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| The Waubansee Stone (Digital photograph) |
 Pieces of the Past |
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| The Waubansee stone was a souvenir of two different pre-fire
eras. It was a relic of Fort Dearborn--the face of Waubansee, a Potawatomi
chief, was probably carved by one of the soldiers. More recently, it had
a place of honor in the garden of I.N. Arnold's North Division home, whose
grounds occupied the whole block just west of Pine Street (now Michigan
Avenue) between Erie and Huron. Arnold's mansion, with its extensive art
collection, its library of eight thousand books, and memorabilia relating
to his friend Abraham Lincoln, represented the best of Old Settler Chicago.
Colbert and Chamberlin evoke this sense of an unrecapturable time in their
elegy for Arnold's house, his possessions, the garden with vines of wild
grape, Virginia creeper, and bitter-sweet that hung from his elms and covered
the piazza, and for this stone, which its owner had converted into a fountain.
"On the lawn was a sun-dial," they added, "with the inscription:
'Horas non numero nisi serenas' [I number none but sunny hours]. "Alas! the tablet vindicated its motto but too well. It was broken by the heat or in the melee which accompanied the fire, and the dark hours which have followed pass by without its reckoning." |
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