August 18 is Marshall Field’s Birthday so Arthur Miller’s Art Class will be about Marshall Fields relationship with Lake Forest

Show Notes:

LF has been the home of Marshall Field 5th for many years and now a daughter has a weekend house here as well, a rehabilitated 1911 Shaw mansion.

Marshall Field, I died after a Jan. 1, 1905 or 1906 golf game on the Chicago area, catching a bad cold a third of a century before antibiotics. P.D. Armour had died the same way playing outside with his grandkids five or so years earlier. After Field died, John G. Shedd took over as the second president of the firm, continuing to grow it, including working personally with Edward H. Bennett ca. 1907 on the Walnut Room, with Bennett’s design.  Shedd died in the late 1920s, having given LF lakefront homes to two daughters, Mrs. Schweppe on Mayflower and Mrs. Reed, later Keith. Mrs. Reed rebuilt the garden and house, the latter with David Adler. Mrs. Reed also built an indoor tennis court and adjacent living quarters, where they lived while the 1931 Adler house was built. The two sisters donated the 1931 LF Library, in the same cruciform plan as their father’s late 1920s Aquarium, Chicago. When wings were added in 1978, Mrs. Reed’s son, John Sheed Reed, was the donor; he was chair of the Santa Fe RR, then headquartered in Chicago.

Field I had been planning to build a museum downtown for 1893 fair anthropology artifacts, etc. his nephew, Stanley Field, in the cold golf party, inherited the job of creating the museum. After court losses over putting the museum in Grant Park, they created new landfill south of the grant Park landfill, from coal ashes from the Loop, hand shoveled, and built the building, which opened in 1921. Field also built a Lake Bluff lakefront home at the end of today’s Lakeland Rd.

One of the first branch stores of Fields was in the west building facing the park in Market Square, 1931, eventually expanding to take over the whole building. The upstairs by the 1970s was women’s dresses and sportswear. The basement sold linens, etc., and the main floor accessories, cosmetics, and a few men’s clothes. The malls, with a bigger Fields at Hawthorne, cut into that trade in Market Square. By 2006 the Fields successor company, Macy’s, closed most of the store, though kept the cosmetics business as Blu Mercury.

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