Painting Company in Morgan Park, IL

The community was initially settled in the mid-19th century and known as North Blue Island because of its geographic relationship to the already established settlement of Blue Island to the south and because of its position on the Blue Island Ridge. Thomas Morgan became the area’s largest landholder when he purchased all of the property between what is today 91st St. on the north, 119th St. on the south, Western Avenue on the west, and roughly Vincennes Ave. to the east. Morgan was born in Surrey, England, and came to the United States in 1843, briefly settling in Albany, New York. He was the son of a London banker and was left a large fortune by his father which he used to establish himself on the ridge in 1844. Here he cleared trees and operated a cattle and sheep ranch for the next quarter of a century. Morgan’s son Henry was for a time the village president of Hyde Park before that community was annexed to the City of Chicago in 1889. In 1869, the Blue Island Land and Building Company purchased three thousand acres of this property from the Morgan family and laid out streets, planted thousands of trees, and built houses for those who were attracted to the bucolic atmosphere of the new community. The goal of the organization was to create a suburban community “..free from smoke and other nuisances that [were] becoming more and more intolerable in the city”.

Both the president and the treasurer of the Blue Island Land and Building Company were executives of the Rock Island Railroad at the time the former company was incorporated, and they immediately used their influence to have a spur line built to serve the new community. This arrangement lasted until 1889, when the “Suburban Line” as it exists today was built between Gresham and the Vermont Street station in Blue Island, at which time the dummy line, as it was called, was removed, much to the consternation of those who lived immediately nearby. At this point Morgan Park received three handsome passenger depots (at 107th St., 111th St., and 115th St.), with the 111th Street station being an elaborate structure designed by John T. Long that is sited immediately east of Bohn Park. Morgan Park (and especially the area of it depicted in western part of the map included with this article) is primarily an upper middle-class community, with a housing stock to reflect this demographic, although there are several estate-sized houses on the ridge at Longwood Drive. Many of the buildings in the neighborhood were designed by notable architects, including Dwight Perkins, Dankmar Adler, Murray Hetherington, John Hetherington, Palliser, Palliser & Co., Normand S. Patton and Harry H. Waterman. The community is home to the Beverly Arts Center.

Because of its ecclesiastical associations (George Walker’s father was affiliated with the old University of Chicago and Walker himself would play an influential role in the creation of the present University of Chicago, both of which were founded by organizations with Baptist connections) Morgan Park prohibited the sale of alcohol east of Western Avenue when it was incorporated as a village in 1882 – a ban which stands to this day. The suburb became a city neighborhood when it was annexed in 1914.