FREDERICK A. SMITH

BY THOMAS W. GOODSPEED

I first became acquainted with Fred A. Smith sixty years ago when he was a boy of sixteen. From 1860 to 1862 we were students together in the first University of Chicago. Ten years later he was one of my parishioners in the Second Baptist Church of Chicago. A few years later, and thereafter for the rest of his life, a period of forty years, we were associates on four boards of trustees, first of the Baptist Union Theological Seminary, and later of Rush Medical College, the Chicago Manual Training School Association, and the present University of Chicago. It was only because I was four hundred miles away in the wilderness of northern Wisconsin at the time of his death that I could not, as he desired, speak at the funeral of my long-time friend. It will therefore be easily understood that the preparation of this sketch of Judge Smith's life is a labor of love. He and I were friends from that autumn day in 1860 when we first met until the day of his death in 1919, a period of fifty-nine years.

It was a member of the great Smith family who planted the first colony of white men in the new world. Ever since the days of Captain John Smith there have been Smiths in America in ever-growing numbers. More than fifty thousand of them represented our country in the recent world-war. That branch of this great family to which Judge Smith belonged came to the West from Washington County, New York, one of the easternmost counties of the state, lying east of Lake George and the Hudson. They were among the pioneer farmers of Cook County, Illinois.

The wooded regions of southern Illinois were settled long before the prairies of the north. One of the chief reasons for this was the late lingering of hostile Indians in the northern part of the state. They did not take their departure till 1835 and 1836, and even after the last large migration many scattered families remained behind. For nearly twenty years after Illinois was admitted into the Union as a state the Indians possessed the northern half of it. But there were two other reasons why the settlement of the prairies of the north lagged behind that of the forest-covered areas of the southern part of the state. The

first was the curious hallucination that the soil of the prairies was not fertile. How, men demanded, could a soil that would not grow trees be expected to produce crops? The other reason was that the sod of the prairies was so thick and tough that it could not be broken up by the light plow of a hundred years ago. It was not till long after the opening of the nineteenth century that a steel plow was devised strong enough to break up the soil of a wild prairie farm. As soon, however, as that was done and the extraordinary fertility of the soil demonstrated, the rumor of its richness was spread abroad and the farmers of the east began to flock to the prairies of northern Illinois.

Both because of this migration and in order to encourage it, the general government established a land office in Chicago and a great sale of public lands was advertised throughout the country to be held in that frontier settlement in the spring and summer of 1835. Chicago was then an insignificant village of about 2,000 people, built along the Chicago River, between its forks and Fort Dearborn, which was still a military post, and which quite cut the small hamlet off from Lake Michigan. Half the buildings or more were still built of logs. It was a forlorn, straggling frontier settlement, with almost no well-defined streets or sidewalks, the level of the land so little above that of the river that in the spring floods, the water of the muddy stream filled the drainage ditches and made the village site little better than a swamp.

But in the early thirties the little village had some enterprising citizens, among whom were Gurdon S. Hubbard, P. F. W. Peck, Eli B. Williams, Silas B. Cobb, and Philo Carpenter.

The year 1835 is a most important one in the early history of the town. During that year the population more than doubled, increasing from less than 2,000 in January to more than 3,000 in December. Probably fifty men who later became prominent in the growing city made it their home in 1835. Among them were William B. Ogden, Arthur G. Burley, Thomas (Judge) Drummond, Abram and Stephen F. Gale, Elijah M. Haines, Tuthill King, Edward Manierre, Julian S. Rumsey, J. Young Scammon, John Turner, Seth Wadhams, and others who long remained leading citizens in the rising metropolis.

But the great events of 1835 in the history of Chicago were the sale of farm lands by the government and the birth of the real estate boom in the village itself. The land office was opened on the first of June. Immigrants intending to settle in any part of the district of northern Illinois had to buy their farms at the Chicago office. There was "an immediate and immense influx of people desiring to enter lands."

From June to the end of the year 370,043 acres of farm lands were sold at $1.25 an acre. There were more than 20,000 purchasers. Among these was Gustavus V. Smith, the first representative of the Smiths of Washington County, New York, who entered land on the "Ridge," in Jefferson township, only ten miles northwest of Chicago at that time—now a part of the city itself.

Gustavus sent back to the family such favorable accounts of the new country that in March, 1836, two brothers, Israel G. and Marcellus, packed their few belongings (they were young and unmarried) into a primitive sort of sleigh known as a pung or jumper, drawn by two horses, and started on the thousand-mile journey for the new world of the West. They traveled from thirty to forty miles a day and, taking their way from Buffalo through Canada, though the winter was ending, the sleighing continued good. As they were nearing Detroit, however, the pung which had lasted astonishingly well, finally gave out. It was abandoned, the baggage loaded on the horses, and the last third of the journey was made on horseback.

The two boys reached their destination on April 10, 1836. When they came in sight of their brother's home they were astonished to find the whole country east of the "Ridge" under water as far as they could see. A great spring freshet was on. The north branch of the Chicago River had overflowed its banks and the whole country was inundated; that is, the whole country east of the "Ridge." The "Ridge" itself stood fifteen or twenty feet above the flood. It must have been a welcome sight to the weary travelers. Many miles in length, covered with groves of oak, it is a most attractive feature in that prairie country. It is not strange that Israel Smith decided that his farm must run across it and include some of those groves. The great sale of farm lands was still on. In 1836, 202,364 acres were sold. Everyone bought as near Chicago as he could, and thus Cook County, after a start was once made, was soon filled with farmers.

Israel G. Smith, one of the brothers who made the journey just described, was the father of Judge Smith, the subject of this sketch. Born in 1816, he was twenty years old when he settled in Illinois, and perhaps twenty-one when he secured his farm. Buying it at the Chicago land office, he held it by a warrant from the government, and the title is one of the few titles in Cook County that have been transferred but once during the last eighty-four years.

The Smith brothers were very fortunate in the location of their farms. They came early enough to buy near Chicago, and enjoy

the enhancement in values attending proximity to the future great city. No one, indeed, then dreamed of what Chicago has since become. But though a small town in the thirties of the last century, to the farmers who settled near, it supplied a convenient market for whatever they could raise and in its stores they could buy whatever they needed. They thus escaped many of the privations and hardships of those pioneers who settled far away from markets and centers of supply. They had another advantage. They were near neighbors, and other farmers soon occupied the surrounding country. Their father quickly followed them to their new home. In 1837 John Pennoyer and the following year his sons, Stephen and James Pennoyer, became part of the community. Mancel Talcott, later well known in Chicago, was also one of this pioneer group.

In 1838 the Smith brothers, Mr. Talcott, and others held a meeting at the house of John Pennoyer to consider their need of a school and after a full discussion voted that "all adult male citizens, including bachelors, should each contribute five dollars to purchase lumber for a schoolhouse." The assessment was paid, the lumber bought, and all the able-bodied members of the community assembled with their tools and built the schoolhouse, one of the first, if not the very first, erected in the county outside of Chicago. No sooner was it finished than a school was opened, the first teacher being Susan, a daughter of John Pennoyer, who was thus one of the earliest country school teachers of northern Illinois. She did not, however, long remain with the school, leaving it to become the wife of Israel Smith.

The Pennoyers were an English family some members of which were men of wealth in the old country. William Pennoyer, a merchant of London nearly three hundred years ago, is said to have been a liberal contributor to the funds of Harvard College. His brother Robert came to the new world in 1635 and from him descended the branch of the family to which Susan, the mother of Judge Smith, belonged. In 1648 Robert Pennoyer made his home in Stamford, in the southwest corner of Connecticut, and that place long remained the principal home of the family. But a hundred years ago John, the father of Susan Pennoyer, left the old home for the western frontier. He had within him the urge of the pioneer and in 1818 took his family to Cayuga County in central New York. But this did not prove to be near enough the frontier, and nineteen years later, in 1837, he joined the colony of farmers in Cook County, Illinois, and there tasted the joys and experienced some of the privations of life on the real frontier. He and his sons were men of intelligence and public spirit, apparently leading the

community in the movement to provide the first schoolhouse in which his daughter Susan taught the first school.

At about the time the schoolhouse was built, ground for a cemetery was purchased and the first burial in it was that of Henry, the father of the Smith boys, who survived his arrival in his new home only two or three years.

Israel Smith entered early into the public life of the new community. He was elected justice of the peace at the first election held in Jefferson township. He and his brother-in-law, Stephen Pennoyer, were prominent men for many years. In 1873, in connection with other citizens, they secured with much difficulty the organization of the new township of Norwood Park, now a part of Chicago. I say with much difficulty, for the townships out of which it was carved carried their opposition to the legislature of the state; Stephen Pennoyer was made supervisor of the new township and Israel Smith one of the commissioners of highways and treasurer of the board.

Israel Smith and Susan Pennoyer were married April 13, 1843, by Rev. C. Billings Smith, a well-known clergyman of that day, and pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist Church of Chicago. There was no church near them in the country and they became and remained for many years members of this church. Mr. Smith had a strong leaning toward business, and three or four times during the thirty years following his marriage yielded to this inclination. At one time he conducted a grocery store on State Street and at another a boot and shoestore on Lake Street. These ventures brought his family for brief periods to the city, so that the children were both country and city bred. The great fire of 1871 brought the last of these excursions in merchandising to an end and led to Mr. Smith's final return to the farm. These adventures in business were all of short duration and the farm was the real home of the family for sixty years.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith had seven children, four sons and three daughters, of whom one son and one daughter are now living. Edwin D. Smith still makes his home in Norwood Park, near the place of his birth. One of the daughters, Emma I., married Mr. Henry R. Clissold, a Chicago publisher and editor and one of the most prominent and useful Baptist laymen of Illinois.

The first of this large family of children, the subject of this sketch, was born February 11, 1844. He was named Frederick Augustus, but was generally known as Fred A. Smith. Israel Smith had accomplished his purpose of making the "Ridge" a part of his farm, and it added