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Gordon Adamson died at the age of 71 on January 21, 1986. He was a former vice president of Baldwin-United Corp. (Cincinnati), and prior to that secretary and assistant treasurer of the Bowman Dairy Co. His spouse was Emily Norcross Adamson, daughter of Dr. Edward P. Norcross, Highland Park, and sister of Dr. Pliny Norcross, Amherst, MA. Gordon Adamson was chair of the lake Forest Symphony and on the Board of Directors in the 1980s of the Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society.

Mary Reynolds Aldis, wife of Chicago developer Arthur Aldis, wrote one-act plays, poetry, and painted in watercolor. Born in Chicago and educated at St. Mary’s School in Knoxville, IL, she married her husband in 1892. After moving to Lake Forest in 1902, she occupied an estate on the southeast corner of Deerpath Rd and Green Bay Rd. She and her husband added and then converted a cottage on their property into an amateur playhouse which opened on June 11, 1911.

The Aldises were considered pioneers in amateur and community theater in Chicago. Mary’s Lake Forest summer playhouse ran full seasons until 1915 and ended by 1920. The playhouse put on plays by both amateur and professional playwrights and reflected Mary’s tastes as a writer, translator, and dramatist.

Aldis worked to support women's rights and other progressive causes. She, at times, lived independently from her husband and died in 1949 in Milwaukee.

Mary Reynolds Aldis, wife of Chicago developer Arthur Aldis, wrote one-act plays, poetry, and painted in watercolor. Born in Chicago and educated at St. Mary’s School in Knoxville, IL, she married her husband in 1892. After moving to Lake Forest in 1902, she occupied an estate on the southeast corner of Deerpath Rd and Green Bay Rd. She and her husband added and then converted a cottage on their property into an amateur playhouse which opened on June 11, 1911.

The Aldises were considered pioneers in amateur and community theater in Chicago. Mary’s Lake Forest summer playhouse ran full seasons until 1915 and ended by 1920. The playhouse put on plays by both amateur and professional playwrights and reflected Mary’s tastes as a writer, translator, and dramatist.

Aldis worked to support women's rights and other progressive causes. She, at times, lived independently from her husband and died in 1949 in Milwaukee.

Alfred S. Austrian was born in Chicago June 15, 1870, the son of Solomon and Julia Austrian. He was a Harvard graduate, 1891, and was admitted to the bar, Chicago, in 1893. He married Mamie Rothschild October 1, 1901.

Edward Arpee (1899-1979), the brother of Armenian historian and theologian Leon Arpee, taught at Lake Forest Academy for 35 years beginning in 1929. He was the spouse of Katherine Trowbridge Arpee (granddaughter of Chicago wholesale grocer and later Lake Forest 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 Arpee'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

Madeline Ashton taught Modern Languages at Lake Forest College.

Clifford W. Barnes was a clergyman and sociologist born in Corry, PA on October 8, 1864. He was an accomplished student attending both University of California and Oxford University (England) and graduating from of Yale University. He also received a Masters degree from University of Chicago. He began his career as a pastor in New York City and Chicago. Importantly, he became the first male resident of the Hull House, Chicago, in 1893.

Alongside his church work in Chicago, Barnes traveled throughout Europe to places within England and France to learn and teach in schools. He pursued such a course of teaching to closely examine the differing definitions of morality held worldwide. He soon returned to the United States to teach sociology at UIC for a year and he married Alice Reid on May 5, 1898. Clifford and Alice became parents of a son Summerville Reid, who died in early childhood and of a daughter, Lilace.

Clifford Barnes was later officially appointed as President and professor of Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois in 1900. Yet, Barnes always chose to devoted his energies to many social movements and held a number of organizational positions/titles. One of best known group created by Clifford was the well known Chicago Sunday Evening Club.

Lilace Reid Barnes, the daughter of Clifford Barnes (1864-1944) and Alice Reid (1866-1938), was born in 1900 and followed her family's pioneering spirit of generosity throughout her life. Most notably, she accomplished much as first American World President of the YWCA (Young Women's Christian Association) and with also her later involvement at Lake Forest College.
Initially, she began her work with the YWCA in 1926 as a volunteer secretary and soon joined the YWCA national board leading to her eventually rise as the 1947 World President of the International YWCA meeting in China. She held this office in Geneva, Switzerland until 1955. Upon her return to the United States, she was chosen to serve as the head of the YWCA US National Board until 1961 playing a strong role on local, national, and international stages of the organization.

Lilace directly continued to show her propensity for leadership roles as she was the first woman on the Lake Forest College Board Trustees in 1944 and served until 1962. In 1968, she was made an honorary life member and her name holds import on campus at the Lilace Reid Barnes Interfaith Center and with the donation of Reid Barnes collection to the Library Archives and Special Collections. She died in Lake Forest at the age of 89 in 1989.

George Raimes Beach, Jr. was the son of the Montclair attorney, entrepreneur and corporate official George Raimes Beach (b. 1875) originally from Jersey City, N.J. and profiled in Who's Who in Commerce and Industry. Beach, Sr., married Lucy McBride on April 30, 1901, and George, Jr., was the first of two children, the other was Katherine L. George Jr. was a 1926 graduate of Princeton University. He made his career in chemicals, with Dupont, and retired in 1965 having been Midwest regional manager of the E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. electrochemicals division.

Mr. Beach lived in Lake Forest for many years, served as an alderman, a term as mayor from 1960 to 1963, and was also a trustee of Lake Forest College acting as board chair from 1971 to 1974.

Between the time of his retirement in 1965 and 1980 he traveled extensively and wrote, for private distribution to his friends, several travel narratives. His later writings after 1975 also featured his second spouse, Mary, who sometimes did the writing in the early 1970s. He also had a home -- Charduar -- in western Virginia, at Bacova (zip 24412), not far from Hot Springs, where he died, having given up by then his Lake Forest house.
Sources:

Who's Who in Commerce and Industry, 10th interrnational ed. Chicago: Marquis, 1957, 75.

Chicago Tribune obituary, August 28, 1990

Edward Herbert Bennett (1874-1954) was born in southwestern England the son of a clipper ship’s master and was educated in Bristol schools before coming to the U.S. in 1890, to California where after trying ranching he found employment in architectural offices. There he came to the attention of notable architect Bernard Maybeck (1862-1957), who arranged for him to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, funded by Phoebe Hearst (1842-1919; Phoebe Hearst Architectural Plan for the University of California), ca. 1898-1902. Another protégé of Maybeck’s and Hearst’s, and friend of Bennett’s was Arthur Brown, Jr. (1874-1957), who also graduated from the Ecole, in 1901 and returned to California to practice. A notable work of Brown’s is Stanford’s iconic Hoover Tower (1941). Brown also worked with Bennett on the Federal Triangle, Washington, DC. Bennett, like Brown, received his Ecole diplome, a relatively unusual achievement for students from the U.S.

Bennett took two major Mediterranean trips focused on architecture, one ca. 1900-01 and another in 1910. For the first there is a small group of photos recording this trip with at least one Ecole friend. For the second, to Egypt with his sister Helen, there is both a larger photo album collection and a travel diary.

After a brief stint in the offices of architect George B. Post (1837-1913) in New York, Ecole friend and Chicago Burnham design partner W. Peirce Anderson (1870-1924) recommended him to Daniel Burnham to assist on a West Point competition plan. Though not successful in winning the contract there, Burnham took him on to work on a plan of San Francisco, 1905. By 1905-06, though, Burnham was urging Bennett to leave his adopted home state of California and promotion of that Plan to return to Chicago to take up work by 1906-07 on a plan for Chicago, published in 1909, the Plan of Chicago. On the Plan Bennett worked closely with French artists and Ecole comrades Jules Guerin and Fernand Janin (1880-1912), the latter the artist of a portrait of Bennett as a student; another American Ecole (Paris) five-year alum Carl F. Gould (1873-1939); Plan editor Charles Moore (also later Burnham’s biographer, 1921), and Plan chair Charles Dyer Norton, also a Lake Forest College neighbor (550 E. Deerpath) and College trustee (1903-11) responsible for the 1906 campus plan.

Bennett started his own national practice, after 1910. Early work included a Portland (Oregon) plan and a lakefront plan for Lake Forest (Illinois), 1911. Bennett served as consulting architect for the Chicago Plan Commission, 1913-30. He designed the 1920 Michigan Avenue bridge (conceived as two levels during the 1907-09 process), Grant Park and the 1920s Buckingham Fountain, thus fulfilling some of the 1909 Plan’s projected key features. From 1927 to 1937 he led work on the Washington, DC, Plan, and in particular the Federal Triangle. From the late 1920s through the early 1930s he played a leading role in the 1933-34 Century of Progress exposition in Chicago, responsible for the design of several buildings in the new French version of International style, Art Deco, and reflecting the influence of Le Courbusier in this country then.

Bennett led partnerships after practicing on his own: Bennett and Parsons, 1919-22; Bennett Frost and Thomas, 1922-24; and Bennett Parsons and Frost, 1924-38. Through the 1920s the City of Lake Forest outsourced its planning work to local resident Bennett’s firm, with its first zoning ordinance, 1923, and creation of a Plan Commission in 1929; Bennett served as the inaugural Lake Forest Plan Commission’s first chair with a five-year term (records, AIC Burnham Library). He closed his practice in 1944.

Bennett had arrived in Lake Forest in 1906, attending events, etc. at Onwentsia, joined the club and was a summer resident in 1907, and married Catherine Jones in 1912, daughter of capitalist and Lake Forest University/College board of trustees president David B. Jones, 1903-04 (trustee 1896-1915; secretary 1896-98). The couple built their home Bagatelle on the southwest corner of Deerpath and Green Bay Road, 1915-16, to Bennett’s designs, including garden planting plans. This was a corner of David B. Jones’ estate and near his home, Pembroke Lodge (1895, Henry Ives Cobb). In the same period Bennett designed the landscape and gardens of Jones’ villa Pepper Hill (1916, David Adler) at Montecito, Santa Barbara, CA. In 1930 he also built for himself in his garden a new brick studio, in the International Style he employed in his Century of Progress work.

Catherine Jones Bennett died in the 1925 and he remarried, Olive Holden Mead. The Bennett family beginning in the 1930s enjoyed a farm in present-day Mettawa, west of Lake Forest and Ghost Ranch, in the southwest, where Edward H. Bennett designed an adobe home. In his last decade he built a retirement home in Tryon, North Carolina (Paul Schwieckher [1903-1997], ca. 1948-49; landscape by Bennett), and he pursued his work with watercolors, which he had employed as a student and on the 1909 Plan.

Edward and Catherine Bennett had one son, Edward H. Bennett, Jr., a Harvard-educated architect and planner, the founding president in 1976 of the Lake Forest Foundation for Historic Preservation. For his Harvard thesis EHB, Jr. designed and International Style union railroad terminal for west of the Chicago River, in the mode of the 1960 Naess & Murphy O’Hare Field air terminal. Among EHB, Jr.’s residential designs is a 1957 International Style house for George and Rosemary D. Hale, 270 Butler Dr., Lake Forest, in the mode of the Lemke house (1932) by Mies van der Rohe and 1940s and 1950s houses by Philip Johnson (Lemke house photos and Johnson material in Schulze collection; Hale house plans in the library’s Hale collection).

Edward H. Bennett, Jr.’s one son and also only child, Edward H. Bennett III, is a Lake Forest College alumnus, Class of 1971; he was president of the Lake Forest Foundation for Historic Preservation, 1999-2001. Edward H. Bennett III’s older son, Christopher E. Bennett, also is an alumnus, Class of 1992, and he resides in Chicago. Mr. Bennett’s younger son, Timothy R. Bennett, AIA, ALA, carries on the family architectural tradition and resides in Highland Park.

In 1953, in the year prior to his 1954 passing, Edward H. Bennett donated a large collection of his papers, largely professional materials, to the Burnham Library, Art Institute of Chicago. The remaining papers, photos, etc. stayed in EHB Jr.’s house (the former Jones stable block) on the 1895 Jones compound to 2004, when they were transferred to EHB III’s house further west on Deerpath in Lake Forest. Much of this family archive relating to EHB’s work on the 1909 Plan of Chicago and subsequent planning career made up the body of this 2008 donation.

Lois Cesner was the Publicity Chairman and collected newspaper clippings/minutes for the Chicago North Shore City (formerly the North Shore Alumnae) Panhellenic Association from 1959-60. This was also the year that the group was admitted to the national panhellenic sorority organization as described by Cesner in an article that is among the additional loose materials at the back of the scrapbook. She lived at 1304 Isabella, Wilmette, Illinois.

William Crosby worked with Elliott Donnelley to preserve shay locomotives at the Illinois Railroad Museum and at the La Porte Indiana Historic Steam Society. Crosby made home movies of Donnelley's western railroad trips.

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).