Chicago: the White City

The Lost Records, by Morgan Hirsch

One night, at the McTaggert estate...

Ah-hem. Allow me to begin by reading verbatim an historical anecdote from The Story of Glen  Ellyn, Illinois, published 1928, by Ada Douglas Harmon, beginning page sixty-three.

In 1867, the DuPage County Courthouse was moved from Naperville to Wheaton, with much bitter feeling. Naperville objected to giving up the county records, so a party of men from Danby, including Amos Churchill, joined by a party of men from Wheaton led by Marcellus Jones, went over to Naperville one night, entered the Court House and carried away four books of records. They were attacked by Naperville men, the books being dropped in the street in the scuffle. The men of Danby picked up the four books, and took them to Chicago for safe-keeping. It is supposed they were lost in the great fire of '71 for they have never been found. For more than a half century later they were referred to as "the lost records" and would have been worth thousands of dollars if they had been found. 

You see, this rather mundane tale fails to grasp the true nature of the  history. One must go back nearly forty years to when the Scott family,  pioneers from Maryland, discovered the DuPage river on a hunting  expedition. Willard Scott shortly thereafter began his 'relations'  with the heathenish Indian tribes of the area. It is recorded that he  had a great deal of respect amongst the Blackhawks for personal bravery  shown over a dispute about the trade of a buckskin coat. I assure you  this is pure farce. Willard Scott first consorted with the natives  while on expedition from Fort Dearborn; he did not return till years  later, on the eve of the Indian war. He came to those tribals with a  thunderous rifle and sharp saber. Scott had a particular talent for driving fear into the hearts of rudimentary souls. He was highly ascendant with them; worshipped, even personally. They called him 'White Eagle'. 

Prior to the opening of hostilities of the Blackhawk war, Chief Black Hawk himself acted directly to remove the 'White Eagle' from his place among the Indians. Scott was very low upon exile from his tribe. He rattled around the county, eventually determining to stay in a room at Fort Payne in Naper (later Naperville). Though prone to melancholy and fits of excitability, Scott very pompously demanded position in the county. In those days, he was what passed for a war hero. The few people in the county then saw fit that he was made justice of the peace. Scott penned the first pages of the DuPage county record; he signed his entries as Judge White Eagle Scott. 

I am qualified to speak with authority as to what precisely was penned in those ledgers, the fabled 'lost records,' for the simple fact that I have seen and studied them. I will not get ahead of the story, however. In-between recording the actual business of the county, Judge Scott simply transcribed his memoirs, recording certain blasphemous, dirt-worshipping rituals and ceremonies. These arcane practices were meant to provide some miraculous benefit from some unseen, ethereal force, which oft times was paid for in the spilling of human blood. By my eye in many of these ritualized slaughters, Scott himself 'stood in', as it were, for the beneficent overlord. 

I do not take it up to account for every group of administrators and functionaries who served in DuPage country and were privy to Judge Scott's half-mad texts. I will propose that these dirt-worshipping sacraments were held to like pawnbroker to his coin. I do take it up to account for the opposition. Deacon Winslow Churchill arrived in the Five Corners area, Northeast of Naper, with his numerous family members in 1834. Deacon Churchill was a thoroughly righteous, pious, and dutiful zealot for his Methodist faith. He conducted the first religious services in the area and organized the first Sunday school and proctored the few youths in the county. The eponymous figure is immortalized in that area, with Churchill Woods and Churchill School. Churchill had a fiery hatred for Judge Scott; he had sensed, or perhaps witnessed the Justice's paganism. I have read from eye-witness accounts that on one occasion while Judge Scott's court was in session, Churchill's wagon appeared in town, with the Deacon holding the reins. He parked alongside the courthouse, stood from the driver's seat, and hurled a Bible through a glass window to strike the judge firmly on the shoulder. I have read numerous accounts of what the Deacon shouted, though they are not in agreement. 

I do not think it a long leap to say that the Deacon passed on his irascible hatred of Judge Scott's barbarous ways to his third-born son, Amos. You will recall the name Amos Churchill from Mrs. Harmon's history; he represented the Danby contingent of men who went to retrieve Judge Scott's records in 1867. He and the reverend Marcellus Jones had previously been the driving force behind the withdrawal of the county seat from Naperville to Wheaton. Their ploy to get at the records and interdict the monstrous rituals via the bureaucracy was a failure, however; in the end they had both to organize willing members of their flocks to stage a raid by dark of night. These are the circumstances which prompted Mrs. Harmon's entry about the 'lost records'.

Speaking of, on page sixty-eight of The Story of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, there is a quote from a one Mattie Janes Coe retelling of the 1876 county fair, held in Naperville, nine years after the battle for the records. The body of the reminiscence tells how the village of Naperville cordially invited all peoples of the county to attend the fair, and the parties from Wheaton and Danby were welcomed with open arms, and the hatchet-or tomahawk?-from past ill-will buried. What is not recorded is that both Amos Churchill and Marcellus Jones had been buried, too, one year prior. It was written in their obituaries that both men had been simultaneously thrown and trampled by their horses whilst riding home from a Sunday mass held in outlying territories.

Very little else worth mentioning happened following the theft; except for the fire. Following the disruption of the annual rituals done in Naperville, there was quite coincidentally a four-year draught in the Northeastern Illinois region. Such a draught had never been seen before and has never been seen since. I have read from meteorologists that the phenomenon was the most prominent draught in the Americas in eight hundred years. This extremely parched period served as the circumstance which led to the Chicago Fire. I once found some crop reports from Naperville, from the draught period. Farmers around that village were not in a tight spot from this draught. It seems the water table of their wells rose by almost ten feet in that period.

Now I did mention that I had seen the 'lost records' of Judge Scott, hadn't I? Contrary to common belief the DuPage county records  were not destroyed in the Great Fire. They were unearthed from wreckage in 1872. It was in March of '74 when I was called by special invitation of the Mayor of Chicago Harvey Doolittle Colvin, under the advice of his personal medium and spiritualist, Miss Adelaide Meyers-Cartwright. Mayor Colvin wished to know precisely what it was he had in these books, and I was to interpret them for him. My report, I am told, has since traveled with those records as a key interpretive document. More than the actions of the architects, or Daniel Burnham, it was the need of the rituals, you see, contained within Judge Scott's records that demanded the forest preserves which now amount for one hundred thousand acres in Chicago. The Indians were not known as Dirt-Worshippers for nothing, you know. I do not bear any personal doubt that Mayors and Councilmen of the City of Chicago have carried out the procedures which I translated for them; I do wonder with some mirth if they have practiced them in Churchill's own woods, though. 

I would not plead with you that you should believe me when I tell you these things. The evidence is reported in your modern news. Chicago is the city of the century, and has continued to prosper throughout the years where other cities have risen and fallen in their eminence. Naperville, whose town fathers I suspect have passed down orally or through re-transcription the works of 'White Eagle' Scott, has prospered like no other village in DuPage county. They were voted some years ago the best place in all these forty-eight states to raise one's family, were they not? As for me, my family has prospered since I encountered and studied the lost records and the rites within.

You see, now perhaps more fully, what kind of a history our city has to its name.