2018 Conference

Individual Paper Presentation

By analyzing the preservation of nature in a major metropolitan area, this paper complicates existing accounts of the effects of American conservation on communities living on or near protected lands. With jurisdiction in the county encompassing Chicago, the Forest Preserve District of Cook County today manages 69,000 acres and its leaders began purchasing land in 1916. Many landowners sold their properties willingly, but others fought the forest preserve district’s efforts. Using its powers as a government agency, the forest preserve district moved to condemn the land of unwilling sellers. This paper examines trial transcripts of the resulting eminent domain cases between 1919 and 1940. The documents reveal that much of the land the forest preserve district bought was used for agricultural purposes, from truck farming to cattle grazing, at the time of condemnation. Upon successful acquisition, forest district staff members planted trees on most of this property to produce a landscape to match their agency’s name. At first blush, the making of Chicago’s forest preserves seems similar to the establishment of U.S. national parks as described by Laura Ogden (2011) and Karl Jacoby (2003): district staff members displaced people who were living off the land and then erased their legacy to create a wilderness without human history. However, the eminent domain cases also show that the forest preserve district often condemned land owned by real estate speculators, who had bought agricultural property in the Chicago-area with the intention of holding it until the market improved or building residential subdivisions, golf courses, and after Prohibition, taverns, on the acreage. The case of the Cook County Forest Preserves during the interwar period, then, has new significance as the Trump administration seeks to reduce the size of national monuments, effectively turning protected lands over to commercial development. Perhaps even subdivisions.