A Centennial Retrospective

Cook County Normal School

The Growth of Credibility

A century ago Englewood was sparsely inhabited prairie, except for a windmill, a few scattered farms, and the tracks of two railroads. The view north to Chicago, five miles away, was unbroken. To contempo­raries viewing the swamp that had been selected for the school’s location, it was “a frog pond beyond civilization.” The site, however, was not without its advantages. The founders wanted an institution unencumbered by city influence, and Englewood was believed far enough away from Chicago to escape its seductions for many years. Railroads gave Englewood a particular advantage: two terminals and several roads would provide ready access to the campus from neighboring counties. Open prairie afforded land for the expansion of the school, for the establishment of businesses, and for the location of housing for faculty and students. A self-contained academic community was envisioned and was accordingly developed.

Cook County Normal School and the Village of Englewood did indeed grow together. Settlers were attracted and property values rose. The impact of the institution on the community, it may be claimed with some validity, led to Englewood’s seventy-five year mercantile domination of non-downtown Chicago. Its commercial preeminence was directly the result of the village fathers’ planning and foresight and their $85,000 investment.

The cornerstone was laid on September 16, 1869 amid good nineteenth century American color and with a typical nineteenth century American cast. Plumed Masonic knights with shields and swords, a proper parade with band, and suitable speeches of that era solemnized the occasion. Until the building was completed, classes were held in what was later the Champlin School, which belonged to Englewood District No. 2.

The first building erected to house Cook County Normal School. Built in 1870, it was hailed as the finest structure west of Philadelphia.

Pupils living within this district could attend the school free of any charge, while those outside of the prescribed boundaries were charged an admission fee of $25 per annum.

Opened on September 21, 1870, the first permanent home of the new school was a three-story structure typical of its time, though it was widely described as the finest building west of Philadelphia. It contained twenty-seven rooms, a model grammar school, a rooftop observatory, and the first steam heating plant in the Chicago area. All this became the county’s for the then-not-inexpensive sum of $120,000. A few years later a dormitory was added, and the school seemed to be embarked upon the typical normal school path to greatness. The story from here, however, was to be quite atypical of the genre.

Under Wentworth’s leadership the school grew in enrollment and influence and quickly achieved a national reputation. The cause for such renown remains obscure, since Wentworth’s educational philoso­phy was traditional and conservative, as befitting a man who once said he would rather be principal of the Normal School than President of the United States. Perhaps it was the fact that it was done in the provinces at all that attracted so many from the East.

The first principal of the Normal School, Daniel Wentworth, shown with his faculty. They successfully proved that professional teacher training could become a reality on the prairies of Englewood.

 

Wentworth, however, validly laid claim to some degree of innovation in his organization of the school. Teaching in his view was a profession, requiring its practitioners to maintain standards of performance, and the school was organized to achieve this goal. There were three departments: the Preparatory Department; the Normal Department; and the Training Department. No examination was necessary for admission to the Preparatory Department. It. prepared students who wished to qualify for admission to the Normal Department but who were not initially able to pass the admission examinations because of limited training at their local grammar schools.

The Normal Department was central to the school. In 1872 its course of study was extended to three years. The training Department was established to provide an opportunity for students to practice teach. The department contained a grammar school for grades one through four. Beginning in his sixth term, each student was required to spend from five to twenty days a year teaching there. Before taking charge of a class, he spent two days observing an experienced teacher and reviewing a “Criticism Book,” a compilation of his and other students’ mistakes.

The student body was heterogeneous, though provincial. Commuters traveled daily from Blue Island, Washington Heights, and South Chicago. Resident students came from LaSalle, McHenry, Will, Kane, DuPage and Boone Counties and lived in dormitory facilities partially subsidized by Wentworth himself, or boarded with families in the area. Campus social life flourished. Picnics in the heavily wooded area surrounding the school, ice skating parties, socials, teas, and weekly dances were all joyously attended. If not yet the golden years, these were certainly halcyon days.

The school experienced little difficulty until 1875. Then the first of the crises which were to plague the institution throughout its history occurred. Deteriorating finances resulted in an austerity program and gave impetus to a movement to replace Wentworth. Severe financial cutbacks were instituted and proposals were seriously considered to end the admission of students residing outside Cook County. From such perils, the school, like Pauline, was to be rescued throughout the coming century.

Cook County had 960 square miles of territory, and at the time of the school’s to construction forty of these square miles were within the limits of the City of Chicago. Neither the Cook County Normal graduates nor those of the state normal schools ever received any recognition from the Chicago Board of Education. Hence, although the constituency of the Normal School covered ninety-six percent of the Cook County area, it enrolled only five percent of Cook County inhabitants. It followed that the citizens and taxpayers of the City of Chicago, whom the school in no way served, paid from eighty to ninety percent of its support. This was a constant source of misunderstanding and opposition which continued for more than thirty years.

Friction between the Normal School and the County reached new heights in July 1876 when the Committee on Teachers and Salaries recommended that William F. Phelps replace Wentworth as principal. The causes of Wentworth’s troubles were many, ranging from not entirely unwarranted charges of poor financial ability to equally valid charges of educational traditionalism. Some critics opposed his active involvement in community affairs as political in nature while others wanted to eliminate an expensive undertaking by eliminating its leader. This group of momentary allies, united only in their common antipathy to Wentworth, failed largely because Wentworth had established himself as a prestigious figure in the nation and in the community. While his administration was expensive, he had made many friends and had become a community bulwark. As his support solidified, the County Board of Education found itself deadlocked on the question of his removal. An alternative proposal, to eliminate Wentworth permanently by closing the school, failed, but its introduction indicates the intensity of the Conflict.

A complicated legal struggle ensued as a result of the dead-lock. The school did not open as usual in September and in fact remained closed until October 1876. Wentworth’s enemies used the impasse to forestall action on necessary fiscal matters. The County Commissioners, while on questionable legal ground, reaffirming the right and duty of the County Board of Education to manage and control the Normal School, nevertheless asserted their ultimate right to take temporary control of the school’s affairs because of the County’s capital investment. After considerable opposition in the press to their stance, the Commissioners finally capitulated and reaffirmed Wentworth’s appointment.

That the Commissioners’ action was not to be taken as a vindication of Wentworth became evident the following year. Wentworth was again not offered a new contract. This time he resigned. Lured by the promise of freedom from bureaucratic interference, he accepted the principalship of a newly established teacher training school in Dolton, Illinois, Many of his faculty followed their leader in search of this promised land.

If his move had been calculated to produce a public outcry for his return, Wentworth’s assessment of Englewood sentiment proved accurate: the expected summons was only one year in materializing. The pressure of his admirers, who viewed him as an Old Testa­ment patriarch , and the possibility of the school’s imminent demise, caused the Commissioners to recant.

If the early years of Cook County Normal School arc des-cribed as “stormy,” the situation in Chicago across the city boundary was volcanic, with periodic eruptions that eventually brought teacher education to a standstill. In 1873, the second director of “practice” education resigned, following the announcement by the Board of Education that incompetent students could be dismissed only by Board action, and that the teachers in the training school could not prevent the graduation of anyone approved by the Board. In 1877 the Chicago Board closed its training school entirely, claiming there were more applicants to fill the needs of a staff of 700 than there were vacancies. Opponents of the closing alleged that the Board’s motive was to do away with the training requirements for prospective teachers and to restore to itself the unquestioned control of appointments on a personal or political basis. One hundred seventy-nine teachers had profited from the training given by young Ella Flagg in her four years of effort. But in 1870 less than half the women teachers in the Chicago schools had graduated from the four-year high school or the two-year normal division, and the majority had only attended elementary school.

The failure of succeeding Boards of Education to put into effect the hope of Superintendent Wells that they would reward their teachers more generously and the opposition of many members toward any effort to improve the training of teachers must have been particu­larly discouraging to the next superintendent, Josiah Pickard. As State Superintendent of Education in Wisconsin, his finest achievement had been the creation there of a state normal school. In Chicago he had to watch a small experiment in teacher training be whittled away until nothing at all remained. By 1875 sixteen cities in the United States had set up some kind of training system to provide teachers. Chicago was the only one of the sixteen which failed to continue its teacher training program.

The end of teacher education in the City of Chicago made it all the more imperative that Cook County provide this source of training, and the County Board recognized the opportunity. Wentworth returned in triumph as Principal and the monies denied him in 1877 were readily available in 1878. His return initiated a period of calm and he reigned tranquilly until a critical illness in 1882. With fifteen years of devoted service, Mr. Wentworth’s life went out in the struggle.

After his death in 1883, his virtues became more apparent. It became known that the school’s survival often had depended on his subsidizing shortages from his own meager resources. Upon his death his family was left with only the proceeds of a small insurance policy purchased by devoted friends.

He was not generally appreciated at the time by the community which he served, but his graduates, without exception, honked and revered his memory. The antagonism of the Normal School which so hampered his work largely grew our of the anomalous political situation in the county. His seemingly pedestrian educational accomplishments appeared more impressive in the perspective of death. While the school during his tenure never graduated more than forty-five students in any one year, the quality of their education was unsurpassed. Wentworth had the great distinction of being the first to establish a sound foundation for professional teacher training in northern Illinois.