Lists of military graves in Chicago tend to list two Revolutionary War vets – but neither are verifiable. In fact, they’re quite dubious. Lincoln Park hosts a memorial boulder to David Kennison, who claimed to be a 115 year old veteran of the Boston Tea Party. A note in his pension file says not to…
Author: adam
author / historian who does all kinds of neat stuff. I have about 20 books out and I've been running historical tours and ghost tours in Chicago since 2005.
The Omnibus Riot of 1862
In July of 1862, as the Civil War raged in the south, a tangential battle was waged in Chicago on the corner of Clark and Randolph. The horse-drawn omnibusses in the city were privately owned, and generally not segregated, though there seems to have been an unwritten rule that black passengers would move to the outside…
Louise Lindloff: The Fortune Telling Murderer
Often, in pulp stories about the 1920s serial killer Tillie Klimek, she was said to have been a “psychic killer.” They say that she used to predict the deaths of family members, and her future victims, which one can imagine would have made her a real hit at parties. For the longest time, I assumed…
Virtual Tour Sat Mar 28, 11am: Health Scares in History
In this strange new age, we tour guides still have to find a way to work! Though our scheduled “Health Scares in History” tour at Graceland Cemetery had to be canceled, we’re going to run it as a no-audience tour to be streamed live on our Facebook page. We’ve been running short live videos there…
The Story Inside the Getty Tomb
(the following is cross-posted from the Cemetery Mixtape page, which also includes a podcast!) Every year, thousands of people walk past the landmark Getty tomb in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery to admire the architecture. Designed by Louis Sullivan, it’s perhaps the most perfect example of Sullivan’s style. Almost no one who sees it realizes that inside…
Henry Rhines: The Chicago Slave-Catcher
The career of Henry Rhines, an early Chicago villain.
Uncollected Frederick Douglass Speech Discovered
I love research. I feel like Indiana Jones when I’m digging around in a box crumbling paperwork at the legal archives. And, though it’s a lot easier to search old newspapers that have been digitized, it’s more of an adventure to browse the microfilm reels. For one thing, it’s the closest you can get to…
Was John Stone Chicago’s First Serial Killer? (podcast)
John Stone was the first murderer hanged in Chicago – and suggested the murder wasn’t his first. An “oral history” of his Chicago crime.