This is my 100th column on Kankakee history topics to appear in the Daily Journal.
The series began with a suggestion from Journal editor Mike Frey that I might write an occasional column about people, places and things from our community’s past. The first of these stories appeared just more than two years ago, on June 18, 2016, when I described the “vanished towns” of Judson, Aylmer, and Clarke City. By Sept. 3 of that year, when the story of Kankakee’s elegant Hotel Riverview appeared, the column had become a regular feature of the newspaper’s weekend edition.
At this milestone, it seems appropriate to pay tribute to those who preceded me in telling Kankakee County’s story in historical columns that appeared in the Journal and its predecessor newspapers. Four men — Burt Burroughs, Harold Simmons, T.J. Lindsay and Vic Johnson — have been regular columnists at various times dating back almost a full century.
Burroughs was the writer who began it all, relating “legends and tales” of the community’s past in the Kankakee Republican-News in the early 1920s. Much of Burroughs’ material was based on first-hand accounts he heard from old settlers (he was born in 1862 in the small settlement of Sugar Island, and began a career as a newspaper reporter in the early 1880s). In addition to his newspaper columns, Burroughs authored two books of local history, “Homeland on the Kankakee,” and “Tales of an Old Border Town.”
He was followed, in later years, by Harold Simmons, whose weekly history columns appeared in the Kankakee Republican and its successor, the Daily Journal. Under the title, “Up ’til Now,” Simmons wrote literally hundreds of stories recording happenings in local history. He often gathered material by paging through the large bound volumes of local newspapers dating back to the county’s founding in 1853. Often, his column would focus on a single event, such as the fire that destroyed the first county courthouse in 1873.
From time to time, however, he would reprint the happenings in Kankakee from a specific day’s newspaper. These columns might include serious topics (actions of the city council, a downtown fire, a new business opening), as well as the minor events of everyday life (“Mr. and Mrs. Abram Smith, of Chicago, are visiting the home of their son, Lester, in Kankakee this week.” or “The Waldron nine defeated the Momence baseball team by a score of 4 to 2 on Thursday.”).
The next “Up ’til Now” columnist, T.J. Lindsay, of Manteno, wrote on a variety of local history topics from 1975 to 1985. Many of his columns dealt with events or people first described by Burroughs or Simmons, but were supplemented with original research to provide new information. Lindsay was very active with the Kankakee County Historical Society, and operated a publishing business that produced books on local historical topics.
For a dozen years, from 1990 to 2002, Bradley resident Vic Johnson carried on the “Up ’til Now” tradition. A dedicated and superb researcher, he concentrated upon the roots of our county’s history: the Prairie Band of Pottawatomi Indians who lived here before the earliest settlers arrived, and those early settlers from French Canada and the Eastern states. In the more than 500 columns Vic wrote, readers enjoyed learning previously unknown facts about the origins of this community. In addition to writing the columns (and creating many original line drawings to illustrate them), the prolific author also produced several books: an annotated volume of Burt Burroughs’ columns entitled “Kankakee’s Earliest Pioneer Settlers,” “An Illustrated Sesquicentennial Reader (Kankakee County, 1853-2003),” and “Bradley: A Centennial History of a Prairie Boomtown.”
From Burt Burroughs to this writer, we are all basically storytellers: we take the facts of local history and try to make them “come alive” for our readers. For those facts, the raw material of history, we depend upon another set of storytellers: the men and women journalists of our local newspapers. Their day-by-day recording of community events through more than one-and one-half centuries has provided us with the facts we need to produce our history columns.
Through the years, the city of Kankakee has been home to a number of weekly and daily newspapers. When was the first Kankakee newspaper published?
<strong>Answer:</strong> On Aug. 29, 1853, editor and publisher Augustine Chester cranked up his hand-operated printing press and produced the first issue of the Kankakee Gazette. Since the building that would serve as the newspaper's office was still under construction, that first newspaper was printed out-of-doors, in the shade of a large tree that stood near the intersection of Court Street and Schuyler Avenue.