This collection contains materials generated primarily by the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. These materials document the history of the district, the people who founded it, some of its day-to-day operations, and its planning, construction, and development. It includes correspondence, memoranda, reports, financial records, legal files, construction plans and blueprints, minutes of meetings of the Board of Forest Preserve Commissioners and of advisory bodies, and photographic prints, negatives, and glass "lantern slides."
Digitized material from this collection is drawn from the following series:
Series 0: Photographs and Illustrations
This series contains print photographs, negatives, glass negatives, and glass slides. These were taken by early advocates of the FPDCC, by its officials or employees, or on its behalf. This series also contains a small number of oversized photographic displays, illustrations, and artwork prepared by or for the FPDCC.
Series I: Administration records
These materials pertain to the day-to-day operations of the district and includes materials that come mostly from the office of the General Superintendent.
Series V: Planning, Development, and Construction Records
The records in this series deal with the strategic planning and construction projects for the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. The digitized materials from this series are largely blueprints.
Series VI: Construction Blueprints and Other Large Blueprints
Contains oversized blueprints, most of which are master plans or control plans or detailed construction projects undertaken on Forest Preserve property.
Series VII: Newspaper Clippings
Includes clippings from local newspaper articles that mention the Forest Preserve District. Due to copyright restrictions, access to this series is limited to UIC users.
Note that there is more material in the physical collection than has been digitized. To learn more or to prepare to use the collection in person, consult the Forest Preserve District of Cook County records finding aid.
The Forest Preserve District of Cook County (FPD) was created in 1914 with a mandate to "protect and preserve" the forested lands in and around Chicago. The district quickly became known as one of the most extensive systems of wildlife reserves near a large metropolitan area. Throughout its history, the FPD has tried to balance the conflicting goals of preserving the natural beauty of the land and ensuring its accessibility. By 2011, the district has acquired nearly 68,000 acres and now entertains as many as 40 million visitors each year.
The commissioners of Cook County serve on the FPD's governing body, the Board of Forest Preserve Commissioners of Cook County. The FPD's general office handles most of the day-to-day administration of the district, and it houses the following departments, each with its own superintendent who works under the direction of the general superintendent: conservation, finance (purchasing), maintenance, planning and development, resource management, and permits and recreational activities. The district also has a legal department and a law enforcement department. The district's holdings are divided into nine roughly coherent geographic regions throughout the county.
The idea for the FPD came from the Progressive Era desire to make natural lands available to the citizenry. Reform-minded organizations, such as Chicago’s Municipal Science Club, believed that exposure to open spaces--city parks, "outer parks," and wildlife preserves--mitigated and healed the social problems created by industrialization and urbanization. To assess the possibilities for open spaces, Chicago-area municipalities created several park commissions. The reports of these commissions, including the influential 1905 report by the Special Park Commission "On the Subject of a Metropolitan Park System," urged the city and county to invest heavily in parks and to set aside forested land for "preserves, or designated wilderness areas," outside the city.
To put these recommendations into effect, reformers lobbied state lawmakers to authorize the creation of a forest preserve district, which would be a special taxing body that could acquire forested land. These reformers sometimes had contradictory goals. Some, such as Dwight Heald Perkins and Jens Jensen, two noted architects who served on the Special Park Commission, envisioned a system of open spaces that the county would maintain in near pristine beauty. Others preferred a system of "outer parks" that would be more extensively developed with a wide array of amenities for the general public. An example was the Outer Belt Park Commission of Cook County, headed by Henry Foreman, one-time president of the Board of Cook County Commissioners. This commission sought the construction of a special highway--or "outer belt"--that would run through the preserves and encircle Chicago. These competing visions, along with legal and political difficulties, hindered speedy agreement on a plan for a forest preserve district, and two statutes passed by the state legislature in 1905 and 1909 fell prey to partisan infighting and constitutional challenges.
Finally, however, the Illinois General Assembly enacted a law that survived a constitutional challenge and gained the support of most major forest preserve advocates. The Forest Preserve Act of 1913 set out a two-step process by which Illinois counties might establish forest preserve districts. First, the county commissioners would refer the question of establishing a district to the voters. Second, upon voter approval, the members of the county board would assume ex officio governance of the new district, which would operate as an independent taxing body with the authority to incur bonded debt and purchase or condemn land. In 1914, Cook County Commissioners referred a forest preserve measure to its voters, who approved it by a margin of over 100,000, and in 1915, the board officially organized the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. In 1916, the statute survived a constitutional court challenge in a "friendly suit" sponsored by Perkins, People v. Rinaker.
The FPD’s most aggressive period of land acquisition was during its first thirteen years. This expansion aroused controversy because the new district implemented condemnation proceedings against landowners who declined to sell to the district. Yet by 1929, the FPD had acquired about 31,000 acres and had adopted a strategic plan to develop its holdings.
When the FPD was organized, its commissioners created a "Plan Commission" charged with overseeing land acquisition. This commission had eight members, of whom four were FPD commissioners and four were private citizens. The Plan Commission determined which land the district ought to acquire and negotiated with landowners for the purchase of these lands. By 1917, the Plan Commission had acquired enough acres to enable the district to dedicate its first preserve, the Dear Grove Forest near Palatine.
In their efforts to acquire land, the Plan Commission and the FPD sometimes used condemnation proceedings that were contested by two types of litigants. The first consisted of landowners who did not wish to sell their land and challenged the FPD’s right to condemn their land. The second consisted of speculators who, the district’s lawyers alleged, bought land merely in the hopes that they might resell it to the county at elevated prices; they challenged the prices that the district offered for their land. The district suffered some setbacks. In Washburn v. Forest Preserve District of Cook County (1927), for instance, the Illinois Supreme Court curtailed the FPD’s prerogative to acquire land that was not obviously linked to a particular forest. But in general, the district won most of its condemnation proceedings and took control of the land it desired.
The expansion of the 1920s made it necessary for the FPD to devise a systematic plan for developing its thousands of acres. In 1926, it did away with the Plan Commission and set up an "Advisory Committee" to study the district's challenges and offer recommendations for its future management. Its 1929 tract, "Recommended Plans for the Forest Preserves of Cook County," set out a strategic vision that the district followed for the next forty years.
The 1929 report issued specific recommendations that its authors believed would ensure that the FPD be administered more systematically and more autonomously. Some of its specific recommendations were the construction of a highway that would link all the preserves but not go through any protected areas, the construction of amenities and recreational facilities for visitors, and a careful study of each tract of land to determine development on a case-by-case basis. Along with these suggestions, the report adopted more general recommendations: it argued that the district should be less beholden to what the Advisory Committee saw as the undue influence of politicians and private groups seeking special privileges or patronage employment. It also urged the FPD to pursue a program of massive restoration of lands that the Advisory Committee believed had been overused and damaged.
The district adopted the Advisory Committee’s report and, on the recommendation of that committee, hired Charles "Cap" Sauers as the General Superintendent of the Forest Preserve District of Cook County to implement the Advisory Committee's program. His tenure marked the beginning of a long period of administrative continuity, at least at the FPD's supervisory levels. Sauers served more than 30 years until his retirement in 1964, and his successor, longtime employee Arthur Janura, served until 1991. Other administrative employees, such as Charles "Chick" Estes, Chief Engineer, and Roberts Mann, Superintendent of Maintenance and, later, Superintendent of Conservation, served several decades as well.
The Great Depression posed challenges for the FPD. After 1931, for example, the county's tax receipts had shrunk so precipitously that the county and the district had trouble paying their bills. But the Depression also brought new opportunities. The district enjoyed an influx of state and federal funds from such federal and state bodies as the National Park Service, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation created under the auspices of President Herbert Hoover, and the Illinois Emergency Relief Commission. Above all, the programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, especially the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), but also the Civil Works Administration, the Public Works Administration, and the Works Progress Administration, allowed the district to embark on large projects to develop the preserves. Among such projects were the construction and renovation of hiking trails, picnic and toilet facilities, swimming pools, toboggan slides, and golf courses. Most notably, perhaps, was the Civilian Conservation Corps’s work on the "Skokie Lagoons." The goal of this massive endeavor, which involved thousands of workers and may have been the largest single CCC project of the New Deal, was to build a series of seven lagoons to re-beautify the marsh areas around the Skokie River of northern Cook County.
By the time the United States entered World War II in 1941, the federal government had dismantled most of the New Deal programs that had aided the Forest Preserve District. But the large influx of federal funds had helped the FPD pursue many of the recommendations advanced by the 1929 report of the Advisory Committee.
After the war ended in 1945, the FPD embarked on a renewed land acquisition effort. From the 1940s onward, the district lobbied Illinois lawmakers for authority to take on more land. The legislature obliged with laws that incrementally advanced the maximum number of acres the district was permitted to require from the 37,000 acres permitted in the original 1913 Forest Preserve Act, to 60,000 acres by the 1960s, and to 75,000 acres by 2000. The legislature also empowered the FPD to take on different kinds of land. The original statute, as amended in 1921, allowed the district to purchase only land that already contained a forest, immediately adjoined a forest, or linked two or more forests. Under a law enacted in 1961, the district could now acquire any land, provided that it show the land was "capable of being reforested."
In addition to expanding its holdings, the FPD also expanded the scope of its operations. It oversaw and administered, with the help of the Chicago Horticultural Society, the Chicago Botanical Gardens in Glencoe, Illinois, that was opened to nature lovers in 1972. The district also opened "nature centers" on its property, with a mission to give young people and others a chance to experience nature. The FPD had opened the first of these, the Hal Tyrell Trailside Museum, in 1931, and opened five others after World War II. By 2002, the district operated several other amenities for its visitors. According to one study offered 190 major picnic areas, 74 miles of paved bicycle trails, 190 miles of other trails, 34 fishing lakes, 90 baseball fields, 10 golf courses, 18 sleds hills, 11 boat launches, and 8 model airplane fields.
The image featured at the top of this collection is FPDCC_00_01_0010_040, "Picnic Along River with Canoe"
Processing and encoding for this collection were made possible by a generous grant from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation. http://www.gddf.org.