Beverly-Morgan Park Collection

The Beverly-Morgan Park area is a former homeland of the Potawatomi peoples. In 1833, they ceded their land rights to this area to the United States government. In 1839, John Blackstone purchased 300 acres encompassing land known as the Ridge, a heavily wooded highland. Chicago and Fort Dearborn were accessible by an indigenous trail, also called the Vincennes Trail. Additional settlers were attracted to the region after the Rock Island Railroad built stations in 1852.

Morgan Park was named after Thomas Morgan who purchased most of Blackstone’s land in 1844. After the Civil War, his children sold the land to the Blue Island Building and Land Company. In 1869, the company first platted the subdivision of Washington Heights, an area that includes most of the Morgan Park and Beverly communities. In the 1870s, the Morgan Park Military Academy (1873), the Chicago Female College (1875) and the Baptist Theological Seminary (1877) were founded. The Morgan Park Library, now the George C. Walker Branch of the Chicago Public Library, was established in 1893. In 1882, when the Village of Morgan Park was incorporated, the area was serviced by 46 Rock Island trains daily. From the 1890s to the early 1900s, transportation was expanded to surface lines on several main streets.

Adjacent to Morgan Park is the community of Beverly, or Beverly Hills. Located 12 miles south of the Loop, the area is considered part of the Blue Island Ridge. As the area was settled, single family houses predominated with more elaborate homes on the Ridge west of Longwood Drive and apartment buildings near the Rock Island Railroad tracks. With the nearby Dan Ryan Woods, Beverly and Ridge Country Clubs and Ridge Park, the area long resembled a suburban setting. Large sections of Beverly south of 99th and west of Western were undeveloped prairie until the 1940s.

In 1890, part of Beverly was annexed to Chicago and part to the Village of Washington Heights. The Village of Morgan Park was annexed to the City of Chicago in 1914 following a protracted fight amongst the citizenry. Organizations were formed to represent and lobby for both sides and were known as either “Annexationists” or “Home Rulers.”

Early settlers in Beverly-Morgan Park were mainly Protestants of English, Irish, Swedish and German descent. Despite a building boom between 1910 and 1930, the community did not permit the construction of factories or saloons near the Ridge. In the 1920s, Catholics began to settle in this predominantly Protestant community, and by 1936 there were two Catholic parishes. African Americans began settling near the Rock Island Railroad line east of Vincennes Road in 1915. In 1921, the Chicago Commission on Race Relations maintained that Blacks and whites in Morgan Park had cordial relations but that African American residences were limited to the area east of Vincennes Road.

The post-WWII building boom brought a great increase in population. In 1947, the Beverly Area Planning Association (BAPA) was founded. In the decades to come, BAPA fought panic peddling by unethical real estate agents and promoted the area’s historical significance. The Ridge Historical Society, founded in 1971, worked to increase awareness of the neighborhood’s numerous landmark buildings. In the 1980s and 1990s, several significant houses and regions of Beverly-Morgan Park were designated as landmarks, including the Givins Irish Castle and Longwood Drive District.