Scots in America
While there are generally books in the collection refering to Scots in general in this country, the focus of holdings here is on Scots in Chicago, the Chicago region and in adjacent Wisconsin, and in Lake Forest and on the North Shore in particular.
In addition, though, there is material on Princeton University, for which Lake Forest University in the late 19th C. and early 20th C. served as "farm club;" on George Smith and his Aberdeen-based Illinois Investment Company, 1830s and its interests including railroads; and on other Chicago companies with Scots ties, including Quaker Oats (the Stuart family). Significant college faculty from the late 19th C. to the late 20th C. had Scottish roots, first president, 1875-78, the Reverend Dr. Robert W. Patterson, and a later (1897-1901) president (and First Church pastor) the Reverend Dr. James Gore King McClure (1848-1932). Longtime turn-of-the-century Mathematics Professor Malcolm MacNeil also was a trustee of the Church. And in the last third of the 20th C. Scots-born Alexander Mitchell was the chiar of the Art Department.
Lake Forest's Scots Roots
Lake Forest the town, the educational institution, and the First Presbyterian Church all are rooted in Clavinist Scottish traditions combined with those of conservative, Clavinist New England diaspora arrivals in Chicago also in the 1830s to 1850s.
The idea of the Lake Forest town and educational institution was incubated in Chicago's Second Presbyterian Church in 1856, under its 1842 founding pastor Scots-Irish descendant the Rev. Dr. Robert W. Patterson (1819-1893). Patterson's family came from eastern Tennessee to Illlinois when he was a boy to leave behind slavery. He attended Illinois College, Jacksonville, under Edward Beecher in the mid 1830s and Lane Theological Seminary, Cincinnati, under Edward's father, the Reverend Dr. Lyman Beecher, in the late 1830s. He was the latter Beecher's favorite pupil, and as a young man influenced both by radical and then moderate anti-slvery sentiments, was called to Chicago to found the moderate anti-slavery Second Presbyterian Church and build its congregation and its Gothis Spotted Stone edifice in 1851. After the trouble in Kansas and an 1854 cholera epidemic, in 1855 Presbyterian leaders in Chicago sought a site for an educational institution and community outside the city, along the new rail line north from Evanston to Waukegan, competed in January 1855. Scot Sylvester Lind, when an employee of fellow Aberdeenshire native George Smith and traveling between Chicago and Milwaukee ca. 1840, had seen the picturesque setting at the future Lake Forest of deep ravines leading east to the lake's high bluff and shore. Reminescent of New England and Tenneessee hills as it was of Scotland, he site seemed ideal. In February 1856 a Lake Forest Association organized in the lecture hall of Second Church, shares were sold, land bought, a town laid out, and lots sold by 1857. By 1861 a small village had sprung up between the tracks and the lake, along Deerpath and including Lind's 1859-completed home.
Lind had offered a substantial pledge, he having extensive real estate and lumber interests, and the educational institution was named in his honor, chartered in February of 1857: Lind University. The financial panic later that year made it impossible for him to fulfill his pledge by 1863 and by 1865 the name was changed quietly to Lake Forest University. Lind continued in business in a small way as a storekeeper with another Aberdeenshire native, James Anderson, and they were founders in 1859 of the first Presbyterian Church of Lake Forest, housed in the 1859 completed Lake Forest Academy building. Lind was mayor four times over the next two decades.
Also in 1859 Lind University had opened its medical school in the Lind Block, Chicago, and free sapce was given until Lind's ultimate financial collapse in 1863. This school was signficant, though, as the first modern medical school, with progressive vs. revolving, instruction, internships, admission requirements, etc. this later bacame Northwestern's medical school. But it was a Scot, Lind with the support of the trustees and Second Church, who launched this revolutionary modern endeavor (see related institutions elsewhere). The diplomas issued read "Lind University" to 1865 and all ties were not broken until later.
Another notable local family of Scots origins was that of Simon Somerville and Martha McWilliams Reid, her of Redi Murdoch & co., wholesale grocers in Chicago. After his early 1890s passing, and that of two of their children, Mrs. Reid in 1899 donated both the Arthur Somerivlle Reid Memorial Library and the Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel, two collegiate gothic architectural highpoints still today of this campus. Three generations of the family continued as friends and trustees, through Lilace Reid Barnes, who died in 1988, the College having acquired her home opposite Middle Campus on Sheridan Road, Glen Rowan (1909, architect Howard Van Doren Shaw)--today a campus meeting and guest house.
Arthur H. Miller
May 24, 2010