One of my favorite monuments in the region doesn’t get much attention these days.
A statue of young, beardless Abraham Lincoln erected in the early 2000s that presides over the intersection of Lincoln and Dixie highways is the more eye-catching edifice, but directly across from it is another, far older image of Lincoln.
Perched atop a pedestal where several spouts trickle water in temperate months, Lincoln’s downcast visage graces an enlarged copper penny dated 1916, the year the sculpture was presented to the burgeoning city of Chicago Heights by the Conservation Committee of the Arche Club of Chicago, a prominent South Side women’s group that focused on artistic endeavors.
The monument was envisioned as a drinking fountain for tired travelers who had reached “the Crossroads of the Nation,” the intersection of two of the most prominent named highways in the early days of motoring.
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The Arche fountain still flows, though drinking its contents isn’t advisable. But several benches surrounding the monument continue to offer respite to weary pedestrians.
Above Lincoln’s visage, a quote attributed to him is printed in raised metal letters: “We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth.”
It’s an optimistic message posted at a time when things were looking up, not just for Chicago Heights, but for the entire region. Inland Steel, founded in a plant at the east end of Main Street in Chicago Heights, had recently expanded to a huge foundry in East Chicago, Indiana, and business was good. Steel was in high demand and plants popped up throughout the area.
Rail Cars remained a big business in Pullman, pianos were rolling off the line in Steger and Calumet Baking Powder cans sealed in Calumet City were spreading the region’s moniker throughout the country and beyond.
The Calumet region was booming. It had come a long way from the days when Native Americans would harvest wild rice in wetland prairie areas. Ditches drained the marshes, creating land suitable for modern development, and those wet prairies that remained were ideal places to dump industrial waste.
Meanwhile in 1912, a University of Chicago graduate student searching for botanical samples hopped on a train south to a prairie remnant not far from the Pullman factories. Norma Pfeiffer’s discovery of a tiny parasitic plant sent shock waves through the botany community. Later dubbed Thismia Americana, nothing like it had ever been spotted in all of North America. Related to plants native to Tasmania and last spotted growing in the area in 1916, the plant has generated more than a century’s worth of speculation, hunts and even allegations the find was an elaborate hoax.
The complex interactions of industry and nature, the geological forces that created the landscape and the thousands of generations of Native Americans who shaped it to serve their needs as well as the the waves of immigrants who later called the Calumet region home all contribute stories to an exhibit that opened this month at the Field Museum in Chicago.
Though the exhibit just opened before Thanksgiving, it had “already been on a journey through the Calumet region,” said Madeleine Tudor, a senior environmental social scientist with the museum.
Collected under the umbrella title Calumet Voices, National Stories, the traveling exhibit has been in the works since 2018, pooling the resources of 15 area museums, libraries, galleries and other entities.
“We call ourselves the Calumet Curators, which is awesome,” Tudor said.
They’ve been working together for four years on “a tangible way to showcase the stories that are very rich and embedded in this amazing landscape that really are not told, and the voices in the stories that aren’t always heard,” she said.
The exhibit’s first stop, in 2019, was at Pullman National Historic Monument, where it took on an “elemental” theme focusing on “fire, water, earth — how elements came together in this region and the stories that came from that.” The Historic Pullman Foundation, Robbins History Museum, Blue Island Historical Society and other organizations contributed to that first effort.
The exhibit’s second evolution premiered at the Gary Public Library and Cultural Center in Indiana in January 2020, showcasing a theme of the Calumet region as a “land of opportunity and challenges — not painting a Pollyanna picture but showing the amazing resilience in this region,” Tudor said.
“Racial tensions, challenges of industry, labor, safety, and also looking at this region at time where there were 100 languages spoken, and different ways intense cultural diversity was happening, and how relationships were built in the mill and the neighborhood.”
That exhibit, of course, faced an unforeseen challenge at the outset of a worldwide pandemic.
The Calumet Voices tour started back up again in Porter County, Indiana, in May with an exhibit highlighting the art of the region, including the everyday art found in local advertisements as well as the work of more famous painters like Dunes landscape artist Frank Dudley.
The Field Museum exhibit, which runs through October, was put together from elements of all of its three predecessors, as well as some new items that have been discovered along the way.
One of those is a giant steel plate that had become part of the flooring at the former Inland Steel plant in East Chicago, which was more recently operated by Arcelor Mittal and recently sold to Cleveland-Cliffs, Inc.
A couple of years ago, workers at the plant moved some filing cabinets and discovered the steel floor plate had some writing welded into it. That turned out to be the cursive signatures, welded in steel, of several women steel workers, along with a date: June 4, 1943.
Officials at the steel plant contacted the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historic Park in California about the artifact, which in turn contacted the Calumet Curators.
“We said this is pretty amazing and we should keep it here; don’t send it to California,” Tudor said.
It’s a Calumet story in of itself.
“There’s gender – the Rosie the Riveter story, but it goes a lot deeper than that,” she said. “There’s the pride in their work that is just palpable, and their relationship to the medium of steel is really fascinating.”
Mark Bouman, Chicago region program director at the Field Museum, said it’s a prime example of how objects can illustrate the Calumet Region’s stories.
“We’re learning so much about the many voices in the region, and especially the first voices — the voices of Native Americans who were here first and are still here,” he said.
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An image in the exhibit depicts two people collecting manoomin, a wild rice native to the Great Lakes region. It’s showcased along with specimens of the rice added to the Field’s botanical collection in 1925.
“It’s such a reverberant connection between the past and today,” Bouman said. “It makes the collection come alive, and it also helps document what was happening in the natural world at the time.”
Another item on display showcases the evolving relationship between the Calumet region and the people who have never broken their cultural ties to it.
Native American bead artist George Martin creates ceremonial shakers using antique cans of Calumet Baking Powder, manufactured in Calumet City.
“These cans he uses are cans that were rationed out to tribes on reservations,” Tudor said. “It’s an act of representation and reasserting heritage — this is our culture, and this is how we will represent ourselves.”
The Field Museum itself factors into another one of Bouman’s favorite elements of the exhibit. A photo taken from the roof of what is now the Museum of Science and Industry, “but what was the Field Museum in 1906,” offers a view south over Jackson Park.
“In the distance you see the smokestacks over South Chicago. I’ve always loved that photo, but to see it blown up that way, I spent 15 minutes staring, looking at all the little people having picnics in Jackson Park. That’s the natural world outside the door of the Field Museum.”
While many of the Field’s exhibits feature elements from far flung locales, many of the museum’s earliest holdings were drawn from items exhibited during the World’s Columbian Exhibition in 1893, and many of those were collected to showcase the environs of the host city of Chicago.
One element that’s not on display is the Thismia Americana, Chicago’s very own plant, albeit one that’s likely extinct, Bouman said.
“There are six herbarium specimens in the world, and two are here at the Field Museum,” he said. “It’s too priceless to be in this exhibit. But we have a photo of it.”
The exhibit also is also part of an ongoing effort to establish the region as the Calumet National Heritage Area, a federal designation bestowed by the National Park Service.
Other areas, including the nation’s first National Heritage Area along the Illinois and Michigan Canal, have used the designation to boost tourism, but Bouman said the Calumet effort is an opportunity to “bring people together to tell a story of themselves to the rest of the world.”
“It’s a super important place in the national story,” he said. “This is a critical moment in history, and the people who live in this region, 1.5 million or so, should be proud to know that they’ve built this place. They’ve occupied it in a way that shows they are resilient; they can show the rest of the country some new things about ecological restoration, about environmental justice, about workers rights, women in prominent and leadership roles.
“One of the biggest services we can do is bring it here in this building on the lakefront and shout it from the steps, that this is a place that really matters. And it matters most to the people who live here, and work here and play here.”
The Lincoln/Dixie intersection in Chicago Heights may no longer be the Crossroads of the Nation, but in many ways, the Calumet region still is.
Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at [email protected].