I. N. Arnold Home

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View North on Pine Street (now Michigan Avenue) to the Water Tower before the Fire; P. B. Greene, Stereograph, 1871 (ichi-39581)

View North on Pine Street (now Michigan Avenue) to the Water Tower before the Fire; P. B. Greene, Stereograph, 1871 (ichi-39581)

The North Division, notably the blocks along and just west of Pine Street (now Michigan Avenue), was the preferred neighborhood for successful Old Settlers, those who had come to Chicago mainly in the 1830s and early 1840s, when it was still a small settlement, and helped ensure its future growth by building their businesses and taking an active role in civic leadership.  They built large and comfortable homes on sprawling grounds, so near and yet so far from their offices in the South Division and the much more modest dwellings nearby (especially west of Clark Street) where many working class immigrants lived. 

Isaac N. Arnold set up residence on the west side of Pine Street in the block between Erie and Huron streets. Arnold was an attorney who came to Chicago from upstate New York.  In addition to practicing law, he served in the Illinois and United States House of Representatives, helped form the Free Soil and Republican parties, was active in multiple cultural institutions, and became a close friend and biographer of Abraham Lincoln.  Arnold's home, with its extensive art collection, its library of eight thousand books, and its Lincoln memorabilia represented the best of what Old Settler life had to offer.

Writing in Bygone Days in Chicago, his memoir of Chicago in the 1860s, Frederick Francis Cook described (in the present tense) this neighborhood and Arnold's home: 

"Not only is every street shaded, but entire wooded squares contain each only a single habitation, usually near its centre, thus enabling their fortunate owners to live in park-like surroundings....  These spacious domains exhibit a native growth remarkable for its variety. The Hon. Isaac N. Arnold is at this period the proud owner of one of these preserves, acquired in the thirties when this region was first platted, and when entire squares, at opportune times, were bought for less than the present value of a single lot, with fifty or more to the square. Mr. Arnold's plot retained much of its original aspect up to the fire, and he could point out among other varieties of timber (as he loved to do) fine specimens of oak, ash, maple, cherry, elm, birch, hickory, and cottonwood."

View North on Pine Street (now Michigan Avenue) to the Water Tower after the Fire; P. B. Greene, Stereograph, 1871 (ichi-39582)

View North on Pine Street (now Michigan Avenue) to the Water Tower after the Fire; P. B. Greene, Stereograph, 1871 (ichi-39582)

"And to think," marveled Frederick Francis Cook in Bygone Days in Chicago, "that in a single night all this wealth of nature disappeared as if it had never been!"

Waubansee Stone (ichi-64450)

Waubansee Stone (ichi-64450)

The Waubansee stone was a souvenir of two different pre-fire eras. It was a relic of Fort Dearborn—the face of Waubansee, a Potawatomi chief, was probably sculpted by one of the soldiers. More recently, it had a place of honor in Isaac N. Arnold's garden.  In their history of the fire, Chicago and the Great Conflagration, Arnold’s contemporaries Elias Colbert and Everett Chamberlin include what amount to an elegy to Arnold's handsome house and its precious contents; to the garden with its vines of wild grape, Virginia creeper, and bitter-sweet that hung from stately elms and covered the piazza; and to this stone, which Arnold had converted into a fountain. "On the lawn was a sun-dial," Colbert and Chamberlin recalled, "with the inscription:  'Horas non numero nisi serenas' [I number none but sunny hours].’”  They then continued, "Alas! the tablet vindicated its motto but too well. It was broken by the heat or in the melee which accompanied the fire, and the dark hours which have followed pass by without its reckoning."

The Waubansee Stone and Other Fire Relics; Photograph, 1911 (ichi-64375)

The Waubansee Stone and Other Fire Relics; Photograph, 1911 (ichi-64375)

The Waubansee Stone and other objects salvaged from the fire were assembled into a kind of memorial of the fire--and the pre-fire Chicago of I. N. Arnold--in the back yard of the home of his daughter.  The stone is now in the collections of the Chicago History Museum.