The History of the Marshall Field Mansion and Family.

Marshall Field's house was located at 1905 South Prairie Avenue in Chicago. The architect, Richard Morris Hunt, designed the Breakers and the Biltmore estates for the Vanderbilts.

The cost came to about $2,000,000 ($45,500,000 today). It was the first house in Chicago to feature electricity and lighting. The 3-story plus basement house was red brick with stone trim and a mansard roof.

The Marshall Field Sr. Mansion, 1905 South Prairie Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.

The Marshall Field Sr. Mansion, 1905 South Prairie Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.

In 1862, when Marshall was 28, he met a visiting Ohio girl, 23-year-old Nannie Douglas Scott, at a party. Nannie was the daughter of a prosperous Ohio iron master. When he learned she was leaving town the next day, he went to the train station to see her off. As Nannie boarded the train back to Ohio, the normally reticent Field, who approached every aspect of his life with succinct trepidation, impetuously jumped aboard the train car. As the train puffed, lurched, and chugged into life, Field burst forth with a marriage proposal to Nannie. Although shocked by her admirer’s impulsive act, she immediately accepted, particularly in front of the other passengers. His courage then extinguished, Field got off the train at the next stop and went back to work.

The Marshall Field Sr. Mansion Hallway, 1905 South Prairie Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.

The Marshall Field Sr. Mansion Library, 1905 South Prairie Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.

Marshall and Nannie were married in Ironton, Ohio, in 1863. The couple had planned to marry the year before, but the death of Nannie’s sister, Jennie, caused the wedding to be postponed.

Nannie Douglas Scott Field with the Field children, Marshall Field, Jr. and Ethel Beatty Field. Louis Field died in 1866 as an infant.

Nannie led Marshall Field into "hell-on-earth life.” Their dinner table arguments were loud, excruciatingly shrill battling scenes (even before the servants), and the talk of Prairie Avenue children, who were sometimes present at mealtimes with little Ethel and Marshall II. Eventually, Marshall and Nannie separated; he was alone in his mansion, and she was in France and England.

Marshall Field II (or Jr.) built an 8,000-square-foot house at 1919 South Prairie Avenue, next door to his father, in 1884. 

They were divorced in the 1890s. Nannie moved to France permanently, where rumors floated that she had become addicted to drugs. On Sunday, February 23, 1896, she died in Nice at 56 years old from peritonitis disease (an inflammation of the tissue that lines your abdomen and can be serious and deadly). She is buried in the Field plot at Graceland Cemetery, Chicago.

Delia Spencer Caton, a longtime friend and romantic interest of Marshall lived in the house behind Field at 1900 South Calumet Avenue.

Delia Spencer Caton Field

After Delia Caton's husband Arthur died in 1904, Field and Delia decided to marry.

Delia was 46 years old, 24 years younger than her 70-year-old fiancé. They were married at St. Margaret’s Church in Westminster Abbey in London, England, in 1905. The ceremony was quiet and attended only by a few friends. 

There were plenty of rumors thrown around. One was that Marshall and Delia were romantically involved before the death of her husband. A second rumor was about a tunnel connecting the Field and Caton houses.

Marshall Field II died of a gunshot

wound on November 27, 1905.

Marshall Field, the richest merchant in the world, died at 4 o'clock on Tuesday, January 16, 1906, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon at the Holland House in New York City of exhaustion following a bout of pneumonia. He had amassed a fortune of $150 million ($4.5 billion today).

After Marshall Field died, his wife, Delia, inherited the property. She chose to live in Washington, D.C. and deeded the mansion to Marshall Field III in 1906. 

Field III donated the property to the Association of Arts and Industries with the stipulation to use it as an industrial art school. László Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius founded the "New Bauhaus" in 1937, a graduate school teaching systemic, human-centered design. Today it is the IIT Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology.  

The house was ultimately razed in 1955.

MARSHALL FIELD AND COMPANY ARTICLES

By Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

Marshall Field & Company, Cloud Room Restaurant in the Chicago Municipal Airport (Midway).

In 1926 Chicago began leasing an airstrip for commercial purposes. A single cinder runway served airmail traffic. Chicago Municipal Airport was dedicated on December 12, 1927, offering mail, express, and passenger service.

Marshall Field & Company opened its Cloud Room restaurant, in the passenger terminal building of the Chicago Municipal Airport (Midway International Airport, today) on March 20, 1948. The night before the restaurant opening, Mayor Martin Kennelly was the guest of honor in the Cloud Room, a 3,600 square foot dining salon that overlooks the runways of the airport. Marshall Field & Company paid $90,000 ($1,020,000 today) to build out the second floor of the restaurant and $260,000 ($2,945,000 today) to equip it. Marshall Field & Company agreed to pay the city $2,596 or 5% of its gross business and 40% of its net profit.

NOTE: The above contract was a good deal for Marshall Field & Company with a captive audience. Between 1932 and 1961, Chicago's Midway Airport boasted the title of the "world's busiest airport." At its peak in 1959, the municipal airport served 10 million passengers.

1949 MENU TEXT AND PICTURES

Menu Cover

You will find in food and service ... the sky's the limit in the Cloud Room!

There are good reasons why this is true.

For a world on the wing, the airport is the front door to the city. Here the traveler by air gets his first, sometimes his only glimpse of Chicago. Like any conscientious citizen, Marshall Field & Company want this impression to be the best.

Fun for the young — and the young at heart!

That's why, just beneath the main control tower in the terminal building, you will find the Marshall Field & Company Cloud Room on the second floor.

It is an excellent restaurant in food and service — a showcase for Chicago. From your table in the windowed bay of the Cloud Room, you can sit and watch the drama of the skyways, the giant silvered planes that gather here from the far ends of the earth. 

Business lunch in the Cloud Room is a pleasure.

You can relax in comfort, dine to a gourmet's taste, admire the vermilion and gray decore, the shapes and shadows of Alexander Calder's mobile in brass, "Flight in Motion." 

Alexander Calder's mobile sculpture, “Brass in the Sky.”

NOTE: Alexander Calder's mobile sculpture, “Brass in the Sky,” was placed in storage. Field's installed it in the Northbrook Court store. In 2001, when Target Corporation took over Marshall Field's in 2004 the mobile was donated to the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. Subsequently, the museum auctioned off the mobile fetching $2 million in 2005 from a private collector.

If you wish, you can inspect the shining stainless steel kitchens, as up-to-date and serviceable as a DC-6. Restaurant men have come from every part of the country to see them.

View of Marshall Field's Coffee Shop on the ground level.

Quick service around the clock in the first floor Coffee Shop.

Sightseers, too, who come to watch the spectacular, real-life show from the promenades around the airport, will find a meal in the Cloud Room a fitting climax to their visit — especially since this meal takes place behind a wall of glass, one of the vantage points for viewing the coming and going of the giant airships.

The big ships pass before your eyes.

All in all, the Cloud Room is a modern, cosmopolitan dining place for the traveler, the casual visitor, and the sightseer alike. It is because we want the Cloud Room to reflect this city's spirit of hospitality and this store's effort to be of service to the community.

MARSHALL FIELD AND COMPANY ARTICLES

INDEX TO MY ILLINOIS AND CHICAGO FOOD & RESTAURANT ARTICLES.

By Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.