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Notable poet and Ragdale Foundation founder and first president Alice Judson (Ryerson) Hayes, 1922-2006, was the daughter of Clay Judson and the sculptor Sylvia Shaw Judson, 1897-1978. Sylvia in turn was the second of three daughters of architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, 1869-1926, and poet Frances Wells Shaw,1872-1938. Alice spent many summers as a child at her mother's parents' summer place in Lake Forest, Ragdale, designed by Howard Shaw 1897 and subsequently.

Hayes married Ned (Edward L., Jr.) Ryerson in 1941 and raised a family (Susan Moon, Nora Ryerson, Mitchell Ryerson, Francie Shaw) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She earned there a doctorate in education. In 1976, as her mother who had inherited the Shaw family Ragdale house and one-third of the grounds in 1938 prepared to retire to Philadelphia, Alice moved to Ragdale and launched the Ragdale Foundation as an artists' community on the model of Yaddo and McDowell on the east coast. A decade later she donated the house and seven acres of grounds to the City of Lake Forest, with the Ragdale Foundation and its residency programs for artists remaining a tenant. She continued as president until 1992 and on the board of trustees until 1994.

She retained a cabin on adjacent property through her lifetime where she continued to summer with her husband after 1981 Albert Hayes, living with him in Hyde Park winters, eventually at Montgomery Place (1991 on). She also was a summer visitor annually after 1947 at Chilmark, Martha's Vineyard, where in later years she loved entertaining her large family and many grandchildren. Albert Hayes was a Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Chicago.

Alice was a member of the Friends Meeting in Lake Forest, which had been incubated in Sylvia Shaw's former studio cabin, later Alice's summer place.

Since its founding in 1976 and the donation of the Ragdale property to the City in 1986, the Ragdale Foundation has grown into the oldest midwestern artists' community, the fourth oldest nationally, and one of the largest in the region. It has hosted many young writers and artists who have become major figures, including Jane Hamilton, Jackie Michard, Alex Kotlowitz, and Audrey Niffenigger. It normally houses twelve artists and writers at a time, with five writers in the Ragdale house. The house underwent an Historic Property Report recently and is beginning in 2010 a major restoration.

This writer was told in the mid 1990s by former Ragdale Foundation director Michael Wilkerson that the quality of Hayes' poetry was high enough to have made her a major national voice if she had begun earlier in life and had built up a larger body of work. A good collection of her poems is New and Selected Poems, Spoon River Press, 1987. A decade later her Journal of the Lake: Excerpts from a Seventieth Year, Open Books, 1997, was a substantial addition to her body of work. She was a superb teacher of the art of writing poetry, with exercises that made such effort accessible to many. But her work, though represented with a smaller than normal volume of good examples, deserves to be considered a significant contribution. In her work supporting the creativity of others she did so as one who was capable of the best herself, even in the midst of a life filled with other activities.

The original Saville Organ factory was located in Northbrook, Illinois and later moved to Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. One still stands in The Auditorium Theatre in downtown Chicago.

The original Saville Organ factory was located in Northbrook, Illinois and later moved to Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. One still stands in The Auditorium Theatre in downtown Chicago.

The original Saville Organ factory was located in Northbrook, Illinois and later moved to Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. One still stands in The Auditorium Theatre in downtown Chicago.

Daughter of John Courtney (1841-1938) and Mary Eames (Kinney) Neltnor (1843-1935)
Sister to 6 Siblings and Member of the DAR
Aunt of Edwin Asmann and Wife of Frank Anthony, Civil Engineer
Prominent Elocutionist in the 1880s and 1890s

American Architect well known for his designed buildings in Chicago Area
Created the design for Lake Forest Market Square, the first planned shopping center in the United States.
A Leader of the Arts and Crafts Architectural Movement seen with buildings like his home Ragdale, Lakeside Press Building, Second Presbyterian Church (Chicago) and Marktown
Member of the American Institute of Architects and received the AIA Gold Medal
Married Frances (Wells) Shaw and Father of Three

Susan Dart McCutcheon was the wife of John T. McCutcheon, Jr., the former editor of the Chicago Tribune’s editorial page and archivist in the 1980s. After raising her family in Lake Forest, Susan Dart, the name she wrote under, produced a natural foods and cooking syndicated column for the Chicago Tribune (1976-81), and wrote a “Forest Ranger” column for the Lake Forester newspaper. She is also the author of several books published in the 1980s and 1990s. Along with advocating for healthy diets, she was active in saving from demolition the 1899 Lake Forest City Hall. She moved to North Carolina with her husband in the late 1980s and continually returned to spend many summer vacations in Lake Forest.

As she described in her partly autobiographical study of her brother, architect Edward Dart, Susan Dart was a native of New Orleans. She graduated from Connecticut College and met her husband, a young Navy officer in New Orleans in the early 1940s. They married in 1943 and moved to Lake Forest in 1947, living in a cottage on the Aldis Compound on Illinois Road called Bird Cottage, which has since been demolished.

In the 1950s, Susan Dart McCutcheon raised a family and moved into a new brick ranch style home (W. Laurel Ave., demolished) designed by her modernist architect brother, Edward Dart. She never considered herself a socialite, but she did belong to both the Onwentsia club in Lake Forest and to Chicago’s Friday Club. In 1963 she received a master’s in English from Northwestern University, and she then taught at Ferry Hall (now merged into Lake Forest Academy) and Barat College.

Her local column, “Forest Ranger,” for the local Lake Forester in the early 1970s was succeeded by her syndicated “Natural Foods” column from 1976 to 1981. In these later columns she crusaded for healthy eating based on foods not contaminated by little-understood and potentially-harmful chemicals. Through her accessible writings about practical recipes she showed the way for individuals to live better and healthier lives.

By 1980 to 1997, Sart devoted herself to writing books focusing on subjects like family, local community, architectural and organizational history that remain essential sources. These are:

Evelyn Shaw McCutcheon and Ragdale. (Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society, 1980).

Market Square. (Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society, 1984).

Friday Club: The First Hundred Years, 1887-1987. (Chicago; the Club, 1987).

Supplement to Edward Arpee, Lake Forest, Illinois: History and Reminiscences, 1861-1961. (Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society, 1991).

Edward Dart, Architect. (Evanston: Evanston Publishing, 1993).

The Old Home Place. (Louisville, KY: Chicago Spectrum Press, 1997).

The first book Evelyn Shaw McCutcheon and Ragdale, was also the first book published about Ragdale, a decade prior to Alice Hayes and Susan Moon, Ragdale: A History and Guide(Open Books and the Ragdale Foundation, 1990). This pamphlet preserved lore about her mother-in-law and her family and the family compound, Ragdale, by then housing the Ragdale Foundation(founded 1976 by Alice Hayes) in Shaw’s 1897 completed English Arts & Crafts summer home.

This book about the Shaw family and Ragdale led into the second book as Susan Dart delved further into the work of architect Howard Van Doren Shaw and his arguably most notable project, Market Square(1916), the model for all subsequent shopping centers. For her work on Shaw she mounted a campaign to document photographically as much of Shaw’s local (Lake Forest, Chicago) work as possible and she engaged volunteer and professional photographers including Barbara Wood-Prince, Bert Congdon, Jean McMasters Grost, and others (available in Special Collections).During the period of Dart’s pursuit of material on Shaw and Market Square, she also stepped in to fight against demolition of the 1899-completed City Hall itself part of the architectural context that shaped the nearby Market Square design by Shaw.

Disappointed in the physical presentation of her first book, she took control of the production of Market Square (1984). She engaged book producer Frank Williams and also eminent book designer R. Hunter Middleton, both of Chicago, to create an appropriately respectful form for her study of Shaw’s significant 1916 first and model shopping center. She accompanied review of the project’s history and architecture with a biographical sketch of the architect. Once this was published she donated her Shaw and architecture material, along with the production and design records with Williams and Middleton, respectively, here in Special Collections, 1984. Also included were other local materials and photographs, including 1907-08 Onwentsia horse show stereo views identified by her late mother-in-law, Evelyn Shaw McCutcheon. Deposited the year after the Donnelley Library opened its first Special Collections reading room and new closed stacks in 1983, this became a major building block of the College library’s Special Collections of local materials (architect Shaw having also designed seven campus buildings).

Edward Arpee (1899-1979), the brother of Armenian historian and theologian Leon Arpee, was a career (over thirty-five years, beginning ca. 1929) professor at Lake Forest Academy. He was the spouse of Katherine Trowbridge Arpee (granddaughter of Chicago wholesale grocer and later LF resident Calvin Durand), and father of Harriet Sherman of Lake Bluff. Arpee graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and wrote various notable books, including "History of Lake Forest Academy" (Chicago: Alderbrink Press, 1944) and "From Frigates to Flat Tops" (1953).

The Arpees lived at 383 N. Washington Road, less than a block from the Academy, and about a block south of Mrs. Arpee's parents' home on College Road. According to the Apree's, the home was once a summer rental property for Onwentsia residents when it was owned by Van Weganen Alling. One of the past renters was Adlai Stevenson, who later built his farm in Libertyville.

Sources:

"Senior master Publishes an Historical Documentary," Spectator [Lake Forest Academy], April 20, 1964, 1.

Biographical Details gathered by, Arthur H. Miller Archivist & Librarian for Special Collections

Edward Arpee (1899-1979), the brother of Armenian historian and theologian Leon Arpee, was a career (over thirty-five years, beginning ca. 1929) professor at Lake Forest Academy. He was the spouse of Katherine Trowbridge Arpee (granddaughter of Chicago wholesale grocer and later LF resident Calvin Durand), and father of Harriet Sherman of Lake Bluff. Arpee graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and wrote various notable books, including "History of Lake Forest Academy" (Chicago: Alderbrink Press, 1944) and "From Frigates to Flat Tops" (1953).

The Arpees lived at 383 N. Washington Road, less than a block from the Academy, and about a block south of Mrs. Arpee's parents' home on College Road. According to the Apree's, the home was once a summer rental property for Onwentsia residents when it was owned by Van Weganen Alling. One of the past renters was Adlai Stevenson, who later built his farm in Libertyville.

Sources:

"Senior master Publishes an Historical Documentary," Spectator [Lake Forest Academy], April 20, 1964, 1.

Biographical Details gathered by, Arthur H. Miller Archivist & Librarian for Special Collections