George Hemingway and Oak Park
With the premiere of Ken Burns’ three-part, six-hour documentary on Ernest Hemingway last week, I thought I’d look at the family’s roots in Oak Park, specifically his uncle George Hemingway (1876-1953), who was a local realtor and developer.1 George was the younger brother of Ernest’s father Clarence. In 1895, at just 19 years old, George opened his own real estate office at the Dunlop Brothers’ Oak Park Trust and Savings Bank Building, built in 1887, at 101 N. Marion Street, “for the transaction of the general real estate, insurance and loan business,” according to a 1927 article in Oak Leaves newspaper.2
In spite of his youth, George would not have found this venture particularly difficult as his own father, Civil War veteran Anson T. Hemingway, operated a real estate and loans business starting in the 1870s that at one time was located in Burnham & Root’s Calumet Block at 111-17 S. LaSalle in downtown Chicago. You could say George was following in the family business.
George’s real estate dealings grew as Oak Park was transformed from open prairie and cow pastures of the 19th century to a growing commuter suburb of Chicago in the 20th century. He subdivided and sold acres of land, while also building a number of speculative houses, mainly on the undeveloped north side of town. George hired Albert Hart Regan, a builder and civil engineer who would later be in charge of constructing the Ogden Avenue bridge in Chicago, to do carpentry work on his buildings. Regan and his family even lived in one of George’s houses on the 200 block of North Oak Park Avenue (it no longer exists but ironically is the location of Hemingway’s Bistro).3
In 1933 George was quoted in the Chicago Tribune talking about the rising land value in Oak Park:
“In 1917 I sold lots on both sides of Euclid, from Thomas to Division, for $8 a front foot and resold them in 1926 for $100 a front foot. Land at Augusta and Fair Oaks Avenue that sold for $800 an acre in 1913 was sold at the rate of $24,000 an acre in 1926. Lots on Madison Street, from Oak Park Avenue to Austin Boulevard, that brought $25 a front foot in the boom of 1890, sold for $300 a front foot in 1925.”4
Probably because of all the money he was now making selling land, not even fifteen years after starting his own business, George constructed the Real Estate Building at 121 N. Marion Street in 1909, where his offices occupied the second floor. Architect Arthur B. Maiwurm designed a classical style building with limestone piers, a stone parapet with dentils, and capital relief.5 George worked with local builders Harper & Butendorff in its construction, who would continue to work with him on future projects. Oak Park’s main commercial corridor was more centered around Marion Street back then, although Lake Street always had a number of businesses as it was an old stagecoach route that people used traveling from Galena to Chicago.
In 1933 his offices moved again, although just a block way to the Parkside Building at 1026 North Boulevard. By this time it was incorporated as the Hemingway Real Estate Company. Not long after George’s death, the company was renamed Houser Real Estate Co. in 1960 and later merged with F.C. Pilgrim & Company.
It’s not surprising that a number of George’s spec homes were located close to where he lived at 639 North Oak Park Avenue with his wife Anna Ratcliff and their children Margaret, Virginia, and George. In the early days of Oak Park, it was hard to escape the Hemingway name. The land on which George’s house sits was part of a subdivision at the southeast corner of Augusta Street and Oak Park Avenue that had been subdivided earlier by George’s own father Anson back in 1880. One of the lots was eventually sold to the Rankin family, who constructed a Queen Anne designed by local architect E.E. Roberts in 1896. Anna Ratcliff Hemingway’s parents purchased the home in 1899 with George and Anna renting it between 1900-1908, then buying it themselves. They would live there until 1939.
With builder W.C. Franck, George constructed three spec homes on North Grove Avenue between 1908-09, starting with two bungalows kitty corner from each other. No information has been found on an architect who designed these single-family residences, but one is a wood clapboard craftsman while the other has a stucco facade. A third home adjacent to one of the bungalows is larger and shows more influence from the Prairie School style of architecture.
In 1913 George commissioned well-known Prairie School architect, John Van Bergen, who was a native of Oak Park and a former draftsman in Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural studio, to design a speculative venture just south of the train tracks at 106 S. Grove Avenue. Working with builder George Duchien, the house’s plan was not unique as Van Bergen reversed an earlier commission he had designed on Fair Oaks Avenue. Interesting that Hemingway briefly lived in John Van Bergen’s childhood home at 532 Fair Oaks Avenue, where the architect also had his first studio located in his parents’ attic.Although a pre-built home intended to make a profit, George had a difficult time selling it, probably because prairie style was no longer in vogue, and he could not find a buyer for over a decade.6
George would hire two more local architectural firms to design spec houses, beginning with Tallmadge and Watson’s Prairie School design at 228 N. Scoville Avenue. Constructed by builders Harper and Butendorff in 1919, the stucco single-family residence looks like a lot of homes that started popping up around Oak Park at this time. Five years later in 1924 George worked with architect George “Gustav” Pearson and builder Alan McConachie to construct a Prairie School Foursquare at 725 Belleforte Avenue. Frank Lloyd Wright might get all the attention, but Pearson is responsible for designing 229 buildings on record in Oak Park between 1919-38, with the majority located north of Division Street.7
When George and Anna left Oak Park in 1939 and retired to the land they owned on Lake Charlevoix in Michigan, George was most likely a millionaire. But he still had his hands in business as he continued to run a tree farm located on their property, which is now known as Hemingway Point. It’s not far from Walloon Lake where Ernest and his family spent their summers at Windermere Cottage, which is still owned by the Hemingway family 121 years after it was first built by Ernest’s parents. Ernest, who regularly visited from the time he was six weeks old until his marriage in nearby Horton Bay in 1921, would write “The Torrents of Spring” and “The Nick Adams Stories,” both set in Michigan. One of Ernest’s better known short stories “Indian Camp,” first published in 1924, features a character called Uncle George. A number of interpretations believe he is the father of the baby who is delivered by the doctor in the story. Considering a lot of Ernest’s writings were semi-autobiographical, Uncle George is portrayed unsympathetically, which might be tied to Ernest’s own feelings about his uncle.
In 1915 while in Michigan Ernest shot a protected blue heron. The game warden found out and threatened to arrest the teenager. Ernest sought protection from his Uncle George, probably due to his wealth and connections, but George refused to help him. Ernest pled guilty and paid a fine. Ernest would strongly oppose George’s claims of cowardice, something that troubled him throughout his life, and found his uncle to be insensitive and cruel.8
When Ernest Hemingway’s father Dr. Clarence “Ed” Hemingway took his own life in 1928, one of the reasons might have been due to financial problems, specifically high mortgage payments for property he owned in Florida where he hoped to retire one day. Just before his death Ed had asked his wealthy brother George for a loan to meet payments due on December 10th. George refused, supposedly saying to him, according to Ernest’s sister Marcelline: “Unload, Ed. Don’t try to carry a burden too heavy for you. Sell now and get yourself out from under.”9 Ernest’s 13-year-old brother Leicester remembers George saying “These are the facts of life and business is business.”10 Ed died from self-inflicted pistol wounds in the bedroom of his Oak Park home on December 6th. The family, especially Ed’s children, held deep resentment towards George for not helping out his brother in a time of desperation. Ernest immediately sent money to his mother Grace, settling her back taxes of $600 and setting up a substantial trust fund, but ordered her to get Uncle George to pay the home’s $15,000 mortgage considering “He did more than any one to kill Dad and he had better do something in reparation. I know his sanctimonious tightness and he is going to do what he ought to do about that house or I will have his hide.”11
The Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University has an impressive Hemingway family collection, which includes eleven diaries written by George R. Hemingway. George is not buried at Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois next to his father Anson and brother Clarence or the near the town that he helped develop but at Maple Lawn Cemetery not far from Lake Charlevoix in Michigan.
The Historic Landmark Nomination Report on the Rankin-Hemingway House by the Oak Park Historic Preservation Commission, October 13, 2011, provided a lot of the background information on George Hemingway’s life and real estate business.
“Realtor for 32 Years,” Oak Leaves, October 22, 1927, p. 77.
Yesterday When I Was Younger… by Lee Brooke, p. 43.
“Oak Park Land Values Soar Eighty Million Per Cent,” Chicago Tribune. October 15, 1933.
Architecture Survey Downtown Oak Park and The Avenue Business District, 2005.
Ridgeland Revealed edited by Arlene Sanderson, p. 39.
Historic Landmark Nomination Report on the Gustaf and Fride Benson House by the Oak Park Historic Preservation Commission, May 14, 2009.
Hemingway: A Biography by Jefferey Meyers, p.15.
At The Hemingways: A Family Portrait by Marcelline Hemingway Sanford, p. 230.
My Brother, Ernest Hemingway by Leicester Hemingway, pgs. 98-99.
The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 3, 1926-1929.