Appeared in the Spring/Summer 2024 Gazette By Meagan McChesney, WHS Curator We’ve all heard of the Murphy Bed, but did you know that a Winnetka resident created a folding bed forty years before William Murphy patented his design? That inventive Winnetkan was Sanford S. Burr, namesake of our local Burr Avenue. Burr was born in […]

Appeared in the Spring/Summer 2024 Gazette By Carrie Hoza Every year on Memorial Day, the Village of Winnetka takes time to remember its fallen soldiers. After the parade is done and the ceremony ends with the reading of our fallen’s names, Winnetkans move on to enjoy a day of remembrance with barbeques, luncheons, “honey do” […]

Appeared in the Spring/Summer 2024 Gazette By Barry Levenstam In the beginning, western Winnetka was icky. For years, calls to “drain the swamp” were pleas for actual drainage of a real swamp that visited “intermittent flooding, mosquitos, and even smoky peat fires.” Yet western Winnetka remained “icky” until Winnetkan Harold Ickes went to Washington DC […]

Shorter version appeared in the Spring/Summer 2024 Gazette By Duff Peterson Michael Bloomfield was a virtuoso blues and rock musician from Glencoe. He immersed himself in the Chicago Blues at a young age, and took electric guitar playing to a new level. From 1965 to 1967, many considered him the best guitarist in the nation. […]

by Joan Evanich The 1830s Schmidt Burnham Log House sat proudly at its new site on May 6, 2003. The move that day was an exhilarating success, but this was no time for WHS to rest on its laurels. The real work was about to begin in the pursuit to open the longest continuously occupied […]

Bernice Van der Vries, unfamiliar to most Winnetkans today, is one of the Village’s unsung heroes. When she retired from the Illinois House of Representatives in 1955, journalists described her as “the cornerstone of good government” and “one of the hardest working and best known members of the legislature.” She was born in Kansas in […]

2023 marks 100 years since the patent was approved for the very first jungle gym invented by Winnetkan, Sebastian Hinton. Over the last century, the jungle gym’s popularity and reach are practically impossible to calculate. Nearly every child across the world has climbed on, crawled under, or fell off a jungle gym. The very first […]

Appeared in the Spring/Summer 2023 Gazette by Helen Weaver After almost 20 years playing a variety of key roles longtime Winnetka Historical Society Board Member Christine Murdoch has hung up her WHS hat and retired from the board. Christine joined WHS in 2004, after the Schmidt Burnham Log House’s move to the Crow Island woods, […]