Grosse Pointe, Grosse Point, Gross Point

Most residents of Evanston and nearby suburbs are aware of the diagonal road called Gross Point. Why, many wonder, does that road not go to the only other area feature similarly named, the landmark Grosse Point lighthouse at Central and Sheridan in Evanston? Here is the history.

Grosse Pointe originally was the name given by French explorers and mapmakers to the headland¹ where the Grosse Point Light now stands. But the term, with or without one or both of the final e’s, was subsequently used to refer to the large, swampy, generally unpopulated region for miles around that “point,”² between the lake and the “Skoky” marsh, with indefinite borders, taking in half the Chicago lakefront and half of the North Shore.³ The log house near present-day Rogers Avenue and Sheridan Road in Chicago built by Philip Rogers, after whom both the avenue and Rogers Park were named, was said to be “located in Gross Point,”⁴ but so was the log house of Antoine Ouilmette near present-day Lake Avenue and the lakeshore in Wilmette.⁵ In 1832, Major William Whistler and troops, enroute to garrison the rebuilt Fort Dearborn, allegedly camped in “Grosse Point, near where Evanston now stands.”⁶ Right: Detail from “Railroad and County Map of Illinois Showing Its Internal Improvements,” (Ensign, Bridgman, & Fanning, New York, 1854). “Dutchman’s Point” was where Niles is now.
    
In 1843, well before Evanston was founded, a German Catholic Church,⁷ St. Joseph’s, was established in the Gross Point region near modern-day Lake and Ridge in western Wilmette, as was a tavern. A small farming settlement grew up around them.

By 1846, the overall area had sufficient mail incoming and outgoing that the federal postal service established a weekly mail station with the name Gross Point, and appointed a postmaster, George Huntoon, a landholder in what is now south Evanston. Huntoon set up a pigeonhole desk at the Ten-Mile House establishment of Edward Mulford⁸ across the road from Mulford’s mansion, “Oakton,” near the present-day Evanston Hospital. That Gross Point post office soon would move a little further north to the small, rustic Buck-Eye Hotel near present-day Ridge and Grant in Evanston when its proprietor, David W. Burroughs, became postmaster.

By April, 1850, the survey township in which the St. Joseph’s cluster of homes and farms and businesses was located had sufficient population to organize as the civil Township of New Trier, named after a German town Trier. Many locals in New Trier had emigrated from that area.⁹ One week later, what was left of Gross Point south of New Trier, down to what is now Irving Park Road in Chicago, followed suit by organizing as Ridgeville Township.¹⁰ At that point, Gross Point endured as a place name only for the unincorporated settlement around St. Joseph’s.

A quarter-century later, in 1874, that Gross Point community west of Wilmette finally incorporated as a separate village,¹¹ with boundaries of Ridge Ave. [Wilmette] on the east, Central St. [Evanston] on the south, Locust on the west, and Winnetka Ave. on the north.¹² Alcohol had much to do with this; both New Trier Township and the Village of Wilmette, which incorporated in 1872, had previously followed Evanston by voting to go dry, but the tipplers and brewers of Gross Point, where as many as 15 saloons dotted Ridge Road south of Lake, wanted to keep their own status. Right: Ridge Road, looking south from Lake, when Gross Point was a village. With the national passage of Prohibition in January, 1919, however, the Gross Pointers lost that option, and village finances, dependent on the “wet trade,” plummeted into the red as taverns and liquor sales shut down. In April, 1919, voters in the Village of Gross Point voted to dissolve municipal government, and become unincorporated.¹³

In April, 1924, voters in Wilmette ousted their incumbents, with the election won by the “Home Party” on a platform primarily opposing expansion of apartment buildings into residential neighborhoods. At the same election, to gain more control over surrounding territory, voters approved a referendum allowing the village of Wilmette to annex most unincorporated portions of what had formerly been the Village of Gross Point.¹⁴
    
Gross Point was a part predecessor to Wilmette, not Evanston. In 1924 and 1926, Evanston did annex two small parcels on its northwest borders, which included almost all of the small remainder of the former Village of Gross Point that had not been annexed by Wilmette, i.e., north of Central and west of Gross Point Rd., where Lovelace Park now is. Back then the area was not residential, but was dominated by a former quarry that had filled with water. Right: Detail from a 1928 U.S. Geological Service topographical map.

After that, the village faded into dwindling memory, honored mainly by the name of the road that angles from southwest to northeast, from near Touhy and Caldwell in Niles through Skokie and Evanston to the border of Wilmette. Once in Wilmette, Gross Point Road is called Ridge Road.¹⁵ Although a driver turning east at Central from Gross Point will eventually run smack into the site of the Grosse Point Light, the road was called “Gross Point” not because of the lighthouse, but because it had led to the old German immigrant village of that name. Both the road and the lighthouse trace their name to what the French called the area, but have no other connection.

A park in Skokie is named after the road. The old Gross Point village hall, built in 1896, still stands at 609 Ridge in Wilmette, housing the historical society. Like all such landmarks, it is worth a visit.

NOTES

¹ “Pointe” is French for headland, or a type of promontory; Grosse Pointe or “Big Headland” was the only significant bend in the coastline between Waukegan and the Chicago portage and marked a point where the coast transitioned from bluffs to flatter terrain. French nouns are gendered and “pointe” is feminine, so both “pointe” and the adjective “grosse” properly have a final “e” in French. Unless used differently in a text or current place name, this article uses “Gross Point” as the modern spelling, even if grammatically unfaithful to its roots.

² Andreas, A.T., History of Cook County Illinois from the Earliest Period to the Present Time, (Chicago, 1884) (“Andreas Cook Co.”) at 417, 467. See “Railroad and County Map of Illinois Showing Its Internal Improvements,” (Ensign, Bridgman, & Fanning, New York, 1854). Neither “Ridgeville,” Lake View, or Evanston are shown, only the geographic “Grosse Point” on the lakeshore.

³ Andreas Cook Co. at 417, 467 (voting precinct included everything north of Chicago and east of the Chicago river); Willard, Frances E., A Classic Town: The Story of Evanston by ‘An Old-Timer’ (1891) at 7 (asserting that the term applied to everything north of Graceland Cemetery); Viola Couch Reeling, Evanston, Its Land and Its People (Chicago, Fort Dearborn Chapter D.A.R., 1928) (“Reeling”) at 417 (same); “Wilmette: A Village in the Forest | Cover Shows Shore Growth in 100 Years,” Wilmette Life (Sept. 18, 1947) (“everything north of Chicago”); Village of Wilmette, “Gross Point- Story of the New Trier Germans,” 1 Wilmette Communicator (1976) at 7 (“from Graceland Cemetery in Chicago to County Line Road in Highland Park”)

⁴ Goodspeed, Weston A. & Healy, Daniel D., History of Cook County, Vol II (Goodspeed Hist. Ass’n, Chicago, Ill. 1909) [“Hist. Cook Co. Vol. II”], at 251; Reeling at 144.

⁵ Hurd, Harvey B. et al., eds., Encyclopedia of Ill. & History of Evanston. Vol. II (1906) [“HoE2”], at 35; “North Shore of 1836 Recalled by McDaniel 61 Years Afterwards,” Wilmette Life (Sept. 18, 1947 supp.), p.68.

⁶ Andreas, A.T., History of Chicago from the Earliest Period to the Present Time, Vol. I (Chicago, 1884) (“Andreas Chicago I”), at 120

⁷  “History of Wilmette,” Wilmette History Museum, https://wilmettehistory.org/history-of-wilmette/; Services at St. Joseph’s were in German. “Parish Was Organized for Non-German Catholics,” Wilmette Life (Sept. 18, 1947 supp.), p.14

⁸  Reeling @ 169, 260.

⁹  History of Cook County, Vol II at 262; U.S. Census, Population of Civil Division Less than Counties (1870), at 110

¹⁰  Reeling, at 154, 180, 249; History of Cook County, Vol II at 251-252; U.S. Census, Population of Civil Division Less than Counties (1870), at 110; Kiwanis Club of Evanston, Evanston (1924), at 5; Stephen Bedell Clark, The Lake View Saga (2d printing 1985) [“Lake View Saga”], at 10. Note that Edgewater Historical Society, “Early Andersonville - Ante fire (1871),” https://www.edgewaterhistory.org/ehs/articles/v18-3-2 (2007) dates the organization to 1848; however, the enabling law was not passed until 1849, so this seems in error.

¹¹  “History of Wilmette,” supra; Johnson, EvaAnne, and Wagner, Nancy, “Wilmette & Kenilworth, Illinois | Local History and Genealogy Guide” (Wilmette Pub. Lib., Jun. 2017), https://www.wilmettelibrary.info/sites/default/files/2021-08/WilmetteLoc.... Wilmette sources say September 1874 but Andreas in 1884, naming trustees elected, said March 10, 1874. Andreas Cook Co. at 467.

¹²  “History of Wilmette,” supra. Note that Currey says Gross Point incorporated almost 20 years later, in 1893. J. Seymour Currey, “S.J. Scott Was First Resident of Evanston,” Lake Shore News (Feb. 19, 1914), p.3. However, most sources say 1874, and Gross Point shows on a Rand McNally 1886 map.

¹³ “History of Wilmette,” Wilmette History Museum, https://wilmettehistory.org/history-of-wilmette/

¹⁴  “Call Mass Meeting to Push Home Party,” Wilmette Life (Mar 21, 1924), Wilmette Life, p. 1, https://images.ourontario.ca/Partners/wilmette/WilPL002515077pf_0001.pdf; “Call Citizens to Discussion,” Wilmette Life (Mar 21, 1924), p. 1, https://images.ourontario.ca/Partners/wilmette/WilPL002515077pf_0001.pdf; “Predict Huge Vote Here Tuesday,” Wilmette Life (Apr. 11, 1924), p. 1, https://images.ourontario.ca/Partners/wilmette/WilPL002515090pf_0001.pdf; “No Flats — Annexation Approved,” Wilmette Life (Apr. 18, 1924), p. 1, https://images.ourontario.ca/Partners/wilmette/WilPL002515091pf_0001.pdf

¹⁵  Gross Point Road — Ridge in Wilmette — is on a geological ridge that marks the ancient shoreline of a much larger prehistoric lake.