Hall of Fame
Historic Illinoisans

(1879-1940), Illinois’ thirtieth governor, was born in Chicago, attended the University of Chicago, and received his law degree from Chicago-Kent College of Law in 1898. He practiced law in Chicago until 1914, when he was appointed judge of the Probate Court of Cook County. A Democrat, he was elected governor of the state in 1932. He was reelected in 1936, after first winning a bitter primary election in which he defeated the candidate of the Chicago political machine. In an attempt to restrict the power of political machines, Horner supported a law requiring permanent voter registration. A great admirer and student of the life of the sixteenth president, Horner amassed a magnificent Lincoln collection which he bequeathed to the Illinois State Historical Library. He died before completing his second term as governor. 

(1816-1879), the son of a freed slave woman and a German man, was born in Greene County, North Carolina. He was apprenticed to a tailor in Tennessee and moved to Alton, Illinois, and then to Chicago in 1845. He opened a tailor shop in the city, taught himself to read and write, and prospered making fine clothing for wealthy Chicagoans. His shop was a stop on the underground railroad, which helped thousands of slaves to safety in the North. Jones served on the Cook County Board of Commissioners from 1872 – 1875, becoming the first African-American to hold elective office in Illinois.

 (1790-1848), Sauk war chief, was born of the Fox clan in Sauk Village (now Rock Island), Illinois. Astute and articulate, he gained admission to the Sauk tribal council. He became chief after Black Hawk’s defeat in the Black Hawk War of 1832 and was given charge of his former rival. In 1837 he spoke at a conference on land disputes in Washington, D.C. He so eloquently set forth the Sauk and Fox claims that the Niles National Register called Keokuk “one of the most sagacious Indians on our frontier.”

 (1850-1925) was born in Chicago to parents of Norwegian descent, and attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Along with other property, he inherited at his father’s death in 1873 interest in the daily Skandinaven, the only Norwegian-language newspaper in the country. In 1876 he bought the Chicago Daily News which had been started less than a year earlier. Under Lawson’s leadership, the Daily News thrived, soon becoming the most prominent evening newspaper in the nation. In 1890 he founded the Chicago City Press Association, a forerunner of the City News Bureau. Lawson was president (1894-1900) and a director (1893-1925) of Associated Press. 

(1809-1865), who became the best-known, most admired, and probably most eloquent president of the United States, was born in a log cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky, of illiterate parents. His father moved the family to what is now Spencer County, Indiana, in 1816, and to southwestern Illinois in 1830. Lincoln was self-taught; he once said he went to school “by littles,” spending a total of less than a year in country schools while he helped his father with farming chores. He worked as a store clerk, surveyer, and postmaster in New Salem, and studied law in New Salem and in Springfield, where he eventually built a prosperous practice. Lincoln served in the state legislature (1834-1841) and the United States House of Representatives (1847-1849). Though he lost that election, his debates with Senator Stephen A. Douglas during the 1858 senatorial campaign made him a leader of the Republican party. He won the presidential election in 1860, becoming the nation’s sixteenth president. Lincoln led the country with strength and compassion during its bloodiest conflict, the Civil War (1861-1865). Thousands of slaves were freed when President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, four days after Robert E. Lee had surrendered Confederate forces at Appomattox Court House, Lincoln went to Ford’s Theatre with his wife Mary and some guests. Before the play had ended, the president was shot by actor John Wilkes Booth, a disgruntled Southern sympathizer. Lincoln died the next morning. 

(1879-1931) was born in Springfield, Illinois, and studied at Hiram College in Ohio, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the New York School of Art. Lindsay had ambitions to become an illustrator or cartoonist, but he had a natural talent for writing and it was his poetry that eventually won him fame. Chicago-based Poetry magazine launched his career in 1913 when it published his “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven.” Lindsay’s other well-known poems include “The Congo” and “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight in Springfield, Illinois.”

(1802-1837), newspaper editor and publisher and martyred abolitionist, was born in Albion, Maine. The son of a clergyman, he graduated from Waterville College and studied theology at Princeton University. In 1833 he moved to St. Louis, where he became editor of the St. Louis Observer, which advocated the emancipation of slaves. Harassed by his enemies, he moved his printing plant to Alton, Illinois, in 1836. On July 4, 1837, he called a meeting to establish an Illinois auxiliary of the American Antislavery Society; its organization was completed by October 26, at which time a mob destroyed his press for a third time. On November 7, while guarding another new press, he was slain by a pro-slavery mob. 

 (1809-1884), inventor and manufacturer, was born in Virginia and received little formal education. He built a horse-drawn reaper at his father’s farm in 1831. Though he obtained a patent for his invention in 1834, it was not marketed until the early 1840s. McCormick’s reaper revolutionized farming – five times more wheat could be harvested per day than laborers could accomplish by hand. In 1847 McCormick chose Chicago as the location for his manufacturing plant. A “Copperhead” during the Civil War, he founded the Chicago Times, the largest anti-war newspaper in the North. He contributed funds to what became the McCormick Theological Seminary.

(1869-1950), a leading figure of the Chicago Renaissance literary movement, was born in Kansas but moved with his family to Petersburg, then to Lewistown, Illinois, as a small child. He graduated from Knox College, read law in his father’s office, and came to Chicago in 1892. At one time a partner in Clarence Darrow’s law firm, he abandoned a flourishing legal career in 1920 to devote his time to writing. His first great literary success came with the publication of a collection of verse, Spoon River Anthology, in 1915. He was a prolific writer of verse and prose. Masters’s biography of Vachel Lindsay won the Mark Twain Medal in 1935.

(1823-1899) was born in St. John, New Brunswick, and moved with his family to Stark County, Ohio, when he was nine years old. He studied law in Ohio, and purchased the Coshochton Whig in 1849, which he renamed the Republican. Medill moved to Chicago in 1854 and bought interest in the Chicago Tribune, becoming its business editor and managing editor. A founder of the Republican party, Medill was one of the earliest and most influential supporters of Abraham Lincoln’s candidacy for the presidency. During the Civil War, the Republican Tribune competed against Cyrus McCormick’s anti-war Chicago Times. Medill served as mayor of Chicago from 1871-1873. Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism was endowed by his family and named in his honor.

 (1868-1953), physicist and educator, was born in Morrison, Illinois. He graduated from Oberlin College and received a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Millikan was on the faculty of the University of Chicago from 1896-1921. He served the nation in a scientific capacity during World War I. In 1921 Millikan was named director of the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics at Throop Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. He was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on cosmic rays and received many additional honors throughout his life. 

(1872-1939), the son of a poor family in New York City, was a third-generation German-American whose grandfather had been a Union soldier. He graduated from Manhattan College and, upon choosing the priesthood as a vocation, studied at St. Vincent’s Seminary and in Rome. Ordained in 1895, he became the nation’s youngest monsignor in 1906. In 1915 he was named archbishop of Chicago, and cardinal in 1926. During his term, two hundred new churches were built and Quigley Preparatory Seminary, Rosary College, and Mundelein College were established. He purchased land northwest of Chicago to build a seminary, St. Mary of the Lake; the town where it is located was later renamed in his honor. 

(1804-1868), whose father fought in the American Revolution, was born in East Windsor, Connecticut, and received little formal schooling. He moved to Detroit where he established a dry goods business and prospered. Attracted by the possibilities of the new city of Chicago, he moved there in 1833, entering the banking business and investing heavily in real estate. Director and president of a number of banking and business institutions, he founded the Young Men’s Library Association (1841) and was president of the Chicago Historical Society (1860 – 1868). A provision of his will provided for the founding of Chicago’s Newberry Library.

(1764-1840) was born in Sugar Creek, Michigan, the daughter of a French and a mother who was half French and half Pottawatomie in what was then Grosse Pointe, Illinois—an area that now comprises the cities of Evanston and Wilmette, and they established a farm in the area. In 1812 she hid survivors of the Fort Dearborn massacre and later she and her husband helped to establish communication between the United States and Indian tribes. In appreciation for these services, in 1829, the federal government granted this “woman of the Pottawatomie” two sections of land on the shore of Lake Michigan, in the Treaty of Prairie du Chen. The couple sold the property in 1838 and moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa. There is a Ouilmette Street in the city of Wilmette, which was incorporated in 1871.

(1747-1818), Chicago’s first permanent resident, was born in Haiti of African-American and French ancestry. In 1764 Pointe du Sable and a boyhood friend left Haiti on the sloop Suzanne and sailed to New Orleans. With a Pottawatomie guide, he sailed up the Mississippi River. A mutual respect developed between Pointe du Sable and Native Americans. He married a young Pottawatomie woman named Catherine. As early as 1772, he established a trading post in Checagou (a Native American word meaning “wild onion”), near what is now Michigan Avenue and the Chicago River. The first child born in Chicago was reportedly born at his trading post, which flourished for a number of years. After the Revolutionary War, more settlers began coming to the area and Pointe du Sable sold his property and moved to Peoria.

(1831-1897) was bom in Brocton, New York, and left school at fourteen to become a sales clerk and apprentice cabinet maker. In the early 1850s, in Rochester, New York, he invented a method for raising the level of streets and adjacent buildings. In 1855 he brought his lucrative business to Chicago, where he prevented the Tremont Hotel from sinking into a quagmire of mud. Pullman conceived an idea to build railroad cars with sleeping berths, which at first was not well-received. He introduced his first sleeping car, the “Pioneer,” in 1865, founded the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1867, and introduced the first dining car a year later. In 1880 he built the model town of Pullman for his employees on the shores of Lake Calumet. He resisted his workers’ demands in a bitter strike in 1894.

(1878-1967), the son of Swedish immigrants, was born in Galesburg, Illinois, served in the Spanish-American War, and attended Lombard College. After trying a variety of jobs, Sandburg began his career as a journalist when he moved to Chicago in 1912, writing first for the Chicago World, and then the Chicago Daily News. Though other poems of his had been published, it was “Chicago,” which appeared in Poetry magazine in 1914 that first attracted public attention. His volumes of poetry include Comhuskers (1918.), The People, Yes (1936), and Complete Poems (1950). Among his books of prose are The Chicago Race Riots (1919), Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926) and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939). Sandburg received three Pulitzer Prizes—one for history in 1940, and two for poetry in 1919 and 1951. In 1962 he was designated poet laureate of Illinois. 

(1856-1924), often called the greatest architect of his day, was born in Boston and studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Ecoie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He came to Chicago in 1875 and worked for various firms before joining forces with Dankmar Adler in 1880. They designed some of Chicago’s finest buildings, such as the Auditorium Theater, McVicker’s Theater, and the Schlesinger and Mayer Store (now Carson, Pirie, Scott). Sullivan’s book, Autobiography of an Idea (1924), was hailed by critics as a major contribution to American literature. 

(1835-1905) made his violin debut in his native Germany at the age of ten, shortly before he moved with his family to New York. When he was fourteen, Thomas went on his own as a violinist and toured the South. He organized and conducted the Theodore Thomas Orchestra and was conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra from 1876-1891. Thomas accepted an offer to become conductor of the new Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1891, a position he held until his death in 1905. He is credited with helping to raise the level of musical tastes in the Midwest.

(1844-1913), who established the world’s first mail-order business, left school in Niles, Michigan, at the age of eleven to go to work in a barrel factory. He worked for dry goods stores in Michigan an Missouri before coming to Chicago in 1865, where his first job was as a clerk at Field, Palmer and Leiter. With George Thorne, he founded Montgomery Ward & Company in 1872 and issued his first catalog the same year. With expensive litigation, he fought developers to keep Chicago’s lakefront between Randolph and 11th Streets free of obstruction. In 1897 the Supreme Court ruled that no building except the Art Institute could be erected on that strip of property between Michigan Avenue and the lake.

(1862-1931), who was born a slave, began teaching in Mississippi country schools at the age of fourteen. She fought against injustice and discrimination as a writer, editor, and social activist. After working in Tennessee and New York, she came to Chicago in 1893. She married Ferdinand L. Barnett, a Chicago lawyer and publisher of the Conservator, the city’s first African-American newspaper, in 1894. Barnett f the Negro Fellowship League in 1910 and worked with Jane Addams i separate schools for black children in Chicago. She was the first probation officer in Chicago and a founder and director of the Cook League of Women Voters.  

 (1856-1931), who became the most respected African-American physician of his day, was born in Holidaysburg, Pennsylvania. He completed high school in Janesville, Wisconsin, while operating his own barbershop. Williams graduated from Chicago Medical College in 1883. As black physicians were not permitted to work in the city’s hospitals, Williams co-founded Provident Hospital in 1891 as “a venture in interracial cooperation.” He performed the world’s first open-heart surgery there in 18993. Williams left Provident for four years (1894-1898) to serve as chief surgeon at Freedman’s Hospital in Washington D.C. He also served on the staff of St. Luke’s Hospital (1907-1931) and was a founder of the American College of Surgeons. 

(1869-1959), a native of Wisconsin, spent two years studying engineering at the University of Wisconsin before moving to Chicago to pursue a career in architecture. After apprenticing with Louis Sullivan, he opened a practice in Oak Park, where he developed his “prairie style” in a series of homes built with low horizontal lines and strongly projecting eaves. Examples of his work can be found in a number of houses and several public buildings in the Chicago area and around the country. Wright designed the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1923), the Johnson Wax Administration Building in Racine, Wisconsin (1936), and the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1956). 

(1861-1932), born in Philadelphia, went to work in his father’s soap manufacturing company there when he was thirteen. He came to Chicago in the 1890s and began producing chewing gum in 1893; in 1898 he formed the William Wrigley, Jr. Company. The Wrigley Building on North Michigan Avenue was constructed in 1924 to house his burgeoning chewing gum empire. Wrigley bought controlling interest in the Chicago Cubs baseball team in 1921. Five years later the team’s playing field was renamed in his honor.

(1869-1932) was a native Chicagoan whose father had founded the Chicago Academy of Music in 1867. Ziegfield entered show business in 1893, when he brought bands and musical acts to the World’s Columbian Exposition. He moved to New York, where he brought actress Anna Held from Paris to Broadway to star in A Parlor Match in 1896. He produced a long series of musical revues, which became known as The Ziegfield Follies, from 1907-1931. The Follies featured beautiful women in a chorus line and music written by some of the country’s most eminent composers.