Rev. Jeremiah Porter, Chicago's First Moral Crusader

Because Chicago has always the country's first city in crime, it has also witnessed countless righteous uprisings against the underworld. The city's first battle between religion and vice was centered here, on the Southwest corner of Clark and Lake, at the First Presbyterian Church.

In 1833, Chicago's population numbered around 300, the majority of whom were soldiers stationed at Fort Dearborn, French trappers, and "civilized" Potowotomie Indians. As in most frontier towns, the male-to-female ratio was far from one, and men with extra time on their hands and no female companionship will seek excitement in countless ways. Prostitution was an early growth industry on Wells Street, booze flowed freely, and horseracing was a perennial sport. Cards and dice games were also popular, and the city's proximity to the Mississippi River brought a wide range of card sharks and confidence men through on a regular basis.

To make those games of chance more interesting, gambling became a common occupation of frontier Chicagoans, especially during the long, cold winters. It was after one such winter in May, 1833 that the Revered Jeremiah Porter arrived in town. Religion was not a particularly important part of the city's life up to that time, although one tireless believer, Philo Carpenter, had begun a Methodist Sunday School with 15 pupils earlier that year.

Rev. Porter was born in Massachusetts in 1804, and had graduated Williams College in that state at age 21 before matriculating at Andover Theological Seminary. By 1831, he was stationed at Ft. Brady in Sault Ste. Marie, ministering to the soldiers on the wild frontier. After the Black Hawk War of 1832 in Chicago, in which 72 soldiers were killed, a regiment from Ft. Brady was transferred to Fort Dearborn in May, 1833, to replace those lost and to relieve others. Rev. Porter took the opportunity to travel with the regiment.

Porter was apparently an exceptional minister, and had converted all of the Ft. Brady soldiers save one lone couple, who somehow managed to resist. When he arrived in Chicago, he was utterly dismayed at the unchristian standards of the city. He wrote in his journal that his first sight upon alighting in Illinois was a group of Indians playing cards in front of a primitive saloon, with a group of soldiers looking on.

Rev. Porter held his first services almost immediately upon arrival, ministering to 26 members in the carpenter shop at Fort Dearborn. As the Reverend described it later, "I gathered the first church ever formed in Chicago since 'the morning stars first sang together.'"

Again, the Reverend's talents grew the little group to 67 members within a year, and demand began to be made for a formal church edifice. A site was selected on the Southwest corner of Clark and Lake Streets, which at the time was nothing but prairie bog, quite a distance from the first sprouts of the city huddled around the Fort. Members complained that the church was remote and inaccessible, but the foresighted minister made plans to build a wooden frame structure on the lot, at a cost of $316. First, however, a group of squatters who had erected shanties had to be cleared, which they were in the dead of night, pulled down by a team of horses driven by church members, which dragged the squatters' residences several blocks west on Lake Street.

By winter, the church was built, and the group of believers, thinking that Yankee Congregationalism would be unsuited to the new territory of Illinois, founded their congregation as the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago. The dedication took place on January 4, 1834, when the temperature was 24 below zero. In his diary, Rev. Porter wrote of that day:

Many witnessed the solemn scene, but a majority were females, as two vessels were unloading in the harbor, causing a wanton abuse of the holy day by many who sin against clear light, and abuse divine compassion and love.

One of the soldiers' children who attended church at First Presbyterian was the future Mrs. Henry Durant, founder of Wellesley College.

All the time, Reverend Porter's assault on gambling and other vice continued. Records of the church include the following:

12/30/33: William Cole, having used intoxicating drink several times during the past year, so as to be sensibly affected to the wounding of his own peace and the cause of Christ, was called before the session this evening and made full confession, promising to reform.

9/5/34: Brothers William Cole and John Guy, having been laboured with by the pastor and one of the elders for drinking ardent spirits, acknowledge their sin and express a determination to reform.

12/13/34: The church committee visited Mrs. Boyer and her daughter and learned that both of them attended a party where dancing had been introduced. Both confessed their error.

Reverend Porter led city committees to eradicate gambling, and focused his attention on the problem in the summer of 1835, which he called a "season of prayer," with many rousing sermons. Responding to increased public pressure, several gambling sports were imprisoned, though none for very long.

Growing a church was not the Reverend's only activity in Chicago at the time. About the same time Porter arrived in Chicago, a young teacher, Eliza Chappell, came to the city and opened the first school for girls, space for which she rented from the Presbyterians for the sum of $9 per month (given the lack of suitable buildings in the city, the church was able to price discriminate heavily -- they rented the building for county court at the much higher rate of $30 per month).

Close quarters between the young teacher and the man of the cloth blossomed into romance, and in 1835, Chappell and Porter were married. Even with a godly wife at his side, Chicagoans' taste for vice was too much for Reverend Porter, and in late 1835, he accepted a position at a church in Peoria, leaving the church he started and the crusades he founded.

Chicago's wickedness grew over the years, and so the city became fertile ground for religious revivalists. Billy Graham, Billy Sunday, and William Moody all got their starts in Chicago. Gipsy Smith and Mother Cabrini thrived there, as have Louis Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson.

As for the Reverend Jeremiah Porter, his career after Peoria took him to Green Bay, Wis. for eighteen years, followed by a return to Chicago, where he ministered to a Congregationalist church on the west side for many years before retiring to California. During the Civil War, Rev. Porter traveled with the Illinois First Artillery Regiment as company chaplain (one of the Reverend's nine children was a member of the regiment).

However, Chicago was always his home; when Eliza Porter passed in 1888, her remains were brought by train across the country back to Chicago for burial. The old crusader himself remained active, giving lectures to large crowds up until just before his own passing in 1893.

The First Presbyterian congregation held together through the years, though they quickly outgrew the old wooden shack at Clark and Lake. The issue of slavery tore the congregation into three parts: in 1842, a pro-slavery contingent splintered to found Second Presbyterian, and in 1851, another group left to found a radical abolishonist Congregationalist church.

The church slowly shifted its focus to the city's Southside, eventually settling on 64th and Kimbark in the Woodlawn neighborhood in the 1920s. During the 1960s, the church was investigated by federal authorities for links with Jeff Fort and the Blackstone Rangers. Despite its troubles, the congregation of First Presbyterian still holds services today, attracting Chicagoans away from the lures of easy pleasure and vice, 176 years after Reverend Porter first began the crusade.

Lincoln's Coffeehouse

No, not that Lincoln. In the summer of 1835, Solomon Lincoln, who had up until then made his living principally as a tailor in Chicago, opened the city's first saloon at this location on the corner of Lake and LaSalle Streets, known as Lincoln's Coffeehouse. The coffeehouse quickly became the most popular drinking establishment in the city, which wasn't saying much since Chicago's population was under 4,000 people at the time.

Unlike the tattooed and pierced barista at your nearby Starbucks, Lincoln was a noted hunter of wolves, which at that time were a persistent nuisance in Chicago. In fact, the area around the confluence of the Chicago River, just three blocks west of the Coffeehouse, was known in the 19th century as "Wolf Point," for the ubiquitous animals. In Gem of the Prairie, Herbert Asbury quotes an "old-time Chicagoan" as saying: "Many a time, I have seen Mr. Lincoln mount his horse when a wolf was in sight on the prairie toward Bridgeport, and within an hour's time come in with the wolf, having run him down with his horse and taken his life with a hatchet or other weapon."

No wolf sightings at this Bank of America, which currently occupies the site.

Tremont House Hotel

The Tremont House Hotel, first built at the corner of Dearborn and Lake in 1833, burned and was rebuilt three times. During the 1860s, when all the buildings in Chicago were lifted several feet out of the mud, the Tremont was the largest building in town, and resisted all efforts in lifting her foundations, until George Pullman, later of train car fame, managed to engineer the feat.

The second floor of the first Tremont House became home to Chicago's first billiard hall in 1836, and was the favorite hangout of an itinerant criminal named John Stone, who in 1840 became the city's first executed criminal, having been convicted of the rape and murder of a Mrs. Lucretia Thompson.

In 1862, a heavily-inebriated Cap Hyman, the famous Hairtrigger Block gambler and shotgun-spouse of Gentle Annie Stafford, invaded the lobby of the third Tremont house and used his pistol to hold everyone in the hotel hostage for an hour, until police reinforcements arrived.

The fourth and final Tremont was also the site of a shooting in January 27, 1897, according to the New York Times on that date:

D.B. Chandler of New York, agent for the Colgate Soap Company, was shot in the left hand and kicked and beaten until unconscious in Room 203 of the Tremont House at 4:45 o'clock this morning.

According to Chandler's story, he was assaulted by Edward Kirkland, manager of the house, Smiley Corbett, an ex-deputy coroner, and B. McIperson, a former ticket broker. "Early in the evening," said Mr. Chandler, "I went to the Schiller Cafe, where I remained until after midnight. Kirkland, Corbett, and McIperson were also in the cafe. They insulted me several times, and I requested them to stop. At last, I left the cafe and returned to my room. As I was winding my watch, I heard John Bruno, the night watchman, say: 'Open the door.'. I was about to do this when I heard some other person say: 'Break it in.'

The door was finally broken in, and I ran into the bathroom. Then somebody fired three shots through the door, one bullet striking me in the left hand and the others barely missing me. Then the men burst in the door. They jumped on me and kicked me on the head and body until I fainted.

The Times story concludes, "The hotel proprietor will discharge manager Kirkland," which seems awfully unfair, as only one of the bullets hit the guest.

The site of the original Tremont is now the "Theatre District Self Park," a twelve-story parking garage built in 1987, catering to the nearby Randolph Street theaters.

South Wells St.

Wells St. was Chicago's oldest and longest-running red-light district. Prostitution was likely present in Chicago even before the city's incorporation in 1833, as suggested by the fact that the Board of Trustees imposed a $25 fine on known brothel owners in 1835. In 1838, record was made of complaints that several houses of ill-repute were operating openly on S. Wells St., between Jackson and Congress (originally known as First St.). The location pictured above is at Van Buren and Wells, halfway between Jackson and Congress.

The area became so infamous that, between 1870 and 1900, the street was renamed First Avenue out of respect to the memory and family of Billy Wells, a noted Indian fighter of the War of 1812, after whom the street had been named. Later, the western tracks of the downtown Loop were located above Wells, no doubt in part due to the lack of organized civic opposition leadership among Wells' entrepreneurs.

The street continued to be a skid row up until the 1980s, and a few hints of its former seediness remain here and there, mostly ignored by the businessmen on their lunch breaks and upscale condo-dwellers who populate the area today.

The location pictured below is Wells St., between Adams and Quincy, once the home to a group of Black-owned brothels collectively known as Shinbone Alley. Today, it holds a parking garage for the Sears Tower, located one block west.