In the days after the bloody confrontation between labor and police at Haymarket Square in 1886, John V. Farwell and his brother Charles B. were reminded of their return home from a hunting trip out west during a railroad strike nine years earlier. They were traveling on a troop train bringing federal soldiers from Fort Laramie, Wyoming, to Chicago to quell any further disturbance. It took several days for the train to reach the city, long enough for the brothers to decide that Chicago needed its own federal military post. They knew exactly where it should be located too–along the lakeshore just south of Lake Forest, where John, the dry-goods king, and C.B., the senator, both lived. A post at that site would provide ready access to Chicago and, in a worst-case situation, would act as a barrier between Lake Forest and the city’s rabble. In the aftermath of Haymarket, they formed a committee with other business leaders, raised money, found land donors, and offered the government a deal it couldn’t refuse: 632 acres for $10. The first soldiers arrived at Camp Highwood–soon renamed Fort Sheridan–the next year, a few days before the Haymarket defendants were scheduled to be hung.
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Chicago Architecture Foundation docent Benita Myles, who will lead a two-hour walk through the cemetery this weekend, says it’s not what you would call grand. “If you seek the monuments of these families you’ll have to look at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, or Rush Presbyterian, or Lake Forest College,” she says. “This is a beautiful cemetery, laid out around ravines and the lake, but it’s more”–she searches, her eye passing over the familiar names: Swift, Wacker, Ryerson, Jehlke, Pullman, Donnelley, Dick–“humble.” Even so, 11 families have mausoleums here and two family plots are marked with soaring obelisks. The largest, a red granite finger jutting skyward, belongs to the Farwells.
