The RHS Facebook page is a rich archive of history-related posts by Carol Flynn, RHS Facebook admin and writer until mid-2025. Carol prolifically wrote a wide variety of meticulously researched local history articles for RHS. She continues to write for the Beverly Review and other media sources with articles particularly focused on local Ridge history.
2023
The rain's holding off, so the Porch Concert should go on tonight at the Ridge Historical Society! See you there!
It was a great night.
The first Porch Concert of the year, put on by the Beverly Area Planning Association (BAPA), was held at the Ridge Historical Society, and featured the band Beverly Country Club.
The front lawn was packed with people just having a good time.
Memorial Day 2023 – Part 1
The purpose of Memorial Day is to remember the people who died while in military service to our country, the United States of America.
In the Ridge communities, there are many markers and memorials to U.S. service personnel. Here is a list and some pictures of these memorials.
If you know of others in the Ridge area to add to the list, please comment on this post with the locations.
In the next post, we’ll look at the history of military memorials connected to Morgan Park Academy, which started as the Mount Vernon Military Academy in the 1870s. The history was prepared by Barry Kritzberg.
Ridge Park – Six memorial stones, including one of the oldest on the Ridge, installed in 1926.
Graver Park – World War I
Kennedy Park – Korean War
Beverly Park – Connor T. Lowry, Afghanistan
Dan Ryan Woods – Gold Star Mothers
Morgan Park High School flagpole
112th Street and Lothair Ave. – Memorial Triangle
98th Place and Throop Street – Derwin Williams, Afghanistan
111th Street and Kedzie Avenue – American Legion
Memorial Park in Blue Island – Gravestones, memorials, artillery
97th Street and Kedzie Avenue – American Legion Post artillery and eternal flame
Mount Greenwood Cemetery – Civil War veterans’ graves and cannon replica
Mount Hope Cemetery – Civil War veterans section
Beverly Cemetery – Veterans monument
Lincoln Cemetery – James Harvey, U.S. Colored Troops
Mount Olivet Cemetery – “Doughboy” grave statues
Sharing this video from another post – Chicago, 1914, taken from a blimp.
The Ridge Historical Society
Memorial Day 2023 – Part 2
By Carol Flynn, with a thank you to Barry Kritzberg for sharing his historical research
Memorial Day – Part 1 listed many of the military-related markers and monuments in the community. While researching these, the only one that could be connected to the Morgan Park Academy (MPA) was the Memorial Triangle, a small piece of land at 112th Street and Lothair Avenue that contains a marker installed by the cadets of MPA in the 1920s in honor of those who fought in World War I.
MPA started as the Mount Vernon English, Classical, and Military Academy for boys in 1873, when the village of Morgan Park was planned and developed by the Blue Island Land and Building Company. In addition to training for military service, the school promised thorough preparation for business and college.
The name of the school was changed to the Morgan Park Military Academy (MPMA) in 1906. Changes beginning in the 1950s led to today’s school, the MPA that is no longer a military training school and is now a co-educational school from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.
It stood to reason that a military academy would include memorials to alumni who served and died in armed conflicts that involved the United States, but none were in evidence now. RHS reached out to Barry Kritzberg, renowned educator and author who, among many accomplishments, taught at MPA for thirty-six years and authored “Morgan Park Academy: A History (Volume I),” published in 2007.
Kritzberg shared some of his history research and writing with RHS. As expected, there were memorials at MPA at one time.
Records show that 1,389 MPA students served in World War I, World War II, and Korea. There are no records for the numbers who served in the Spanish American War, the first conflict after MPA was founded, or the Viet Nam War, the last conflict before MPA discontinued military training.
Seven MPMA graduates lost their lives during the WWI time period. In 1920, the pictures of these “gold star men” were framed and placed in the chapel of the school’s Blake Hall, a building demolished many years ago.
In 1921, trees were planted in their honor, and plaques were installed on the MPMA campus. This was considered a significant move by MPMA at the time, with the head of the school, Col. Harry D. Abells, stating that this established “new traditions for the guidance of our present and future cadets.”
The loss of MPMA men increased substantially with World War II. A total of forty-five cadets and two faculty members lost their lives in service at that time.
In 1943, the 70th year anniversary of MPMA, seven elm trees with plaques were planted on the campus in memorial to the seven cadets whose war-time deaths had occurred. The Tribune ran this poem at the time (June 17, 1943):
Seven honored decades,
Thru years of peace or dread,
Her sons have served our banner
With seven stripes of red.
Seven stars, new golden,
Shine on her roll today
For seven heroes fallen
In conflict far away.
Seven elms, new planted,
Pay tribute to each name,
And in our arch of triumph
Shall hold their endless fame.
Those first seven deaths were just the beginning. In the next few years, forty more U.S. servicemen connected to MPMA died.
Many of them also had connections to the local community. One case study, that of Lt. Donald W. Yarrow, puts a real face on what would otherwise just be a statistic.
RHS research shows that Donald W. Yarrow was born on December 2, 1924, to Paul and Edna Brown Yarrow. He was the grandson of a well-known minister in the community, Rev. Dr. Phillip Walter Yarrow. The Rev. Yarrow family lived at 11156 S. Longwood Drive, in one of the most picturesque Queen Anne houses in Morgan Park.
Rev. Yarrow was from London, educated at Princeton and Harvard, and the pastor of the Morgan Park Congregational Church. He was described as a “militant anti-vice crusader” who ran the Illinois Vigilance Association for twenty years. He staged hundreds of raids on speakeasies and brothels. He was fearless against Al Capone as well as corrupt government officials. Rev. Yarrow was a trustee of MPMA.
Paul Yarrow was a stockbroker, and Edna Yarrow was an active clubwoman and volunteer. During WWII, she was chair of the Morgan Park Red Cross Unit. She served as chair of the Morgan Park Woman’s Club American Home Committee.
At the age of 18, Donald Yarrow was a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He graduated from MPMA in 1942, where he had been on the honor roll and had received promotions. He attended the University of Michigan, but one month after his eighteenth birthday, he entered the U.S. Army, and became the second youngest officer to complete the officer program at Fort Benning, Georgia.
According to Kritzberg’s research, Donald was wounded in 1944, returned to combat, and then was killed on March 23, 1945, when crossing the Rhine for “the great drive deep into Germany.” He was twenty years old. His funeral service was held at his grandfather’s church at 112th and Hoyne Avenue and he was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, where his grave is prominently marked (see images).
In October of 1945, Paul and Edna Yarrow received a bronze star medal awarded posthumously to Donald. The ceremony took place at MPMA. According to the Chicago Tribune, he won the medal for heroic action on February 23 of that year in Germany, a month before he was killed. In establishing an observation post, he and two comrades had to move through heavy enemy fire, and they captured sixteen German soldiers, four mortars, and ammunition.
Also according to Kritzberg, more information on that event had been included in his obituary in the Chicago American newspaper on March 31, 1945. They captured the German soldiers without firing a shot. Donald, however, could not have fired a shot anyway because he was out of ammunition. It was only after taking the prisoners to the stockade that he realized that he had no bullets in his carbine.
Forty-seven elm trees were planted on the MPMA campus during those years in the 1940s. Unfortunately, Dutch elm disease, which ravaged Chicago in the 1960s, destroyed these memorial trees.
MPA records, according to Kritzberg, also list twelve MPMA alumni who were killed in Korea and Viet Nam.
However, it seems that not all MPA graduates who were killed during active service are on the MPMA lists, only those killed during “war years.” One man who is missing from the list, for example, is Grant Fenn, whose family owned the Graver-Driscoll House that is RHS Headquarters, from 1940 to 1946.
Grant Fenn graduated from MPMA in June 1942. The day after he received his diploma, he was appointed second lieutenant, infantry, U.S. Army, and started active duty. He graduated from the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, in 1945 and was commissioned in the U.S. Air Force.
Fenn served in Italy, and for two years as an assistant attaché in Athens, Greece. He was killed in 1951 when the B-36 bomber he and twenty-two others were flying in crashed in New Mexico. He was 26 years old. He was buried in Mount Greenwood Cemetery.
There were other memorials at MPMA that were identified by Kritzberg and several are shared in the attached images.
Part 8 on the Hofer Sisters – Elsa (Elizabeth) Hofer Schreiber
The youngest member of the Hofer family was Elsa, also listed as Elizabeth on the U.S. censuses. She was born on September 14, 1869, in McGregor, Iowa. Elsa was educated as a kindergarten teacher and came to Chicago by the early 1890s, like her sisters and parents.
In July 1893, at the age of 22, Elsa married George Laurence Schreiber, 31, in Chicago. They made their home in Beverly at the house at 1833 West 96th Street that the Hofer family rented when they moved from Iowa. That house, now gone, stood about where the entrance is to Ridge Park. Elsa and George became the parents of six children.
George Schreiber, from New York, was an artist and an educator, who studied in Paris and established a studio in Chicago in 1892. In addition to producing his own art, he was involved in the settlement and kindergarten movements. He was an extension lecturer at the Art Institute of Chicago, and taught classes at the Chicago Commons Social Settlement, where Elsa’s older sister Bertha had started a kindergarten for local children, and then a training program for kindergarten teachers. Schreiber taught classes like clay modeling, watercolors, and crayon work.
Elsa’s interests focused on the role of mothers in children’s development and education. As part of the kindergarten principles put forth by Frederick Froebel in the 1800s, children began learning through play as soon as they were born, and mothers had the key role in this early development. He believed women needed to be educated for this “mother-play” role and developed programs using toys, songs, and activities.
Elsa and her sister Andrea started the Froebellian Training School for Young Women around 1895 in Beverly. They also ran the Longwood Summer School as a special annual program. Programs for mothers were an important part of the school. Elsa supported her sister in starting the League of American Mothers in 1895, which was covered in the previous post.
Andrea and her husband Frederick Proudfoot owned the property at today’s address of 9333 Vanderpoel Ave. that housed their family and boarding students, a kindergarten, and workshops for industrial training programs for young people. This address served as the mailing address for the school while the classes were held at St. Paul’s Evangelical Church at 94th Street and Winchester Avenue, which has an interesting side-story covered with an attached image.
A Chicago Tribune article from August 1898 credits Elsa with running the school and conducting the lectures and classes along with other teachers, including her husband and oldest sister Mari Hofer, the expert in music education for children.
In 1896, the Hofer sisters and Schreiber were part of a huge Christmas program put on for 500 children and more than one thousand adults from the city’s settlement houses. Being a religious family, the focus was on the birth of the Christ child. Elsa read selections from her sister Andrea’s book “Child Christ Tales,” while her husband George used his stereopticon to show pictures of the story of Mary and the manger, the shepherds and wisemen, put together by Andrea. Mari led the group in singing.
Elsa contributed to the magazine “Child Garden of Story, Song, and Play” started by her sister Andrea. The attachments to this post include a short story she authored.
The school lasted about nine years, and by 1910, Elsa and George moved to Salem, Oregon, where the three Hofer brothers were in the newspaper and publishing business. The Hofer patriarch, Franz Andreas Hofer, had died in 1904, and their mother Mari also relocated to Salem and lived with Elsa and her family. There is a newspaper account that Elsa and George invited forty guests to enjoy an evening of folk songs when sister Mari visited in September of 1911.
By the 1920s, the Schreiber family moved to Santa Monica, California, where they became active in the art scene. George was known for his seascapes, landscapes, portraits, and figure studies. He was an articulate defender of the West as an “inspiring field for the artist” because “all here is new” and “achievement is still ahead.”
Elsa died on May 5, 1942, of heart failure, at her daughter’s home in Battle Creek, Michigan. She was buried in Santa Monica, California, with her husband, who had died two years before her. Her death certificate listed her as a practitioner of Christian Science.
The next post will look at the Hofer family’s involvement in politics and the international peace and amnesty movement.
Readers: HELP choose future topics for the RHS page.
Here's a very informal, non-scientific survey for the loyal readers of the RHS Facebook page. Your input is sought for future topics for stories.
1. What topics do you enjoy the most? People/families? Architecture and houses/buildings? Events from the past? History milestones?
2. Do you like series that can cover a lot of detailed information, or do you prefer topics that can be covered in one post?
3. Here are some potential topics, off the beaten path, for series, on which a lot of research has been done. Which would be of interest?
– The cult that called Beverly home.
– Cowboys on the Ridge.
– Artists of the Ridge.
– Diversity on the Ridge.
– True crime stories from the Ridge.
4. What other topics would you be interested in?
Any comments on the RHS Facebook page would be most welcomed! You can always contact me privately, also.
Thank you!
Carol Flynn
RHS Facebook page administrator
Ridge Historical Society (RHS) Helps with Research Projects
One or two people have mentioned an art project called “Invisible Labors” to RHS. We are aware of this project and were involved in its early stages.
This project is one case study from many on how the historians at RHS help people with research projects. RHS has been doing this for fifty years.
The number one research request we get is from homeowners for the history of their houses.
We get involved in many other research projects, also. In recent years, we helped everyone from a local church developing a Land Acknowledgement Statement to an eighth-grade student developing a presentation on Prohibition.
Our research on the Pike House led to Landmarks Illinois awarding it “endangered status.”
We even found the owner of a wedding ring that went missing decades ago. That story made the national news.
Last year, the artists involved in the Invisible Labors project contacted RHS for ideas and information on the history of land usage by women in the Ridge area. We discussed many topics with them, including women farmers and gardeners, Victory gardens at wartime, early women landscaping architects who lived in the area, artists who drew inspiration from the land, and more. We supplied extensive research material to them.
We introduced them to the Native Americans who lived on the Ridge, the Potawatomi people who lived off the land and today still make baskets from black ash trees. RHS researcher/writer Carol Flynn’s series on the Native Americans on the Ridge appeared on Facebook and in the Beverly Review.
We introduced them to artist Louise Barwick, who lived on the Ridge and painted many watercolors of local scenes. Miss Barwick’s biggest accomplishment was a giant relief map of Illinois displayed at the 1893 World’s Fair, which unfortunately has been lost to time, but a picture of it exists. RHS published a lengthy piece on Louise Barwick in 2015. RHS has a large collection of Miss Barwick’s paintings which we have exhibited several times and will show again for this year’s Beverly Art Walk.
We introduced them to Kate Starr Kellogg and her sister Alice Kellogg Tyler. These women did not live in Beverly; their father owned the land where Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park is now located, and the family farmed there. Kate was an educator; Kellogg School in North Beverly is named for her, although she did not teach in any schools connected to the Ridge. There is extensive research information available on Kate Starr Kellogg. Alice was the artist in the family. Material on the Kellogg sisters was published in the past as part of the RHS Facebook series on people for whom schools on the Ridge are named.
The Native American basket makers, Louise Barwick, and the Kellogg sisters appear to be the final topics of this project. We’re happy to see a project come to fruition, although we have not reviewed the final text or seen the final product so we cannot comment on it.
Anyone wanting help with research can contact RHS through our Facebook page or through regular email or phone (ridgehistory@hotmail.com; 773/881-1675).
Shared from the Ridge Historical Society page by request.
Part 9 on the Hofer Family – Political Involvement
The Hofer family connected with the Ridge came of age during the Progressive Era of the late 1800s – early 1900s, a time of widespread reform in just about every area of American life, from education to business to government.
The rights of women and children were important issues of the day. For women, voting, property ownership, and education and employment opportunities headed the list. For children, child labor laws, the juvenile justice system, public education, and health services were priorities. It was the members of the women’s clubs who did most of the advocating for children’s rights.
The family patriarch was Andreas Franz Xaver Hofer, born in 1821 in Baden, a historical territory in south Germany and north Switzerland. He took part in the unsuccessful Baden Revolution of 1848 – 49, an attempt to overthrow the ruling princes. Forced to flee the country, he came to New York City in 1849.
His future wife, Mari Ruef, was born in 1836 in Baden, and came to New York in 1852. There she met Hofer and they married in 1853. [Hofer died in 1904 and was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery on the Ridge. Mari moved to California where she died in 1918. Hofer’s remains were then brought from Chicago to California to be buried beside his wife.]
The Hofers moved to Iowa from New York and began their family, which would grow to five daughters and three sons. Andreas Hofer fought with the Iowa Infantry of the Union Army as a lieutenant in the U.S. Civil War. Andreas and Mari became naturalized citizens of the U.S.
The Hofers became farmers and dry goods merchants in McGregor, Iowa. Hofer became known as a local expert on cultivating grapes and was active in the Iowa State Horticulture Society. They purchased a local newspaper, the McGregor News, which they ran for many years. The family was well known in the community.
Andreas and Mari Hofer had a passion for social justice and reform that they passed down to their children. Through their newspaper, they shared their “progressive” views, and all the children were trained in the newspaper and printing fields.
Andreas Hofer‘s philosophy for the newspaper was “closely identified with the interests of the people and with successful government,” according to an article written in 1904 by his sons. He was involved in local politics and a leader of the temperance movement. Many of the beer breweries in the U.S were owned by German immigrants, and the newspapers made note of the divide in the German community over the alcohol issue. Hofer wrote temperance tracts in the German language which were published by the German National Temperance Association.
He used the newspaper to advance his platforms, and this did not always go over well with the subjects of his commentaries. In one court case that was followed closely by the public, the newspaper and its publishers, A. F. Hofer and Sons, were sued for $5,000 by a saloon keeper claiming the paper had damaged his character. The paper had accused the saloon keeper of keeping a gambling house. The saloon keeper was backed by the local liquor league. The case went to court, and the Hofers won the case – the charges against the saloon keeper were “fully sustained.”
The involvement of the Hofer children with the newspaper led to careers for all that included writing, editing, and publishing.
The family sold the McGregor News in 1890. By then, the sons, Ernest (1855-1934), Frank Xaver (1856-1905), and Andreas F., Jr., (1861-1913), who made the newspaper and publishing industries their lifetime careers, had moved to Salem, Oregon, to seek their fortunes on the west coast. “E.” and “A. F.” took over the Capital Journal, an evening paper. Ernest later ran the Industrial News Review, which advocated for “policies essential to the well-being of our country.” Frank owned half of one newspaper and was the founder of another.
As covered in the last posts, the five daughters and parents moved to Chicago to allow the women better education and employment opportunities. They rented a house on 96th Street in Beverly. The house, long ago demolished, stood where the entrance to Ridge Park is today.
The daughters became leaders in the kindergarten, social settlement, and playground movements. All of these were “progressive” initiatives, with strong political overtones.
The preceding posts on the Hofer sisters’ careers and this introduction to the family’s political involvement brings us to the Hofer sisters’ roles as social and political activists, which will be covered in the next posts.