The Bur Oak on the Midway

Since I just wrote about the Bur Oaks of Wooded Island, I thought I’d point out another Bur Oak that was a witness to the Columbian Exposition of 1893. You’ve probably noticed it when driving on Ellis and the Midway. It’s very large and one of the contenders for the title of Oldest Tree in Chicago. This is the view looking east (photo by Sam Cholke)

 

 I have a big affection for it because it’s the only thing that the Olmsted sons allowed to break the grid of the Midway when it was redone after the Fair. There’s a 1901 photo of the grid and the hundreds of very recently planted eastern elm trees. The streets and flat panels are a rigid grid.On the far left of the photo is a floof of leaves that is much bigger than the elm saplings—in the right location, basically aligned with Ingleside.

In 1901, the tree starred as THE example of its kind in Henry C. Cowles botany textbook. Cowles was a founder of ecological studies, a long-term professor at the University of Chicago, and the person who first described ecosystem succession by studying the dunes in Indiana.

 

Richard Bumstead, the landscape architect for the university, said it was in the American Indian exhibit during the fair. Everyone else who mentions it follows his lead. But there’s a slight problem with saying what was where on the Midway during the Fair. The maps were made before the Fair opened, but concessions kept showing up, closing down, changing their names, or moving around all across the six months. The worst location for making a buck was here on the western end of the Midway and so the exhibits here were in constant flux.

Very early maps show a large “American Indian Village” and a smaller “American Indian” concession in the area. However, I think the large village didn’t materialize. One theory I’ve heard is that the people who were recruited to be there signed up with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show instead, going where they could make a lot more money and avoid dealing so directly with millions of white Americans. They didn’t have contracts with the Midway concessionaire because of governmental restrictions on what they could be doing off the reservation. It’s fairly clear that the smaller exhibit did open up as “Sitting Bull’s Cabin” where a ticket would allow a look at supposed artifacts from the Little Big Horn and a view of Rain in the Face, who had been at the battle. Photos of the cabin show tree tops behind and outside the exhibit area.

My sense is that the tree was behind the cabin and was actually in the Ostrich Farm, which opened late, too late for many of the maps. There is one map that shows the ostrich farm as next to the cabin and wrapping around behind it. So, I think our Bur Oak spent the fair hanging out with the ostriches. Judging by Cowles' photo, that's it on the right.

 

 

The Bur Oaks of Wooded Island

Before the Columbian Exposition, as Olmsted said, the area in Jackson Park was not promising, with its boggy swales and sand ridges covered with "vegetable mold.” J. Francis Murphy made a watercolor sketch of what it looked like just before work began in January 1891.

Olmsted and Burnham and their partners worked out the grand scheme of lagoons and waterways and started dredging out the pans and building up the shores that would hold the massive buildings.

Olmsted decided to keep one of the ridges. He cut off 15 acres and turned it into an island, which he himself called the Wooded Island. He hoped that he could avoid structures on it because he wanted it to be a restful oasis among the overwhelming artificiality of the Fair. It wasn’t just an interesting aesthetic contrast to him. Olmsted believed in the healing power of nature. He’d heard Emerson in person and read the Transcendentalists, so he saw the island and Lake Michigan for the spiritual uplift that he wanted the fair to deliver.

The problem was that the shorelines were raw and staked up from being sculpted. Olmsted raided the wild riverbanks south of the city, particularly along the Calumet, for thousands of water-loving shore plants. Olmsted wasn’t a native plant purist—he needed a lot of plants in a hurry that would handle the fluctuating water levels of the lagoons. It was a triumph that was praised in guidebooks and visitor diaries as the most magical part of the magical city. As one guidebook put it

“This bit of nature dropped down in the midst of the “City of White Palaces” is the final touch of perfection. Every writer who has told of the Fair, and every artist who has drawn it, has agreed to this….The visitor finds in the sedges, rushes, and other semi-aquatic vegetation along the shores of the Wooded Island and of the mainland of the Lagoon, a great triumph of unconventional horticulture.”

The old Bur Oaks in the middle provided some shade, which Olmsted filled in with quick-growing shrubs and trees. He had so little time to get the effect he wanted. Early photos show that the island looked a bit sparse.

As the summer went on, landscape filled in and earned its name as the Wooded Island.

During the Fair, a favorite view of artists was of the very south end of the island, where the Bur Oaks contrasted with the formal Court of Honor.

And you can walk among them now. They are still clustered around the bridge at the south end of the island.

 

The oaks were old even during the Fair. It became clear how old in 2003, when the largest oak blew down in a derecho that took out hundreds of trees on the southside. The 90-foot spread of its crown acted like a sail and pulled it up out of the sandy soil where it had stood since 1730. Bur Oaks grow in savannah landscapes, so they stretch out gnarled limbs horizontally. They also grow in nutrient poor soil, so they grow slowly. You can spot the old ones now (there's also a map of trees in boxes at the bridges.)

 With time and abandonment, especially after the Nike Missile base blocked access to the area, the island became overgrown with invasive species. In the 2010s, the Great Lakes Ecosystem Restoration came along with the massive effort to resculpt the shorelines and plant 600,000 native plants and recreate the ecosystem. As soon as the competition from the invasives was gone, baby Bur Oaks surprised everyone by sprouting from long buried acorns. When you see a little sapling in a protective cage, that’s a volunteer Bur Oak insuring the island will stay Wooded.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Diana

 

#WCE1893

Some things survived the Fair, though not always in the best of conditions. Such a case is Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Diana. He was the head of sculpture for the Fair, but he wasn’t going to have his own work in the fair--until he had to find a new home for a truly colossal work of art. His good friend Stanford White, whose firm, McKim, Mead, and White designed Madison Square Garden, commissioned a weathervane in the shape of Diana to perch on top of the tower. Saint-Gaudens found a lithesome model for the body (I sincerely hope she didn’t have to stand on tiptoe the whole time). Her step looks light, but she weighed in at a whopping 1,800 pounds and was 18 feet tall.

She was installed in 1891, but it was quickly clear that she was too heavy to turn in the wind and too large for the tower—and definitely too large to be that naked. Arthur Comstock and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice went on a crusade against her indecency. On the other hand, many New Yorkers affectionately dubbed her “Diana of the Tower.” White and Saint-Gaudens decided that maybe Diana should be replaced with a smaller version, Diana 2.0. But what to do with Diana 1.0? Saint-Gaudens had a great idea. She could go on top of the Women’s Building. There were just two problems: the Women’s Building did not have a pinnacle or a dome for Diana to stand on and Francis Willard, president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and member of the Board of Lady Managers for the Fair, strongly objected. This is usually described as a bit of prudish Comstockery, but the women were fighting tooth and nail for respect and the ability to define themselves as real women. Everything in and out of the building was the work of women. They did not want to be represented as titillating deities objectified by male artists. 

McKim, Mead, and White were the architects for the Agriculture Building. She could go on the dome and reign over the south side of the Court of Honor. New York, which had lost the rights to host the Fair and now lost Diana, was a bit grumpy. The New York Times music critic, W. J. Henderson, memorialized the occasion in a long poem “To Diana Off the Tower” which includes these immortal lines

And in the temple men will drop a tear,

And seek surcease of sorrow in cold beer.

…

For poised aloft in the transparent air

She’ll typify to all Chicago’s fair.

Great Diana in the boundless west!

I hope they’ll buy her a new flannel vest,

For there, rude Boreas is at his best.

Another New Yorker, Granville Sharpe, made her a central figure in a short story called “A Goddess in a Fog” and lamented her going to where she might not be appreciated:“Diana’s reign was over, but I still believe in her power, not withstanding that certain residents of the World’s Fair city have refused since then, to accept my golden goddess within their sacred precincts, on account of the scantiness of her attire!”

The scale of the Agriculture Building suited her well. The Official Guide gushed that she turned at “the lightest zephyr” and had “singular grace,” but I haven’t found any other account that she managed to move in the wind. 

The glittering metal was particularly striking at night when the light show turned on, as Julian Hawthorne (Nathaniel’s son) tried to describe: “On the dome of this building stands the golden Diana, ravished from the tower of the New York Madison Garden: at her feet was a ring of lamps, which cast a gleam upwards over her graceful figure…. From various high coignes of vantage the long, keen rays of search-lights struck across the dark, and lit upon the golden Diana on her dome.”

Meanwhile, back in New York City, Saint-Gaudens made a smaller, lighter Diana 2.0 for the tower of Madison Square Garden, where she stood until the McKim, Mead, and White Garden was torn down.

After that, Diana 2.0 went to Philadelphia. Diana of the Tower was so popular, that Saint-Gaudens started to make smaller copies to sell, so if you Google Diana and Saint-Gaudens you can see her in many incarnations, though her billowing cloak is gone.

As for Diana 1.0, she stayed atop the Agriculture Building after the Fair closed in October 1893, waiting while the Board of Manager dithered about what to do with the remnants of the Fair. And there she perched when the Court of Honor was engulfed in flames that cold winter of 1894. The fire was so intense that much of Diana melted. For a while, the remains were kept in the basement of the Field Columbian Museum (now MSI). Then, in 1909, she suddenly reappeared in public on the steps of the Art Institute, aiming her bow up Adams. 

This did not make people happy. The August 19, 1909, Chicago Daily Tribune referred to her as “Diana in the wash tub:” “The untutored host want to know how far Diana extends into the tub and whether she is on her knees… also who grafted the gold colored mustard plaster of new skin over the great wound in her tum tum. The incision appears to have been repaired by a boilermaker rather than the skilled surgeon of clay, Saint-Gaudens. This is surely not the Diana of the Greeks, and we hope, not the Chicagoans.”

Diana stayed out there a couple of years, as far as I can tell. I did find a reference to her moving to the Field Museum, but there’s no reference to her still surviving that I’ve found yet. You can always go visit her many siblings, however, including Diana 2.0 in Philadelphia, who very recently got a new layer of gold, which probably gives a sense of just how shiny she was in 1893.