Recently I treated myself to a present. It’s a framed map by Albert F. Scarf titled Indian Trails and Villages of Chicago and of Cook Counties (1804).
It’s part of a new documentary we are producing with the Lombard Historical Society on the history of the DuPage County Forest Preserve Hidden Lake.
This beautiful piece of land and the adjacent Morton Arboretum today, are lovingly protected from the ravages of indiscriminate development. Once, it was home to a Potawatomi village. Imagine Potawatomi braves, hunting plentiful deer and buffalo and Potawatomi women cultivating corn and other crops along the fertile banks of the East Branch of the DuPage River.
Following the 1821 and 1833 treaties of Chicago, the Potawatomi people were forcibly removed to Missouri, Iowa, Kansas and later Oklahoma. Today, their descendants thrive in places like Shawnee, Oklahoma and Crandon, Wisconsin.
After rapid agricultural development in the mid 19th century, much of what is now Hidden Lake was purchased in 1912 by Arthur W. Cutten, once the second richest man in America. Cutten was known as the Wheat King at the Chicago Board of Trade and built an amazing country estate known as Sunny Acres on the property.
After the crash of 1929, Cutten was the target of Federal investigations surrounding the practice of short selling. He defended himself and avoided conviction on technicalities.
As America plunged into the Great Depression, Cutten and his wife Maud were attacked by a band of robbers who raided a dinner party at Sunny Acres, robbed them and left them and their servants for dead in an air-tight vault in the basement of the estate. After a staff member freed himself from his bonds and pried open the vault’s door, Cutten tapped into his vast resources and launched a campaign using private detectives to bring the gang to justice.
After Cutten’s death in 1936, the property was sold to an associate of infamous Chicago gangster Al Capone. The gambler, William R. (Big Bill) Johnson, went to jail after being convicted of tax evasion in the 1940’s.
The property remained in his family until the late 1970’s when the DuPage County Forest Preserve purchased the land, demolished Sunny Acres and discovered two giant stone goddesses depicting commerce and labor, buried in the overgrown woods. The goddesses reside today in front of the Chicago Board of Trade at LaSalle and Jackson.
It’s a story of conquest, greed, and sacred commitment to the land. It’s an American story that has been largely lost to history, needs to be understood and appreciated, and then passed onto future generations.
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