The story of Frink, Walker & Co., Stage Line, northern Illinois' transportation monopoly of the 1800s.

What the railroad station was to rural country towns, Frink, Walker & Co., was to early Chicago. It was the center of public interest. Several times a day strangers arrived in town, residents set out upon long and often hazardous journeys, mail was received and dispatched and it was the transportation center of the growing town.

A man named John Frink set up the first successful stage line out of Chicago in 1832 with partner Charles K. Bingham. The first Frink, Bingham & Co. Stagecoach ventured west out of Chicago to Fullersburg [1] (Oak Brook), 15 miles from Chicago, which followed the Indian Boundary Line (Indian Boundary Park, Chicago so named because the park is on the Indian boundary).

Frink joined forces with Martin O. Walker and Walker's brother, Curan (a silent partner) on June 1, 1840. Frink provided the political, operational and sales know-how, while Martin provided business experience and funding along with Curan.

The new line was known as the Frink, Walker & Co., and their coaches started from a shanty-like building located in the heart of Chicago at the corner of Lake and Clark Streets. By 1835, Frink moved two doors west, on the south side of Lake Street, off the corner of Lake and Dearborn streets.

Frink, Walker & Co., General Stage Office, two doors west, on the south side of Lake Street, off the corner of Lake and Dearborn streets, Chicago, Illinois. (1844)

From 1832 until the construction of the first railroad in 1848, the stagecoaches of Frink, Walker & Co., were the largest company connecting Chicago with the outside world. For several years after the primitive locomotives had come puffing in and out of town, the stages continued to run regularly, carrying passengers and mail to and from many places not reached by the first railroads. 

Frink, Walker & Co., General Stage Office.

Even before Chicago was incorporated as a town in 1833, the firm established a stagecoach line to Galena in 1832. Oddly enough, that town was also the terminus of the first railroad.

The Galena-Chicago route had many stops; at Lena, Illinois, going east, the stage route followed today's US 20 through Eleroy, Freeport, Rockford, Belvidere, Bloomingdale and other towns along the way. 

The stages typically left the Frink, Walker & Co., Chicago depot between 4 and 6 am to take advantage of as much daylight as possible. They stopped for the night at inns along the route. The 150 to 160 mile trip, depending on the route, took the better part of five days but that was cut to two days when they ran around the clock, with stops every 12 to 15 miles at relay stations to change horses. The fare was $12.50 ($315.00 today). Passengers were often forced to help push the coaches out of the mud or help with repairs. Accidents were common, as were injured horses that often immobilized the stages and forced passengers to continue their trips on the first farm wagon that came along.

Even meals could be an ordeal. The inns usually didn't start cooking until the coach arrived. That took about 50 minutes, so the passengers had to wolf down lunch or dinner in just 10 minutes to avoid being left behind after the hour layover.

A few years later, the 97-mile trip from Chicago to Milwaukee by stage consumed two days, with an overnight stop in Kenosha, but competition from Great Lakes ships had reduced the summertime fare to $3 ($70 today).

Frink, Walker & Co., Offices, 1845.

The first non-local stagecoach line arrived from Detroit in 1833 after the Black Hawk War of 1832 ended an Indian revolt over ownership of Illinois farmland and made land travel safe west of Chicago.

In 1834, Dr. John T. Temple started a stage line from Chicago southwest to Peoria to meet the steamboats plodding up and down the Illinois River from St. Louis. (The 96-mile Illinois and Michigan Canal that would eventually connect Chicago with the Illinois River at Ottawa was not completed until 1848.) Frink, a Connecticut native who learned the stagecoach business in the East, formed a rival stage-steamboat line in 1834, then in 1837, he bought out Temple.

The mail in the 1830s and '40s traveled on Frink, Walker & Co. coaches that rattled and bounced over Potawatomi trails to Detroit, Peoria and Galena at an average of fewer than 10 miles per hour dodging tree stumps and fording streams.

Frink fought all the other stage lines, in true Chicago style, eventually emerging in control of the stages in and out of Chicago. 

The Chicago-Rockford route began sometime around 1837. In 1848 the schedule from Chicago to Rockford was 24 hours. The coaches were always drawn by four horses and the horses were changed at intervals of 15 miles at stations built for that purpose. Coaches left the main office in Chicago on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday and returned on the alternate days. The fare was $5.00 ($175 today).

As settlements increased in number, Frink, Walker & Co., met the growing demands by establishing new stagecoach lines to all parts of the Northwest, as far as Milwaukee and Prairie du Chien Wisconsin, and to the south, a line extended to St. Louis Missouri. Many a lady passenger became hysterical in the Stagecoach when the driver seemingly headed for the middle of Lake Michigan while fording the more shallow water in the delta to the Calumet River, in the days before bridges.

The Stagecoach wasn't as glamorous as the movies made them out to be.

The stagecoach office, from which all the coaches departed, and which was usually surrounded by an interested group of idlers [2]. Many of the stages, especially those obliged to traverse muddy roads, were equipped with six horses, and, in addition to the skillful driver, carried a postillion [3], who blew a horn gaily when the stage was pulling out, and played a fanfare on its arrival to notify the idlers that the stage was in with the mail and passengers. 

Now and again the passengers and drivers on these coaches had a brush with the Indians on lonely stretches of the road, but more often their experiences were confined to struggles with the deep mud of the roads through the woods and across the prairies. The extension of the railroad lines to all parts of the territory reached by the stages led to the abandonment of a picturesque feature of life in early Chicago.

Frink sold the stagecoach business to Walker sometime in the 1840s, then began investing in iron horses.

Frink died of a stroke in 1858 at age 63; Walker operated stagecoaches for another 30 years in more remote areas of the Midwest not served by railroads.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

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[1] Fullersburg, Illinois was on the edge of Indian Country. It was where a roadhouse once stood along the Southwest Plank Road (now Route 34 / Ogden Avenue), a stop on the Frink, Walker & Co. Known as Castle Inn, it is believed that Abraham Lincoln spoke from their veranda while riding his circuit. 

Lincoln's circuit extended thru 18 counties and that he went from Clinton to Monticello, then to Urbana, Danville, Paris, Charleston, Shelbyville, Sullivan, Decatur, Taylorville, and Springfield. At different times in the course of Lincoln's circuit-riding, he traveled thru each of the following counties: Sangamon, Menard, Mason, Tazewell, Woodford, Livingston, McLean, DeWitt, Piatt, Champaign, Vermilion, Edgar, Coles, Shelby, Moultrie, Macon, and Christian.

[2] Idler; A habitually lazy person.

[3] Postillion; A person who rides the leading left-hand horse of a pair or team drawing a coach or carriage, especially when there is no coachman.

Chicago's Famous Block 37.

The story of Chicago's Block 37 is the history of a great American city's downtown business districts in a microcosm. Block 37 is bordered by State, Randolph, Dearborn and Washington streets.

Block 37 - Randolph Street, Chicago, Illinois. 1909

At the center of Chicago, this typical urban block missed no trend, from the first office buildings in the 1870s to the early skyscrapers of the 1890s and the supermarkets of the 1930s. Even through long decades of decline, from the perceived street anarchy of the 1960s to the massive urban renewal of the 1980s that finally demolished the block, Block 37 has mirrored the enthusiasms and fears of the City. The movie palaces, seedy political hangouts, fine billiard parlor, novelty store, and gourmet food hall made it a primary destination for those seeking the Loop's pleasures. Also, a place of work where small newspapers were published, violins repaired, hair cut, and fortunes read, this one city block, in its prime, attracted thousands of people an hour. On a typical day, it housed the population of a small town, only to be completely empty at night. 

All the City's variety was packed into 16 buildings of various sizes and conditions. Its landlords, high and low, were among Chicago's first families and fabled entrepreneurs. A scene for brilliant acts of charity and extraordinary moments of predation. Block 37 was a prime arena for the urban arts, from fly-by-night retailing and three-card monte to international real-estate deals involving hundreds of millions of dollars. To understand the rise and fall of this one block in some of its daunting details is to appreciate Chicago's unique attraction to city lovers and haters alike. To know Block 37 is to know Chicago.

Favored by its unique geography, the land was to become Block 37 already had a rich history before the first Europeans couldoed into the swampy prairie on Lake Michigan. At least 100 years before Chicago (Chicagou or Chicagoua) was surveyed, scribed, and squared, the Potawatomi pursued an active commercial life on the site. With its proximity to the lake and the main branch of the Chicago River, the block was important, too, after Fort Dearborn was established, and the area became a key area of settlement of the Northwest Territories.

The block was platted in James R. Thompson's 1830 survey and numbered one of the City's original 58 blocks. Its strategic location between State and Dearborn Streets to the east and west and Randolph and Washington to the north and south assured that the block's original eight lots, equally cut from only 120,000 square feet of ground, would become fully deployed in the City's remarkable political, commercial, and industrial development.

James R. Thompson's 1830 plat survey.

After Chicago's incorporation as a town in 1833, Block 37, situated only several hundred yards from the Cook County courthouse and across the street from the City's largest bank, boomed along with the City. The famous Crosby Opera House was built between State and Dearborn Streets on Washington Street.

When the Great Chicago Fire of October 8, 1871, razed the entire downtown, the block had already been densely developed for decades. Rebuilt immediately after the fire at over four times its original square footage and increasingly added to over the next century, Block 37 shared the fortunes of other American downtowns from New York to San Francisco. Resiliently prosperous and endlessly inventive in the sort of commerce it could support, the block survived not only the fire but a worldwide Depression and a host of cunning mayors and deal-makers until it finally fell prey in 1989 to the final "improvement" that flattened, in the name of urban renewal, every one of its buildings—including, without distinction, its architectural treasures and notorious firetraps.

Block 37 was, in the end, a victim of the trends it had so efficiently exploited in the past. After World War II, as Chicago's population began its permanent migration away from the core and out to the suburbs, the block started to suffer from the neglect that would eventually make it a candidate for urban renewal. Beginning in the early 1960s, the historic Loop was bypassed to redevelop North Michigan Avenue. The old downtown was perceived and relentlessly advertised as hopelessly decayed and dangerous. 

The once superior location of Block 37 at the matrix of the City's political, commercial, and social life now doomed it. By the 1970s, State Street had lost its preeminence as a shopping center to the department stores on Michigan Avenue and the large regional malls multiplying in the suburbs. The entertainment "Rialto" along Randolph Street — Chicago's equivalent to Times Square — had closed its live shows and subsisted on pornography and action films. At the same time, on Washington Street, the gourmet shop Stop and Shop, a city institution, went out of business. Offices for lawyers, political activists, and skilled artisans on the block's Dearborn Street side went unrented as the center of Chicago shifted to the grand new towers of the West Loop. None of the billions of dollars flooding the City during the skyscraper boom of the 1980s reached Block 37 in time.

Ironically, the block's very dereliction became its last chance. Speculators and city hall insiders had written down the land values of the entire North Loop to the point in 1979 when the Chicago Plan Commission declared 26.74 acres, seven full or partial blocks including Block 37, "blighted." This designation qualified the area for a "taking." Once, a valuable commercial property was seized from its lawful owners, condemned, and written down as worthless. After speculators had delayed the taking almost a decade and bid up land costs, the City paid nearly $250 million for the entire North Loop, including almost $40 million for Block 37 alone. In 1983, a local development group, JMB, won the right to develop the whole block. 

A series of delays, beginning with a challenge from historic preservationists and prolonged by costly legal battles, put off the block's demolition until 1989, when the City started to leveling Block 37 in 1989, making way for the construction of a mixed-use development that included office space, retail stores, and restaurants. Shoppers Corner was in the last demolition phase, closing in June 1991.

Chicago traded the land title to the developers for $12.5 million, less than a third of what it had paid. Plans to build two towers and a large retail mall fell prey to the national real-estate crash of the 1990s.

The Block 37 building at State and Washington Streets in Chicago's Loop.

The block was temporarily used as a winter skating rink and a summer student art gallery for almost a decade. At the opening of the twenty-first century, this once diverse and active place still lies empty, an unwanted orphan of progress. The history of Block 37 will continue to mirror the rise and fall of Chicago's downtown. Its long and varied history is an intimate calibration of the history of a great American city.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.