| Cool Streeter Number One: The "Streeterville" neighborhood of near-north-side Chicago was founded by
George Wellington "Cap" Streeter.
George Wellington Streeter was born in Flint, Michigan in 1837. Prior to
the Civil War, he wandered the Great Lakes region, working at various times as
a logger and trapper, an ice cutter on Saginaw Bay, a deck hand on Canada's
Georgian Bay, and a miner. He married his first wife, Minnie, and then
traveled west in a covered wagon, returning to Michigan on the eve of the
Civil War. He joined the Union Army as a private and served in the Tennessee
theater.
After the war he became a showman, lumberjack, and steamship operator.
After his wife left him (she ran off with a vaudeville troupe), he came to
Chicago in the mid-1880s and married again. He and his new wife, Maria,
decided to become gun runners in Honduras. Streeter bought a steamship and
named it Reutan. Before piloting it down to Central America, Streeter decided
to take a test cruise in Lake Michigan in 1886 during a gale. The ship ran
aground about 450 feet from the Chicago shore.
In the days that followed, Streeter surveyed the situation and decided to
leave his boat where it was. At the time Chicago was in the midst of a
building boom, and Streeter found excavation contractors who were eager to pay
a fee for the right to dump fill on the beach near his boat. He eventually
amassed 186 acres of newly created land. Consulting an 1821 government survey,
Streeter determined that his man-made land lay beyond the boundaries of both
Chicago and Illinois and therefore claimed that he was homesteading the land
as a Civil War veteran.
For the rest of this cool story, please see
http://www.capstreeter.com/
For additional info, please see Streeter
Archive #1, and/or the
Wikipedia article.
Yes, I've been to Streeterville.
Many years ago, the American Bar
Association (I was a member at the time) had its annual convention one summer in
Chicago. One evening, I:
- wandered away from the convention hotel;
- saw a bar, entitled "Streeterville [whatever]";
- thought, "No way!";
- went in;
- had a beer;
- thought, "Way!";
- finished my beer; and
- wandered back to my convention hotel.
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Cool Streeter Number Two:
Ruth Cheney Streeter (1895-1990) was the first director of the
United States Marine Corps Women's Reserve
She was born as Ruth Cheney in 1895 and lived in
Morristown, New Jersey where she was involved in civic affairs. She
married
Thomas W. Streeter, and served as the first woman president of the
Morris County, New Jersey Welfare Board. In 1943 she was appointed
director of the United States Marine Corps Women's Reserve. In 1947, she
became a member of the New Jersey Constitutional Convention.
For the rest of this cool story, please see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Cheney_Streeter
Hey! That's my granny!
And it gets better.
She was a long-time
Colonial Dame.
Those Johnnies-come-lately (Janies-come-lately?) at the
DAR have nothing on
colonel-granny!
Yeah, yeah,
Eisenhower and
Halsey helped out a little bit in the 1940s. She won the war!
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