100 Years of The Prairie Club

How “Saturday Afternoon Walking Trips” became a force for conservation

by Ryan Chew

A Century ago this spring, a spirited group of Chicagoans formed a club with a purpose so unusual that it would help remake society, politics, and the very landscape of our region. They wanted to hike.

They formed what would soon become the Prairie Club, with the purpose of exploring the wild lands around the city. The very idea of hiking for recreation was so novel in 1908 that the word required quotes, like another term they would help popularize — “camping out.” Initially they shied away from the arduous, somewhat military sound of “hiking” and called their outings the Saturday Afternoon Walking Trips. Still more radically, their trips would be coed, led by young men and women.

One of the early leaders of the group was Amalie Hofer, the energetic editor of The Kindergarten Magazine, which promoted the idea that children should be taught in natural settings, and a founder of the Playground Association of Chicago, where Jane Addams served on the board with her. Though women had not yet gained full voting rights in Illinois, they had been voting in school elections since 1881. Hofer was staking out new political ground for women, arguing that their help was needed to conserve the outdoors as a learning environment for children.

Hofer found an ally at the Playground Association, landscape architect Jens Jensen, described by one of his biographers as a “tall, dashing European” in white suit and a silk scarf, “loudly extolling the virtues of outdoor excursions.” With his friend Dwight Perkins, Jensen had written an influential report calling for a “system of forest parks and country pleasure roads,” the vision for what became the forest preserves. But Jensen despaired for his idea. Having lost and regained his position as superintendent of the West Side Parks Commission, Jensen knew he needed to broaden the political base for an expanded network of parks and preserves. In the spring of 1908, a transplanted easterner who had led hikes in Maine suggested that the Playground Association sponsor weekly walks in the country.

Hofer and Jensen seized on the idea and helped to pull together the first walk in April. The next week’s trip, to Mount Forest Island, as the highlands near Palos were called, drew 120 walkers, and by late May, Jensen and Hofer were jointly leading a brigade of 400 to the Indiana Dunes, many of them teachers, suffragettes, and educated young women pulled in by Hofer.

In an age of exclusive social clubs, the walkers invited one and all to walk but restricted membership to those sponsored by other members. This was a social elite hoping to popularize hiking and conservation, but they wanted to hike with people they liked. Not an open club by today’s standards, they did develop a reputation for a democratic, welcoming spirit.

The celebrity of leaders like Jensen, Hofer, Perkins, University of Chicago biologist Henry Cowles, and the quirky appeal of a few hundred mostly single men and women tramping through wet prairies attracted media attention, not all of it friendly. Cynical Tribune reporters found ways to suggest that young women were out of place outdoors, and most stories in the early months included anecdotes about women falling in creeks and men gallantly rescuing them. The focus soon turned to practicalities. At barbed wire fences, someone would push the wire down for men to step over, but women in long skirts needed another option, and so the wire would be held up for them to roll under. Club bulletins reminded women not to wear tall hats that might be blown away or snagged. It only took a few torn skirts before someone came up with a zip-away skirt bottom, allowing a quick change to appropriate hiking dress at the trailhead, and a modest step toward casual modern fashion.

Hiking presented challenges to everyone in those days. To leave the city, there were no buses, few cars, and a confusing rail system of 18 lines departing from nine different downtown stations. There were no established trails, nor even public lands to hike. Trip leaders contacted landowners ahead of time for permission. Farmers were happy to let the cream of Chicago society hike their cow-pie strewn pastures as long as it didn’t require moving the cattle, so confrontations with bulls were fairly common.

The walks were vigorous. On a typical trip on Thanksgiving Day 1912, the group left the train station in Des Plaines in the morning, walked to Wheeling for “dinner” and then made it to Shermerville, now part of Northbrook, for supper. While it’s 12 miles by road today, they traveled more than 20 by riverside trail and cowpath. That summer, the Tribune praised two women from the club as champion “hikers” after they walked to Milwaukee. The club held to its weekly schedule straight through the winter. One bitter December, two members even skated 22 miles on the frozen Des Plaines River, traveling from Libertyville to “a point near Chicago” where they caught a train home.

With many walkers coming weekly for daylong hikes, strong bonds developed. Artists brought sketchpads, scientists lectured at breaks, and musicians and actors performed “masques” and less formal entertainments in the evening after trips. From the membership list in the Tribune in 1912, with its small majority of young women, one gets the sense of a dating club for active, intelligent young people. Directors Gertrude Simonds and William Walker were among the many who got married after meeting in the club. One couple held their wedding at the Dunes, in front of a party clad in hiking khaki, exchanging rings engraved with a dune scene, according to Cathy Maloney, author of the photographic history The Prairie Club of Chicago. The parents of current club president Leo Krusack met in the club, which his father joined as a Czech immigrant looking for ways to get outside the city.

While the club was wide-ranging, most early routes were nearby — to the Palos area, along the Des Plaines and Chicago Rivers, over the bluffs and ravines of the North Shore, and around what is now the Skokie Lagoons, then a marsh. Almost every weekend, they explored some portion of Jensen’s “forest parks,” building the constituency that would be needed for the expensive proposal. By 1911, the club had outgrown the Playground Association, and decided to break off. Jensen suggested a name, the Prairie Club, and was named a director and head of the conservation committee. In 1913, their efforts succeeded with passage of the Forest Preserve Act. Perkins was appointed chair of the planning committee for the Forest Preserve District, selecting promising parcels quietly so the owners wouldn’t raise the price.

With passage of the act, the Prairie Club passed to a new phase. While the local walks remained the most popular activity, canoeists paddled further afield, groups went to Canada each summer, and women of the club scaled 15 western peaks. In 1912, a few members went “camping out” in the Dunes, and by 1914, the club built a beach house there. Former club member Stephen Mather was now director of the young National Park Service, and club members began to heavily promote the diverse dunescape as the premier Midwestern natural wonder, worthy of federal protection.

Club members promoted the Dunes as the Midwest’s premier natural wonder, worthy of federal protection.

Shortly after the first Dunes walk back in 1908, two other momentous milestones passed. The South Shore train line was completed in early July, vastly simplifying a trip from Chicago to the Dunes. Its primary purpose was to serve the new city of Gary, where the first ore boat unloaded its cargo at the immense US Steel factory three weeks later. A trip to the pristine shifting sands now led through a landscape of sooty, low-hanging smoke, violent jets of steam, and fires stoked hotter than any before to smelt steel in unimagined quantities. Dunes were leveled to build the factory city, and removals continued to create industrial land and to provide sand for the Ball jar factory in Kokomo.

Catherine Mitchell took over the conservation committee from Jensen and proclaimed a new club goal. They would save the Dunes. She began a series of creative publicity efforts to make it happen. Her conservation column provided regular updates on lobbying efforts, scientific findings, and on the attention the campaign was getting, including a National Geographic article featuring photos by club members Harriet Mertzky and Frances Lafollette. Her committee created “posterettes,” decorative publicity stamps, handing out more than 100,000 “Save the Dunes” stamps in 1917. Henry Cowles lectured on the biodiversity of the Dunes, and Mitchell created a public exhibit that was mounted at Marshall Field’s and taken to conferences of women’s clubs around the Midwest to build support for a park.

In 1913, the club mounted a “masque,” an allegorical play about the history and value of the Dunes, to an audience of about 500 people. Attendance grew at two later masques, and the campaign for a Dunes National Park reached a climax when 40,000 people came to see “The Dunes Under Four Flags,” held at the Jensen blowout in 1917. In addition to the Prairie Club, sponsors included some 30 women’s clubs from around the Midwest. Trains left Chicago and Pullman every few minutes, and parking was arranged for 5,000 cars. There were more than 1,000 participants, including dancers representing the different cultures that had lived near the dunes. The pressure was succeeding. Mather came to hold hearings on a Dunes park, and nearly broke down with emotion.

But the Dunes campaign fell victim to a much larger one — the war in Europe. In 1918, the ad for a small Dunes masque ran alongside an ad from the club’s “Loyalty Committee,” seeking volunteers for “history’s greatest walking trip,” and the Tribune recommended sardonically that the club be enlisted en masse. War spirit overwhelmed other considerations, leaving Mitchell to ask in the bulletin whether “all the conservation work of years is to be spoiled in a few months?” Large grazing interests were using the war as an excuse to pasture animals in the western parks, and the idea of expanding protected areas was dead for the time.

After the war, the Dunes campaign narrowed its horizons, focusing on convincing the State of Indiana to create a park. Mitchell took the Dunes exhibit to Kokomo and Indianapolis. In the summer of 1922, the club hosted 125 leaders of the Federated Women’s Clubs, and 30 Indiana legislators came a few weeks later. In 1923, Indiana voted to create the Dunes State Park, and club members agreed to provide the land they had purchased there as one of the core areas.

With that, the activist phase of the club as the leading conservation group in Chicago ended. Mitchell gave up the conservation committee, but continued to support conservation, signing a public ad for a Lake Calumet Bird Sanctuary in 1938, the year of her death at age 55. The Prairie Club remained prominent as an outdoor club until another World War reemphasized the martial aspects of hiking. The club lost its weekly Tribune listings to the Hale America club, a “hiking movement to toughen up America.” It would fall to another group led by talented women, Dorothy Buell’s Save the Dunes Council, to finally bring the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore into the National Park system.

Today, the Prairie Club marches on as a social group with a social conscience. Members share access to natural land the club owns and are rebuilding their conservation efforts. They celebrate their 100th anniversary this March with a new partnership, serving as docents at the Garfield Park Conservatory (designed by Jensen) for a gardening program for local children. And they still enjoy the Midwestern landscape that the club was so influential in helping to preserve.

Learn more about the Prairie Club here. Thanks to the Westchester Township History Museum for access to their archives. Photos reprinted with permission from The Prairie Club of Chicago, by Cathy Jean Maloney. Available from Arcadia Publishing.

Related articles:
Jens Jensen: Friend of the Native Landscape, CW Spring 2001
Conservation, Chicago Style, CW Winter 2008