history
La Grange Area Historical Society
In 1972, a future-looking group of La Grange and La Grange Park residents interested in preserving the town’s past formed the La Grange Area Historical Society and began an undertaking that may well be the only one of its kind in the United States.
The 1874 Samuel Vial House is home to the area's historical society.
This group keenly appreciated La Grange’s collection of late 19th century and early 20th century homes and buildings although, when the Society was founded, its immediate purpose was to prepare for the town’s centennial celebrations in 1979, according to Shirley Black, one of those early members. As part of those celebrations, the Society decided to create a survey of the town’s architecturally interesting homes and buildings.
Wilbert R. Hasbrouck’s architectural office set out to conduct the survey on select, significant structures. Today, some thirty-plus years later, Mr. Hasbrouck and his researchers would be amazed to see what the Historical Society has collected and continues to collect.
Since its founding in 1972, the La Grange Area Historical Society has not only moved into its own home, the 1874 Samuel Vial House on La Grange Avenue and 47th Street, but it has amassed nine five-drawer filing cabinets bursting with files on every single home—old, new, middle-aged—in La Grange, La Grange Park and La Grange Highlands. It has files on every single organization, commercial and public building in the area as well as some 200 files on prominent and long-time families.
Today, as many as 10 volunteers gather at the Vial House on Wednesday mornings and continue to track La Grange’s history. These volunteers include Ellen Chevas, who had been volunteering at the Historical Society for only four months in June, 2006. She originally came in to look at the records on her and her husband’s home of 53 years, an 81-year-old residence on North Poplar Street. The file on their address contained clippings from 1953 when they were listed as newcomers to La Grange, the 1970 announcement of the birth of puppies at their address, the 1944 birth of a daughter to the previous owners and lots of Garden Club articles reflecting another of Mrs. Chevas’ hobbies.
For Jeanne Hayden, who moved to La Grange in 1978 and has been a Historical Society volunteer and past board member, her work for the group isn’t limited to Wednesdays. Throughout the week, Mrs. Hayden clips articles which contain anything and everything that has to do with La Grange and its residents. And, by anything and everything that means anything and everything. Social events, scouting, sports, commendations, news, profiles and yes, even items from the published police blotters are clipped, copied and filed. “If it hits the papers, I figure what the heck,” Mrs. Hayden said.
On Wednesdays, Mrs. Hayden comes in and photocopies everything onto acid-free paper, cuts those copies, researches the addresses of any La Grange residents listed, and then files the clippings in the appropriate residence, family and or organization folder.
Mary Ann Sward is another long time member and past board member who loves keeping these sorts of records. “It gets in your blood after a while,” she said. “It’s a puzzle. It’s like being a detective. I’m fascinated with it because you get to know these people. You get a picture in your mind of what the village used to look like.”
Forbes Purkis, who moved into his house on Malden Ave. in 1958, wandered into the Historic Society the day this writer was there. He sat down at the table, and gave Ellen Chevas his address. Mrs. Chevas swiveled around in her chair and deftly chose from one of the 45 filing drawers to find the folder on his house.
Mr. Purkis mused that he and his wife were the third owners of their home, which was built in December, 1926. Examining the file that Mrs. Chevas handed him, he looked through the material. “I guess we haven’t lived in an exciting house,” he said. “The file is thin.” His revelation that rainy June Wednesday was that they were in fact the fourth owners of their home.
The La Grange Area Historical Society has such complete and thorough files for two reasons. The first is a dedicated and disciplined volunteer base which has spent more than two decades amassing, sorting and filing the data it has at its disposal. The second reason is that the database the Historical Society has worked from is an almost-complete set of SUBURBAN LIFE/ CITIZEN newspapers dating from 1905. When the paper moved out of La Grange in the 1970s it gave one set to the library and one set to the Historical Society, which at the time had no permanent home. The Society had some storage space in the First Congregational Church where occasionally the fire department would wander in, note the towering yellowed newspapers and ask both the church and the Society to do something about them.
Just having the newspapers provided the impetus for the filing, according to Mrs. Black, who was the group’s third president. Meanwhile, in the early 1970s when the Society was young, it collected all sorts of artifacts from citizens. In 1984 the Samuel Vial House came on the market. It was owned by the Vial family, one of the first families of La Grange, until the 1950s. From then until the 1980s, the house was rented out and over the years fell into disrepair. In the 1980s a Downers Grove gentleman purchased the property, planning to restore it and move in, but the circumstances in his life changed and he came to sell the property to the Historical Society at the end of 1984.
The Society emptied the Church of its files, retrieved artifacts and other goodies from members’ homes and took steps to comply with village regulations, such as creating at least 10 parking spaces. Members of the Society met with specialists to learn how to set up their filing and storage systems and visited the Chicago Historical Society, as well as the one in Elmhurst all in effort to create as complete repository as possible. Today, the La Grange Area Historical Society is a model for other communities striving to archive their own histories. In fact, the nearby village of Clarendon Hills visited last year for ideas for its own permanent structure and space.
The La Grange Area Historical Society is more than just an archive, though. It is also a museum, with naturally its biggest exhibit being the home itself. The high-ceilinged Victorian has changing exhibits featuring items the Society has collected over the years. Currently, the theme is trains, with a table set up in the dining room made to resemble a dining car in the Burlington line’s Sante Fe Super Chief, circa 1938. Authentic silverware, plates and relics from the period are displayed as is the menu, which at the time featured caviar for $1.75 a serving, while a complete dinner cost $2.35.
Tucked in the home’s back rooms, the Society has more than 18 boxes of hats all neatly labeled, with the dates and styles; it has mini mountains of shoes and boots; baby clothes and bonnets, flags by the yard and gowns by the gross. There you can see what an early vacuum cleaner looked like, read “Who’s Who in Chicago 1926,” and see an array of photographs and albums that would turn the most fervent scrapbooker green.
What is perhaps intangible yet ever-present at the La Grange Area Historical Society, though, is pride of place, a place created by the contributions of hundreds of people in the past and preserved and catalogued by scores of dedicated citizens with their feet firmly in the present--their own efforts contributing to La Grange’s future.