The late 1800s and early 1900s were known as the Progressive Era, a time of reform and advancement in all areas of life, including education, business, science and technology, medicine, and social behavior.

Advancing the role of women became an important goal of the time.

Long denied membership in men’s professional and civic clubs, women started their own clubs. These clubs became very influential in their communities.

Women’s clubs initially started for specific reasons, like temperance or art and literature. By the early 1900s, however, many women’s clubs were organized in cities and communities for broad civic and charity purposes. The members were generally middle-to-upper-middle class women with the time and money to get involved in community activities.

The Beverly/Morgan Park community included two clubs, the Ridge Woman’s Club, which was renamed the Beverly Hills Woman’s Club in 1926 and is no longer in existence; and the Morgan Park Woman’s Club, which is still in existence and celebrated its 135^th anniversary last year.

The Progressive Era included several “movements” that led to the bird sanctuary project. There were the “City Beautiful” movement and the budding “conservation movement” in the U.S.

The City Beautiful movement promoted that beauty was important to create “moral virtue” among the population and advocated for removing tenements and slums, and building grand architecture and many parks in the cities. The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan for Chicago were part of this movement. At the same time, the need for preserving the country’s natural resources was starting to be recognized, and an early conservation movement developed. Yellowstone National Park, the world’s first national park, was established in 1872. Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. President from 1901 to 1909, was a leader of the early conservation movement.

Influenced by these movements, many women’s clubs undertook beautification and nature projects in their communities. The clubs were competitive and collaborative at the same time. Some women, of course, were members of multiple clubs, and this was the case in Beverly and Morgan Park.

Most of the club women in Beverly/Morgan Park enjoyed growing award-winning gardens on their large home lots. The women’s clubs all had gardening committees or “departments” that were very active with shows and contests.

The clubs also had conservation departments and civic improvement departments.

Ridge Woman’s Club Project

In October of 1925, the Ridge Woman’s Club announced an initiative under the direction of the Civic Improvement Committee, chaired by Blanche Buttles (Mrs. Benjamin Buttles) who lived at 95^th and Robey Avenue (now Damen Avenue.).

There were several parts to this initiative:

• Beautify the train stations at 91^st, 95^th, 99^th, 103^rd, and 107^th Streets, along the Rock Island line. The goal was “to make Beverly Hills one of the most beautiful spots in the country” and the train stations were a priority because they were “the parts the visitors see first” and they were “unsightly and ugly.”
• Work with the Cook County Commissioners to landscape the 91st Street entrance to the Beverly Woods, the early name for the Dan Ryan Woods, as part of the plan to beautify the 91^st Street train station area. Ransom D. Kennicott, chief forester of the forest preserves, and Anne Bemis (Mrs. Edward W. Bemis), the first woman commissioner of Cook County, were involved in this project.

The 91st Street Station Plans

The plans of the Ridge Woman’s Club for the 91^st Street station included:

• Plant new trees at the entrance to the forest preserve (this was considered “reforestation” by the Cook County commissioners)
• Erect two pillars of native rock at the entrance to the forest preserve
• Establish an “ornamental safety island” between the entrance to the woods and the train station, landscaped with shrubs, trees, flowers, and lamp posts.

The Woman’s Club planned to pay for the improvements themselves with $3,000 they raised from their garden and flower shows. They estimated it would take several years to complete the 91^st Street project.

In the 1920s, as part of the conservation movement, small “bird sanctuaries” were being established in communities around the country. These were on undeveloped land, usually a few acres, fenced off to allow the local and migratory birds to be undisturbed for nesting. Some of the “sanctuaries” became rather lavish with newly planted berry shrubs and trees, feeding stations, ponds and bird baths, and human-built bird houses. 

In 1923, the Morgan Park Woman’s Club started work on a five-acre bird sanctuary in Kennedy Park at 113^th and Western Avenue.

In April of 1926, the Beverly Hills Woman’s Club, as the Ridge Woman’s Club was now known, announced it had “secured a promise from the County commissioners to establish a bird sanctuary in the forest preserve near the 91^st Street station.”

The Conservation Committee as well as the Civic Improvement Committee of the Beverly Hills Woman’s Club were involved in this project.

The plan included that the area for the bird sanctuary would be surrounded by woven wire fences, and the club would furnish bird baths and food for the birds.

In addition, the head of the manual training courses of the Chicago Public Schools promised 150 bird houses for the sanctuary.

In 1925 and 1926, tree planting ceremonies occurred at the 91^st Street station and entrance to the forest preserve. Elm and honey locust trees were planted.

In late summer, 1926, it was reported that a new “tufa stone gateway” to the forest preserve, designed by Beverly architect Murray D. Hetherington, was built at 91^st Street and Hermitage Avenue.

A rock grotto with cave was being built near 87^th Street where the entrance road ran through. That was likely Longwood Drive, which no longer opens on 87^th Street.

They were negotiating with Hetherington to build pilasters and lamp posts in the “large safety island” in 91^st Street between Winchester and Pleasant Avenues.

On Tuesday, April 10, 1928, a ceremony was held at the “rock pedestal in the center of the safety isle at the 91^st Street station” to dedicate a bronze tablet embedded in the pedestal, which read:  “The Beverly Hills Woman’s Club, through its Civic Improvement Committee, dedicates to the community the landscaping of the Beverly Hills railroad stations, Walden Park, the Rock entrance to the Forest Preserves, the bird sanctuary and isle of safety. 1924-1928.”

At the time, the bird sanctuary was described as located at the edge of the forest preserves at 91^st Street and Winchester Avenue in “a hilly wooded section of the preserves.” Fifty bird houses “of all sizes and types” were erected in the trees, built by Boy Scouts of the community and their fathers.

A banquet was announced where awards would be given for the bird houses.

The banquet was held in March of 1929 for Boy Scout Troop 608 at the St. Paul Union Church in North Beverly. The prize for best birdhouse was awarded, although the newspaper did not report who was the recipient. 

There is little remaining today of the bird sanctuary project. The most visible feature is the “rock pedestal” or “pilaster with lamp post,” possibly designed by Murray Hetherington on the safety island outside to the north of the 91^st Street train station. The original bronze tablet and lighting fixture are gone. Pictures of the original lighting fixture are being sought.

That safety isle is separate from the land to the west between Winchester and Pleasant Avenues that contains the rock with the Vincennes Trail marker. It doesn’t appear that any additional development occurred on that piece of land as was originally proposed.

Remnants of any of the other work, the stone gateway and the grotto, might be in evidence if searched for, but are not readily seen.

The Frank M. Blake Family lived in the Pike House from the 1920s to the 1960s while Blake was head of the Calumet Division of the Cook County Forest Preserves. Blake’s grandchildren reported that as children, they visited a fenced-in section of land west of the Pike House that they were told was a “bird sanctuary.” This matches the description, and confirms the location, of the original bird sanctuary established in the 1920s.

To answer some general questions that have been raised about the bird sanctuary, it was established for local and migratory wild birds to be an undisturbed oasis for feeding and nesting. 

The birds came and went freely. There was no mention of a building or enclosure; this was not like a “bird house” at the zoo where exotic birds were kept.

Volunteers associated with the Beverly Hills Woman’s Club, and Forest Preserve staff, were the people who cared for the birds.