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Clarke House Museum - History
Henry B. Clarke and his wife Caroline moved to Chicago from New York State. They built a comfortable house at what would now be approximately 1700 S. Michigan Avenue, in 1836, a year before Chicago was incorporated as a city. At that time, the area was south of Chicago’s town limits and mostly unsettled — family members could see the campfires of Native Americans in the distance — but the City quickly grew and incorporated the area. In 1872, the Clarke family sold the house to the Chrimes family [link to Other Owners], who had the house moved to 4526 South Wabash Avenue. Bishop Louis Henry Ford and the St. Paul Church of God, in Christ bought the house in 1941 and used the house at various times for offices, schoolrooms, social events, and the parsonage.
In the early 1970s, the City of Chicago, began negotiating with the church to buy the house. In 1977, the 120-ton Clarke House was moved more than four miles north to a location in the Prairie Avenue Historic District. During the move, the house had to be moved over ‘L’ tracks that had been built since its first move across the city. On December 4, 1977, hydraulic jacks lifted the house into air along one side of the track. The house was pulled across the track onto another set of jacks that would lower it, but the bitterly cold weather had frozen the equipment. The house remained in the air until December 18, when the weather warmed enough to thaw the jacks.
The house would be restored and turned into a museum to show what life was like for a middle-class family in Chicago during the city’s formative years before the Civil War. It was restored to its 1850-1860 state, rather than its 1836 form, because the later years were when Mrs. Clarke had the resources to fulfill and update the plans she and Mr. Clarke had made for their home, and did things such as adding the cupola.
In the late 1970s, little specific information about Clarke House was available. Many of the decisions about the exterior had to be based on what was usual in similar homes of the 1830s. By 2004, when normal repairs and maintenance were necessary, technology not available in the 1970s had revealed some unexpected choices in the original design and early years of Clarke House. They were incorporated into the work, dramatically changing the exterior of the house: a portico like the one on the east entrance of the house was restored to the west entrance, and the color of the house was changed.
For more detailed information and photos of these chapters in the life of the Clarke House, see the pages below.
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