Joseph Medill Pattterson (1879-1946) collections and family material.
In 1983 James Patterson, only son of newspaper innovator and mogul Joseph Medill Patterson (1879-1946), JMP, donated papers relating to his father's years with the Chicago Tribune company and its New York Daily News (1919-1946), along with other personal and family papers kept in his New York office/museum until the death of his second spouse, Mary King Patterson in 1977. At that time these materials were released to James Patterson as the paper sought to adpatively-reuse Patterson's former office for other operations (apparently without consulting with Chicago headquarters). After storing the material in McLean, VA for several years, at he urging of Lake forest alumnus J. Howard Wood '22, James Patterson agreed to donate the papers, books, photos, etc. here, alongwith funds to acquire a microfilm copy of the Daily News form 1919 to 1946. By 1985 the papers were organized, in a project led by then Chicago Historical Society manuscripts curator the late Archie Motley (d. 2002), then the dean of Chicago-area manuscript curators. Motley's typed finding aid to these materials is available as a pdf document; it is accessed both from the Archives and Special Collections homepage and from the Special Collections by Name page under Patterson. The materials were arranged in Hollinger boxes numbered consecutively and shelved in department's stacks.
Patterson's thousand-volume library, from his New York office, also came to the college library at that time, and was cataloged into the Special Collections stacks. There also is a card file of the contents that came with the library. Realia received as well included his office furntiure from the Daily News Building (desk, chairs, filing cabinets, portraits, etc.) and this was housed in a separate "Patterson Room" in the Donnelley Library, 1983-2003. When the library was renovated the desk became the supervisor's desk in the new departmental reading room, Donnelley and Lee Library. Patterson's coat rack is that now used by the visitors to the reading room. From 2000 on the distinctive wood-grain-painted filing cabinets have held most of newly constituted then Archives Photograph Collection, now all dedicated to subject files and housed in the department's work room. The portraits, etc. which did hang in the Patterson Room are stored in the Vault, including an oil painting of JMP and one of his Medill great uncle killed in the Civil War. Patterson's 1946 post WWII globe is located in the second floor lobby area.
Ca. 1988 Joseph Medill Patterson's daughter by his first marriage to Alice Higinbotham Patterson, Josephine Patterson Albright, donated further material which had been in the hands of her mother, including earlier correspondence and also some scrapbooks of clippings from press services covering JMP's political and literary activities from ca. 1900 into the 1910s. About the same time special collections librarian Martha Briggs (now manuscripts librarian, The Newberry Library, Chicago) segregated from the papers photographs and arranged them in a separate box; this group is part of the original donation from James Patterson.
Both Patterson collections, that from James Patterson and that from Josephine Albright, include family related material: correspondence, genealogy, business records, material on homes, etc.
In 2009 Mrs. Michael (Alice) Arlen, Josephine Albright's daughter, also donated photographs of the Patterson residence and the estate and experimental farm west of Lake Forest (now in Vernon Hills), Westwood, and also of the Massachusetts summer place of her grandmother Alice H. Patterson's sister, Mrs. Richard (Forence Higinbotham) Crane, Castle Hill. The J.M. Pattersons' Lake Forest countryside house was by architect Howard Van Doren Shaw; its landscape by Ralph Rodney Root. the 1920s replacment house at Castle Hill was designed by David Adler; the photos are by Hattie E. Hewitt and are cataloged in OCLC. The Patterson estate is discussed in Classic Country Estates of Lake Forest... by Kim Coventry, Daniel Meyer, and Arthur H. Miller (W.W. Norton, 2003). Castle Hill is discussed and shown also in Classic Country Estates... and in more depth in S.M. Salny's 2001 Norton book, The Country Houses of David Adler.... and in David Adler, Architect: The Elements of Style, ed. Martha Thorne (Yale U. Press and the Art Institute of Chicago, 2002).