Ridge Historical Society
Irish-American Heritage Month: The Ellerslie Cross Country Club – Part 2
By Carol Flynn
Golf was introduced to the Blue Island Ridge when a group of Irish American businessmen founded the first country club in Beverly/Evergreen Park, the Ellerslie Cross Country Club, in 1899.
The Ellerslie Club grew out of another Irish club in Chicago, the Sheridan Club. As was discussed in Part 1, the Sheridan Club was founded to honor General Phillip Henry Sheridan, the son of Irish Catholic immigrants, who had an outstanding career as a U.S. Army officer.
In the late 1800s, clubs were very important for networking and socializing. They were formed for everything from professions to politics to poetry.
Since most clubs were men-only, and the ones formed by the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment excluded Jews and Blacks, and usually Catholics, women and these other groups formed their own clubs.
By 1900, there were hundreds of clubs in the Chicago area.
Irish Catholics formed clubs focused on political issues like Irish nationalism, working for Ireland’s independence from Great Britain. Like other ethnic and nationality groups, they formed clubs around culture and identity, such as the Irish Music Club, founded in 1902, and the Irish-American Athletic Club, founded in the late 1870s.
The Sheridan Club formed upon the death of General Sheridan in 1888. Although it was called a “social club,” with the Irish, it was not possible to separate out politics and religion. Sheridan was an avowed “Fenian,” an Irish American Catholic dedicated to the establishment of an independent Irish Republic.
The founders of the Ellerslie Club were active members of the Sheridan Club, and they illustrate the advances that the Irish were making in business, education, politics, and society by the late 1800s, in the big cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago.
Here are brief biological sketches of some of the men who founded the Ellerslie Cross Country Club.
Joseph Michael Crennan was the first president of the Ellerslie Club. He was born in 1865 in Ireland and came to the U.S. at the age of 21.
In 1891, Crennan married Jean (Jennie) Walsh, who was born in Chicago to parents from Ireland. Her father, William Walsh, one of Crennan’s fellow members at the Sheridan Club, was listed on the U.S. Census as “captain of a lake vessel.” The maritime professions, sailors and fishermen, were natural for many men from Ireland.
Crennan and Jennie lived at 4825 Vincennes Avenue. Their house is still standing, a stone and brick row house, fashionable for the day, that they hired architect Maurice G. O’Brien to design in 1894, and they moved into in 1895. They had three children, Ruth, William, and Elizabeth.
Crennan became a naturalized U. S. citizen on April 1, 1895.
He was the owner of a successful cigar manufacturing and import business, the exclusive U.S. representative for fine products from Cuba and Key West. His signature products were the “world-renowned” La Carina and Golf Club cigars. He sold wholesale to shops. His business spread; he advertised for salesmen for Iowa and Michigan.
Thomas Francis Keeley was the first treasurer of the Ellerslie Club. He was born in Chicago in 1866. His father, Michael Keeley, was born in Ireland, and his mother, Catherine McCarthy, was born in Chicago in 1840 to parents from Ireland, making her a very early native of the city. He lived at his family’s home at 2829 Prairie Avenue.
Keeley’s father Michael owned Keeley Brewing Company, and when Michael died in 1888, Keeley took over running the company as president and general manager. He also took over his father’s role as vice president in the Dallas (Texas) Brewery, Inc.
Keeley was also president of the Metropolitan-Hibernia Fire Insurance Company, which offered fire and tornado coverage in six states. The family also had large interests in a hotel, and in coal and iron mines in Utah.
In 1894, the first Irish Catholic Mayor of Chicago, John Patrick Hopkins, appointed him to the Board of the Chicago Public Library.
Keeley married Margaret Gahan in 1918 when he was 45 (she was 30) and they had one daughter. Gahan was the daughter of a prominent leader of the Democrat party.
Keeley’s younger brother Eugene also worked with the brewery as secretary and treasurer and was a member of the Ellerslie Club. Their sisters Clara Gertrude and Kate were directors with the company and were sportswomen at the club. Both married men from the Ellerslie Club.
As no surprise, Keeley was anti-Prohibition and worked against that movement. With Prohibition, the brewery closed and sat vacant and decaying for over a decade while Keeley advocated for ending Prohibition and creating legitimate jobs and taxes. He died shortly after Prohibition ended, while in the process of reopening the brewery.
Walter Thomas (W.T. or W. Thomas) Nash was the Ellerslie Club’s first secretary. He was born in 1859 in Chicago, and both of his parents came from England. His father was a meat packer. Nash attended the University of Chicago. It appears the family was not Catholic.
In 1885, he married Nellie C. Fuller, born in Chicago in 1865. They had one daughter.
Although Nash owned a meat packing company, his primary interest was in real estate as part of the company Nash, Trego, and Helliwell, which started in 1888.
Frederick (Fred) Kellogg Higbie, a founder of Ellerslie and member of the first Grounds Committee, was born in New York in 1866.
Like Nash, Higbie doesn’t fit the mold of the others. His family had been in the U.S. for several generations already. He married Julia Pausinsky, whose parents came from Germany, in 1890, and they had two daughters. It appears Higbie was not Catholic, or at least not practicing as one, but he was a very active member of both the Sheridan and Ellerslie Clubs.
Higbie was a manufacturer and merchant dealing in woodenware and meat packing supplies with a regional presence. His company, named for him, earned over $1 million in 1903, and he incorporated a new company, the American Meat Packers’ Supply Company, in 1909. He was owner and officer of salt and coal mines in Kansas.
Higbie lived at 6431 Greenwood Avenue.
Patrick James Lawler, one of the first directors and a member of the first Sports and Pastimes Committee, was born in Chicago in 1873. His father Patrick was born in Ireland, his mother in Illinois. Patrick, the father, was a teamster with the stockyards.
Lawler became a livestock commissioner with his own company, part of the Union Stockyards of Chicago.
In 1903, he married Catherine (Kate) Keeley, the sister of Thomas Keeley. They had two daughters.
They lived at the Keeley family home on Prairie Avenue, then later had their own home at 4925 Woodlawn. The purchase of the Woodlawn House, “a high class Kenwood residence,” for $40,000 in 1919 earned a headline and article in the Chicago Tribune.
Another founding director was William A. Lydon, born in New York in 1863. Both parents, Michael Lydon and Anne Hopkins, were from Ireland. His uncle, his mother’s brother, John Patrick Hopkins, was the first Irish Catholic Mayor of Chicago.
In 1897, he married another Keeley sister, Clara Gertrude. They had three children. They lived at 4758 Prairie.
Lydon was a civil engineer and president of the Great Lakes Dredge and Docks Company. He was a major contributor to the development of Chicago’s vast waterworks systems, including the tunnels and pumping apparatus. He was involved in numerous high profile projects throughout the Great Lakes region.
He was “a widely known yachtsman” and built the Lydonia II, one of the largest yachts on the Great Lakes. During World War I, he turned the yacht over to the U.S. Navy for military use and it was commissioned as the USS Lydonia in 1917. It was used as an escort and later as a coastal survey ship and retired from service in 1947.
Other beginning directors and committee members included Henry J. Fitzgerald, owner of the Fitzgerald Trunk Co.; John Julius Kinsella, owner of the glass company famous for fine church stained glass windows; James Joseph Wade, plumbing contractor and sanitary engineer who worked with the city; John Francis Clare, lawyer who was the prosecuting attorney for the city of Chicago; Michael Joseph Nelson, owner of an interior decorating company that produced fine furniture, draperies, and wallpaper; and Alfred Daniel Plamondon, manufacturer of machinery.
All of these men were not only successful businessmen, they were accomplished sportsmen, which led to the founding of the Ellerslie Cross Country Club. The women mentioned – the Keeley sisters, the Walsh sisters, Nellie Fuller Nash – also excelled at sports.
The Ellerslie club was started as a golf club, but the major passions of these Irish sports folks were actually coursing, that is greyhound racing and hunting; and equestrian sports, “riding to the hounds.”
There will be three more posts in this series: Ellerslie as a golf club; greyhound coursing; and cross-country horseback riding through the southwest suburbs.