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
Part 13 – The Hofer Sisters – Conclusion
By 1920, after having lived on the Ridge for about twenty-five years, the Hofer family had departed from the Beverly area. Some of the sisters stayed in Chicago, and some relocated to other states. They continued active careers for many more years.
Oldest sister Mari Ruef Hofer was recorded as living with her sister Andrea’s family in Hyde Park on the 1920 U.S. Census. By the late 1920s, she had relocated to Santa Monica, California, where her youngest sister Elsa Hofer Schreiber and Elsa’s family lived.
Mari died in 1929 at the age of 71 and was buried in Santa Monica.
The Oakland, California, Tribune noted at the time that Mari had been a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley and in the summer of 1929 had presented pageants in the university’s Greek theater. She had just started the Greek Art Club of Berkeley.
Mari had continued to write and adapt music and folk dances for use in education and recreation programs. In 1926, she published “Christmas in Peasant France,” a Christmas play, and “Festival and Civic Plays from Greek and Roman Tales.” In 1927, she published “Camp Recreations and Pageants.”
Second sister Bertha Hofer Hegner lived in West Chicago, and upon her death in 1937 at the age of 75, was buried in Graceland Cemetery on Chicago’s north side.
Bertha was the President of both the Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College and the Columbia College of Expression until her retirement in 1936.
Bertha developed new education programs throughout her career. One of her later accomplishments was detailed in a 1933 Chicago Tribune article which is attached to this post. She developed and administered a kindergarten, grade school, and playground in the Marshall Field Garden Apartments, a housing development directed by Marshall Field III of the department store family to provide affordable housing and to spur development in the surrounding areas. The apartments, located at 1400 North Sedgewick Street in Old Town, are still in use today as subsidized housing.
Amalie Hofer Jerome, the third sister, and her husband Frank, were living in Hyde Park in 1920. After her husband died in 1933, she moved to their summer house in Michigan. She died in 1941 at the age of 78, and was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery on 115th Street on the Ridge, where her husband was also buried. She is the only Hofer sister to be buried on the Ridge.
Amalie adapted her father’s diary into a biography, and in 1939 published “My Century – The Story of Andreas Franz Hofer.” The book was reviewed by newspapers around the country. The Shreveport Journal in Louisiana gave a poignant review of the book that is attached to the post.
Andrea Hofer Proudfoot also stayed in Chicago, living in Hyde Park. Later, she and her husband Frederick apparently had homes in both Iowa, where Andrea grew up, and in Chicago. They both died in Chicago and were buried in McGregor, Iowa. Andrea was the last of the Hofer sisters, dying in 1949, at the age of 83.
Andrea was always a poet at heart. In 1919, she published a book of poetry called “Trolley Lines, Jotted Down Coming and Going.” It was called “Cubist verse” by Reedy’s Mirror, a literary journal of the day. Cubist writing took its cues from artists like Picasso during the Cubism period of the early 1900s. The objective observation of the external world was replaced by the “stream of consciousness” inner workings of the mind. One review said of Andrea’s work that it was “the new poetry but one can understand it.”
Andrea was president of the Poetry Lovers of America, and a member of the Dill Pickle Club, an unconventional Chicago social club that fostered free speech and good conversation for uninhibited people. “The Pickle” was Chicago’s answer to the “Bohemian” clubs of Greenwich Village in New York City. Andrea was instrumental in raising the money to build a clubhouse for the group on the near north side.
Elsa Hofer Schreiber and her artist husband George and their children moved to the west coast, first to Salem, Oregon, where several of the Hofer brothers lived, and by 1920 they were settled in Santa Monica, California, where George became known in the California arts scene.
Elsa died in 1942 at age 73 while at a daughter’s house in Battle Creek, Michigan. Her death certificate records she was cremated at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago, and burial records report she was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica.
Elsa had participated in numerous professional activities with her sisters and had run the school she and Andrea started in Beverly, but she was also very home- and family-oriented, a pattern set by her own mother, who lived with Elsa in her final years. Most of the later stories about Elsa revolve around her family.
In 1923, a double wedding took place at the Schreiber house the day after Christmas. Daughter Madelaine and son Armin married their respective fiancés in a gala ceremony with holly and poinsettia as the backdrop, and their brothers and sister in attendance. The following week, at New Year’s, a reception for the newlyweds was held at the Schreiber house.
In 1927, daughter Elizabeth was married in Santa Monica. The announcement is attached to this post. As no pictures of Elsa as an adult have been located so far, this picture of her daughter gives a clue as to her possible appearance.
In 1928, tragedy struck Elsa’s family when their youngest child, George L. Schreiber, Jr., died just as he was graduating from the University of California, Berkeley. The cause of death was attributed to ptomaine poisoning.
Father Andreas Franz Xavier Hofer died in 1904 in Beverly and was originally buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Chicago. Mother Mari Ruef Hofer relocated with youngest daughter Elsa. Mari died in Santa Monica, California, in 1918, and was buried there in Woodlawn Cemetery. Her husband’s remains were relocated from Chicago to that cemetery to be buried with her.
Sons Frank and Andrew were buried in Salem, Oregon, and son Ernest in Portland, Oregon.
This concludes the series on the Hofer family who called Beverly home. Truly, this family personified the spirit of the Progressive Era.
Covered in the @[100063654336223:2048:The Beverly Review], online today and out in print tomorrow, the planned "Pop-Up History" event at Smith Village next week.
I hope people will take advantage of this opportunity to see this interesting mural by the late Jack Simmerling. If this is a success, we will explore other "Pop-Up History" opportunities.
See the details in the link below. A special, one time only opportunity, to view the mural of the community painted by the late Jack Simmerling.
Reminder! FREE one-time showing of the mural of the Beverly/Morgan Park community on Wednesday, July 26. Two times – also 1:30 to 3:00 pm. See the link below for details.
Reminder – this event is tomorrow. There are two showings – one in the afternoon from 1:30 – 3 pm, and this one in the evening. No ticket required, no fee – just come!
TODAY.
The History of the Graver-Driscoll House – Part 10The Cummings Family
Every house has a history.
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Graver – Driscoll House, owned by the Ridge Historical Society (RHS) at 10621 S. Seeley Avenue, we’ve been running an intermittent series on its various owners. The house, designed by architect John Todd Hetherington, was built in 1922-23 for Herbert and Anna Graver. Graver was an executive with his family’s business, the Graver Tank Works.
The next two owners are timely subjects for summer. Grant and Grace Harrison Fenn owned the house from 1940 to 1946. Fenn was a mechanical engineer active in the new air conditioning industry. Their story was covered in past posts.
Ownership then passed to the Nicholas Cummings family. Their story revolves around ice cream.
Nicholas Cummings was born Nicholas Athaniscos Kumungis on September 10, 1891, in Sparta, Greece, according to immigration records. He arrived in the U.S. on March 14, 1912. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen on January 2, 1920.
On his 1917 World War I draft registrations card, he listed his employment as bookkeeper with Rusetos and Co. On the 1920 U.S. Census, he was living with his married sister Libby Rusetos’s family on the north side. His brother-in-law, Peter Rusetos, owned an ice cream manufacturing company.
Nicholas married Matina Papadakos, also from Greece. They had one son, Thomas. In 1930, Nicholas was listed as a wholesaler in ice cream. In 1940, the Cummings family was living at 10501 S. Bell Ave., and his occupation was an ice cream manufacturing business.
On his World War II draft registration card, completed in 1942, he listed his employment as Rusetos and Co. at 4801 S. Western Avenue. It appears he went into business with his brother-in-law and later either took that business over, or that business dissolved, and Cummings formed a new one at the same address.
In April 1946, Nicholas and Matina Cummings bought the Graver House, still using the 10616 Longwood Drive address, although the owners before them had purchased land to also establish the entrance used today at 10621 S. Seeley Avenue.
Around 1950, Nicholas and his son Thomas started their own company, Central Ice Cream Company, with father as president and son as vice-president, at the 4801 S. Western Avenue address.
They got involved in some interesting projects. The U.S. Army started a training program, the Army Medical Service Meat and Poultry Hygiene School, to train officers and enlisted men as inspectors for the meat and dairy products procured for the Army. In 1951, Central Ice Cream was one of the field sites for practical application of classroom studies, along with other companies like Campbell Soup and Kraft Foods.
In 1955, Central Ice Cream bid for and won the contract to supply ice cream for the Chicago Public Schools lunch program. They replaced Golden Rod Ice Cream Co., which retaliated by trying to take over other clients served by Central. Central sued Golden Rod for damages but the court dismissed the case.
In the late 1950s-early 1960s, Thomas Cummings, working with two other men, was granted at least four patents for innovations in the ice cream industry, and the patents were shared with Nicholas.
The patents were for a filling apparatus including injection valve, a method of making a wrapped ice cream cone, a method for forming a sealed conical container, and an apparatus for handling and filling erected cartons. Those patents are attachments to this post.
The Cummings family listed the Graver House for sale in the summer of 1961.
Nicholas Cummings died in November of 1961. His services were held at St. Constantine Church at 74th and Stony Island, once the largest Greek Orthodox church in North America. (The building in now the headquarters of the Nation of Islam.) He was buried in Evergreen Cemetery.
The Graver House remained on the market in 1962. Around Christmastime of that year, the Christmas tree caught on fire. The family escaped without harm, but the living room and foyer were destroyed. The family sold the house in February of 1963.
The next owners, William and Myrtle Heim, repaired the house but didn’t stay there for long. They will be covered in the next post in this series.
For many years, RHS did not know the original appearance of the living room and foyer. Then a few years ago, the Fenn family who sold the house to the Cummings family shared numerous photos that showed details of the house up to the early 1960s.
There also is one picture from the Cummings family that shows them in front of the fireplace that was destroyed in the fire, attached to this post.
The August Villager, the community newspaper put out by the Beverly Area Planning Association, includes an article by Linda Lamberty, Ridge Historical Society Historian, introducing the upcoming RHS exhibit, "Louise Barwick's Lost Ridge."
The exhibit will officially open to the public the day of the @[672585269479476:69:Beverly Art Walk], Saturday, September 23, 2023.
Along with the exhibit, RHS will run a series on Miss Barwick and her remembrances of her times on Facebook. So look for this in September!
The Old Water Tower by Louise Barwick, 1893. Located, in the artist’s own words, “200 feet north of 103rd Street between Hoyne and Seeley,” the water tower was constructed circa 1888 as part of a much-needed water system that included a windmill. The then modern achievement became redundant when the area was annexed to Chicago in 1890, when water and other utilities began being supplied by the City.
The Early Days of Morgan Park – Part 1
Selecting a date to recognize the “beginning” of Morgan Park is arbitrary.
Indigenous people lived in the area for thousands of years before the European settlers came, so habitation is not really the measure.
What is really being decided is a date to mark the transition from Natives to non-natives as the predominant inhabitants of the Ridge.
The identity of the first non-native to step foot on the Ridge, and when that person came, will never be known with certainty. The first written records of explorers in the Chicago area date to the 1600s. Jean Baptiste Point du Sable of African descent is recognized as the first non-native to take up residence in the downtown area around 1790.
Fort Dearborn was established in 1804 and survey teams operated from there. They could see the Blue Island rising from the prairie twelve miles to the southwest.
In 1972, a group of Beverly/Morgan Park residents proposed that the community recognize the year as the sesquicentennial of the founding of Beverly/Morgan Park. This was based on the arrival of French-Canadian fur trader Joseph Bailly in 1822 at Porter, Indiana, on the Calumet River, where he established a homestead. Bailly was from a well-known family that ran trading posts from Michigan to Chicago. He interacted with the local Native Americans, predominantly the Potawatomi, and travelled their paths and waterways.
It was surmised that Bailly knew well the local Natives, and the Vincennes Trail that ran through the Ridge, and that he “opened up” the Blue Island Ridge to the fur trade. Therefore, they believed this was the start of current history, at the time 150 years in the past. There was a year’s worth of celebrations in 1972 to mark this anniversary.
A decade after Bailly, in 1832, DeWitt Lane built a cabin at what today is about 102nd Street and Seeley Avenue. He didn’t own the land; the U.S. government had not yet put it up for public sale.
The Native Americans gave up ownership of the land with the Treaty of Chicago in 1833, and began to leave the area.
The government began public domain land sales in 1834. John Blackstone bought up substantial property on the Ridge in 1835 and 1839, and reportedly built a house in today’s North Beverly. In 1844, he sold the land to Thomas Morgan from England who moved here with his family, livestock, and hounds, and established an estate he called Upwood around 91st Street and Longwood Drive.
At the same time, settlement was going on at the southern tip of the Ridge, where the city of Blue Island was being established. Other homesteads were being established along the Vincennes Trail; Norman Rexford and Jefferson Gardner were there in 1834. Because Morgan did not like the Vincennes Trail running through his property, he rerouted it to the east below the Ridge.
Thomas Morgan died in 1851 and the estate passed to his widow, Anna, and their nine children. In 1868, a substantial portion of the estate was sold to a group of investors headed by Frederick H. Winston, and Winston took legal title from the Morgan heirs. In 1869, the group of investors incorporated as the Blue Island Land and Building Company (BILBC), and Winston transferred the title to the company.
Some of this land they sold off immediately, and it became the Village of Washington Heights that included today’s Beverly. Washington Heights was incorporated as a village in 1874, and was annexed to the city of Chicago in 1890.
The BILBC developed some of the land into a section they called Morgan Park, which was incorporated as a village in 1882, and was annexed to Chicago in 1914.
The next post will look more at the BILBC and the establishment of the Village of Morgan Park.
The End of “Joliet Limestone”
The Givins Beverly Castle, the Robert C. Givins House, located at the corner of 103rd Street and Longwood Drive, is Beverly’s best-known landmark. The Castle was built in 1887-88, which makes it over 130 years old.
But really, the Castle is millions of years old – it was constructed of “Joliet limestone.” The proper name for the stone is Joliet – Lemont dolomite, and its chemical composition gives it a yellowish or buff color not found in limestone which is usually more gray in color.
This material was quarried in the Joliet area and used for many buildings throughout the area, from the Water Tower and Holy Name Cathedral in downtown Chicago to the Joliet prison – and the Beverly Castle. The last documented building made of this stone was constructed in the 1940s – the All Saints Greek Orthodox Church of Joliet.
Last month, the last quarry in Joliet announced it was closing. This means it is more important than ever to preserve these buildings. The Beverly Unitarian Church, which owns and uses the Castle, completed restoration of its turrets in recent years.