Here's what to expect when you visit. Since the s, we have been a fixture in the community. Follow our story from then to now. You can download a map of the building to help you find your way around, or take a closer look at our Kids Room.
Postal Service in Starting in , the library occupied parts of various buildings along Oakton Street. The current location opened in and has won awards from the American Institute of Architects and the American Library Association.
A dozen or so years later, he built a log cabin just northwest of the intersection of Lincoln Avenue and Gross Point Road, near the current western border of the village of Skokie. Until his death in , Meyer earned his living by hunting and farming the land around his cabin and by cutting wooden wagon wheel spokes which were sold in Chicago. The cabin believed to be the one built by Meyer during the s has been preserved.
Constructed of large, hand-hewn logs, the cabin stood at its original location for more than a century, although at some point the original logs were hidden under a layer of wooden siding. William Ross became the owners of the cabin in and, for a time, used it as a garage.
William Ross, whose ancestors had settled in Morton Grove in , was interested enough in local history to restore the structure to its original appearance when he removed the added siding in the s. Deeded to the village of Skokie in by Paul A.
Jones, the historic cabin was moved to Floral Avenue in , where it was further restored by T. Hatzold and Associates. The versatile Emerson moved to an within the present boundries of Skokie in He had planned on settling in Evanston, but decided that the area would never amount to anything. So he traveled one-half mile west and settled near the present intersection of Church Street and East Prairie Road. Born in New York in , Emerson traveled west on canal and on foot, reaching Chicago in Although he is said to have regarded the fledgling city as little more than a mudhole, he immediately entered the milk business there.
When California gold fever struck in , Emerson spent four months traveling overland to the west coast. When he decided to return to Illinois, he found that the money had been stolen. As a result, he chose to remain another two years in the hope of regaining his lost fortune. He finally headed back east four years after his original departure.
Back in the environs of Skokie, he laid out one of the major streets of the area, known to this day as Emerson Street. He continued to reside there until his death in at the age of Samuel Meyer, son of pioneers Nicholas and Elizabeth Meyer, recorded his early observations and passed them along by word of mouth. They were eventually paraphrased in the mids by Bertha M. Rosche, a village librarian. He described the beautiful hardwood forests and how pigs roamed at large in them fattening on acorns.
The rendered lard sold for three cents a pound! As many as fifteen deer hung at one time from the rafters of the barn. He told, also, of his closest early neighbors: Samuel E. Ferris, the first permanent settler in Morton Grove who came in ; toward Gross Point, Lyman Butterfield; and two miles or so east, Schneider and Huffmeyer, the first two men on East Prairie. To the south, of course, was Chicago, which by now had more than a thousand residents.
But the mile journey to the fledgling city was an arduous one, made difficult by streams to be forded, fallen timbers, tangled prairie grass and sometimes impenetrable swamps. Even the two principal routes to Chicago, which eventually became Lincoln and Milwaukee Avenues, were often made nearly impassable by rain or snow.
The natural barriers kept traffic and trade between Chicago and the Skokie area to a minimum. And of what has been preserved, much is vague. In the description of Niles Centre in History of Cook County, Illinois, published in by Alfred Andreas, for example, the author notes that a blacksmith shop was opened in the settlement in After Samuel Ferris, the largest landowner in the section, owning acres, was William Butler, who owned acres.
Nicholas Meyer had They built and lived inthe famous log cabin in the mids. Following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in , the nations of Austria and Prussia fought sporadically for control of the independent German states around them.
By , almost all of these states were aligned with Prussia although many of the local citizens were opposed to Prussian authority. Perhaps fueled in part by the French Revolution of , which inspired widespread hope for political and economic power among commoners on the European continent, a series of rebellions took place in a number of German states.
Adding to the political and military turmoil in Germany was the failure in of the entire potato crop, leading to widespread famine. And so, beginning in the early ls, large numbers of Germans began to emigrate, many coming to America and the migration continued for decades. For German immigrants, especially farmers, the land north of Chicago held a number of attractions.
Sparsely settled, land was cheap and fertile. Rich soil deposited and flattened by the Wisconsin Glacier made farming, even on previously untilled land, relatively easy. Congress in and begun in , was finally completed in the spring of For Chicago area farmers, it meant that vast new markets in the Mississippi Valley could now be reached with inexpensive transportation by barge.
Transportation to the east was already assured by the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal. One of the earliest Prussian immigrants to Niles Township was Dr. Theodore Hoffman, who arrived in the area in For nearly two decades, Doctor Hoffman made house calls on horseback, ending the practice in when he moved to Chicago. Louise Klehm graduated from medical school in , interned at Jane Addams' Hull House, studied surgery in Europe, and returned to Skokie to practice medicine.
Take a deep dive into local history by exploring primary sources from the ss created by Niles Township leaders, ranging from early township meetings, property tax assessments, and school expenses to the construction of roads and ditches essential for a rapidly growing population.
Explore more than artifacts detailing the history of the village's fire department, including photos of:. Watch and listen to interviews with Skokie residents that capture some of the history and daily life of our village. The Skokie History Project contains a broad sample of historical materials relating to Skokie including:. Created to commemorate Skokie's centennial in , this online version reproduces the full-text of the paper volume also available at the library. Look through photos and handwritten messages to the future from our Solar Eclipse viewing party on August 21, North suburban and Chicago Telephone Directories View telephone books from Library of Congress online covering the north suburbs from Search Skokie obituaries from to the present.
Full-text obituaries are available starting with March To ensure that young minds continue to learn these lessons, the organization successfully secured the passage of the Holocaust Education Mandate, making Illinois the first state to require Holocaust Education in public schools. In , the organization was again influential in expanding this mandate; the Holocaust and Genocide Education Mandate now requires Illinois schools to teach about all genocides.
As the second largest Holocaust museum in the United States, Illinois Holocaust Museum not only honors the memory of the millions who were murdered during the Holocaust, but salutes the courage and resilience of Survivors.
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