Civil_War,_1861-65

Lake Forest, the town and the College, grew out of the regional conflict over slavery in the 1850s. Many of the Lake Forest founding residents and their descendants were very interested in the outcome of the conflicts, eventually war, so that Chicago could be a funnel to westward expansion by rail. The College library's Special Collections includes donations from many old Chicago families and also from those who were involved in the 1961-65 Civil War Centennial.

Primary source material includes the Official Records... published shortly after the war (also with the medical volumes), periodicals that published individual reminiscenes of their experiences, books of first-hand accounts of wartime life and deeds, and a few more unique items. One is the master's thesis of Barbara Bulter Davis edits Civil War era letters from an Indianapolis based founder of Butler University. The Eugene B. Payne collection consists of nineteen letters from the Arkansas and Missouri Union campaigns of early 1862, including a map of the Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas. We have a run of the venerable Chicago Civil War Round Table newsletters from 1961 to 1987. The Railroad Collection has books on the role of railroads in the Civil War and also a copy of the 1862 Act for the Pacific Railroad, one printed by the Tribune in Chicago, a reference to the intense local interest.

We also have book materials from two descendants of Joseph Medill, one of Lincoln's key Chicago allies in the Civil War: Joseph Medill Patterson and Robert R. McCormick, grandsons of the Tribune publishing magnate and first cousins who in turn led the Tribune Company together, 1910-46. We have Patterson's two-volume Civil War Atlas and a shelf of civil War related books used by Col. Robert R. McCormick in his research and publishing on the Civil War. From the Medill family, too, there is an oil portrait of a Medill brother who perished in the the war.