of James’ brothers—William, Edward and Henry—also moved to Chicago but put down roots on the genteel, languid West Side, where they were surrounded by the southern conviviality of fellow Kentuckians who continued to practice the bluegrass virtues of civility and hospitality. Ashland (then Reuben) Avenue was the center of an area where shaded gardens surrounded large houses with wide porches; the cooking was Southern and lively dancing parties featured reels and cotillions.
To understand the Wallers, it is important to know the West Side colony of their era. The gracious southern style houses were each set in a full city block. Henry Waller’s house, in the block at the northeast intersection of Ashland and Jackson, was directly catty-corner to the superb house and grounds of Henry Hamilton Honoré at the southwest corner. The Honoré estate, pictured at the top of this segment, was later owned by two generations of the Carter Harrison family, also of Kentucky.
Henry Hamilton Honoré.
Originally the West Side was prairie with fields of tall grass and wildflowers, in contrast to the forested area near the lake. In the summers, a portion of this plain became a baseball field, a ritual formalized on July 4, 1868 when a grandstand for 200 was erected between Ashland, Jackson, Van Buren and Laflin. As it became more settled, the area continued to be dominated by warm, easygoing—yet, invariably successful—Kentuckians. Carter Harrison Jr., who was born on Ashland Avenue in 1860, wrote of his compatriots that they were clear-eyed, sharp-witted, bighearted Kentuckians—lovers of man and beast.”
Carter Harrison Jr.
Hospitality reigned, particularly with members of the Grasshoppers, a social club that included Wallers, Harrisons and Honorés. The name came from the grasshoppers ladies’ dresses picked up when they walked through fields of high grass to dances held in the spacious parlors of their neighbors’ houses. Square dances alternated with round dances until 11 p.m., when musicians played the supper-march, a signal for guests to line up for the tradition of moving into the dining room to a table of escalloped oysters, chicken salad, and a variety of sandwiches, fruit, ice cream, cake and coffee.
On New Year’s Day there were open houses with bowls of Kentucky bourbon-laced eggnog on every sideboard, alongside champagne, port and sherry.
Carter Harrison Sr.
The Kentucky natives had been raised in an expansive countryside and required space and air. They kept horses, cows and chickens and raised vegetables in their spacious grounds. Carter Harrison Sr. was among those who sugar cured his hams and bacon prior to hickory smoking them in a smokehouse on his property. Homemade sausages were also the rule throughout the community.
The Carter Harrisons, senior and junior, were both five-term mayors of Chicago, prominent men of the time, whose names continue to reverberate today; however, they were but two of the Ashland Avenue residents whose images linger.
Bertha Honoré.
One of the most famous women in Chicago history was the Kentucky-born daughter of Henry H. Honoré, who was raised at the Ashland/Jackson intersection. As Mrs. Potter Palmer, queen of Chicago Society, she would later reign from a Lake Shore Drive “Castle.”
Rather than settling along Ashland Avenue with his brothers, James Breckinridge Waller created his own version of transplanted Kentucky. He bought a large tract of land north of the city, where he settled with his wife, Lucy, and developed the sprawling, gracious community of Buena Park. In 1861, he built Buena House, which replicated the ideal Kentucky homestead, its gates always swung open in the southern tradition.
Buena House.
The warm, inviting house, set in parklike grounds, surrounded by groves of old trees and rolling lawns, so charmed the poet Eugene Field that it inspired two of his works, Ballad of the Taylor Pup and The Delectable Ballad of the Waller Lot. The latter, written in 1895, began:
Up yonder in Buena Park
There is a famous spot,
In legend and in history
Yclept the Waller Lot.
There children play in daytime
And lovers stroll by dark,
For ’tis the goodliest trysting place
In all Buena Park.
Up yonder in Buena Park
There is a famous spot,
In legend and in history
Yclept the Waller Lot.
There children play in daytime
And lovers stroll by dark,
For ’tis the goodliest trysting place
In all Buena Park.
Eugene Field.
Other palatial Buena Park houses set in spacious grounds were constructed on property bought from James, and, as the 11 children of James and Lucy grew and married, several built handsome nearby residences. James Waller’s Buena House, the largest in its section of the city, could comfortably hold at least a half dozen families and did so after the Fire, when many acquaintances who had lost their homes moved in with the Wallers and stayed on as welcome guests until their own houses were rebuilt. Gates were always open not only to Chicagoans but to visitors from the south and throughout the country, including the whole of the Presbyterian general assembly when it convened in Chicago.
In 1896, an area newspaper, the North Shore Suburban, referred to Buena Park as “The Imperial Suburb of Chicago.” In reality, the district, bounded by Irving Park, Montrose, Lake Michigan, and the eastern boundary of Graceland Cemetery, was not a suburb; it had been annexed by the city of Chicago in 1889.
When Buena House was razed in 1913 to make way for an apartment building, the Chicago Tribune stated that the old homestead had “been the scene of more entertaining than any other house in the city.”
The Wallers will continue in Classic Chicago next week withThe William Wallers.
Author Photo
Robert F. Carl
