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| Kate Sturges Buckingham's most well-known contribution-- Buckingham Fountain (JWB Photo) |
On this date in
1937 one of the great women in the history of Chicago passed away as Kate
Sturges Buckingham died at the age of 79 in her home at 2450 North Lakeview
Avenue. She was buried in Woodlawn
Cemetery in Zanesville, Ohio alongside her parents, brother and sister.
In announcing Miss
Buckingham’s passing The Chicago Tribune
noted, “She was godmother to the Art institute; the collections for which it is
most famous were her gifts. She was
godmother to the opera; at the time of her death she was a guarantor. She was godmother to some 200 or more music
and art students. She was a heavy donor
to the Field museum, to innumerable Chicago charities, to many, many nameless
Chicagoans.” [Chicago Tribune, December
15, 1937]
Despite being one
of the wealthiest women in the United States and one of the most generous
individuals in a city blessed with a long procession of altruistic citizens,
Miss Buckingham preferred that no credit come to her for the many contributions
she made. Later in life she ordered that
her name be removed from the Social Register and severely limited her circle of
friends.
Miss Buckingham was
born on August 3, 1858, the eldest daughter of Ebenezer and Lucy Buckingham, in
Zanesville, Ohio. Her mother’s father,
Solomon Sturges, was responsible for bringing the family to Chicago in the
1850’s. At that time the Sturges and
Buckingham families controlled a string of grain elevators in Ohio,
Pennsylvania and along the Erie Canal.
It was sound business sense to
move to Chicago and in 1850 Miss Buckingham’s great uncle, Alvah Buckingham,
constructed the first grain elevator in the city. [Schultz, Rima Lunin & Hast, Adele. Women Building Chicago
1790-1990.]
Everything that the
Buckingham and Sturges families owned was obliterated in the Great Fire of
1871, their homes on the north side of the city, their grain elevators along
the river, the first of many tragedies that would become a motif that ran
through Miss Buckingham’s life.
A second fire in
1873 gave rise to one of the earliest examples of Miss Buckingham’s
generosity. After that second
conflagration, the 15-year-old Kate launched a drive to raise funds for a
Christmas party to bring some measure of joy to children in the Cook County
hospital.
The Tribune describes the effort . . . “On Christmas
eve the Christmas tree, heavily laden with gifts, was set up in the children’s
ward and its many candles were lighted.
Tragedy swiftly followed. Through
some mishap the burning candles started a fire.
The tree and all its Christmas largesse burned down. Bur young Miss
Buckingham, nothing deterred, set forth to raise anew money enough for gifts
for each child. And did.”
The family
relocated their home to Prairie Avenue, the city’s most select street, and the
family business, J & E Buckingham, prospered beyond measure. In 1882 Miss
Buckingham’s father also built a grand home in Lake Forest, but despite its
location on a bluff above Lake Michigan, the family continued to make its
principal home in Chicago.
It was in the
Prairie Avenue home that Kate and her sister, Lucy Maud, were educated. It was in this home that Lucy Buckingham died
in 1889, and it was there that Kate’s sister became increasingly
incapacitated. From the house Clarence
Buckingham, Kate’s brother, and their father expanded the family’s enterprises
to include banking, insurance, steel manufacture, and real estate.
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| Clarence Buckingham's prints were included in a exhibit curated by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1908 (www.steinerag.com) |
The family’s
affiliation with the Art Institute began in the 1890’s when Clarence, impressed
by the Japanese art that was exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition of
1893, began to collect Japanese prints. Ebenezer
died in 1911, Clarence died just over a year later, and Lucy Maud lingered on
in increasingly poorer health until 1920.
All the losses must have further isolated Kate, a woman left alone in a
house that mother, father, sister and brother had shared for her whole adult
life.
She continued to
collect art, though, following her brother’s lead. Clarence had been a governing member of the
Art Institute of Chicago for three decades and a member of the Board of
Trustees for a dozen. [Scultz &
Hast] After the death of her sister,
Kate Buckingham gave her entire collection of Japanese prints, etchings and
engravings, Chinese pottery and porcelain, Persian miniatures, Chinese ritual
bronzes, Italian silver and English lusterware to the institute. [The Frick Collection. Archives Directory for the History of
Collecting in America]
She also furnished
the Art Institute’s Gothic room in the memory of her sister and finished the
Jacobean Room at the museum in the name of her parents. In 1925 she gave her brother’s entire
collection of fourteen hundred sheets of Japanese prints to the museum as well.
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| The "one-million dollar memorial," another legacy of Kate Buckingham (JWB Photo) |
Miss Buckingham
also wrote a check to the Art Institute that was to be used for a great
monument to Alexander Hamilton, about which more information can be found here
and here. Of course, her most memorable
contribution was the donation that allowed construction of the great fountain in
Grant Park, dedicated to her brother, along with a $300,000 endowment to
provide for its maintenance.
But here is
something else that resulted from her generosity about which most people are unaware. On February 12, 1912 Kate Buckingham bought a
property of 81 acres in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. It was not far from where a 55-room
“cottage,” which her father had built near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, stood
until it burned to the ground in 1899.
On the new piece of
land Kate Buckingham built Bald Hill Farm.
After her death the farm, to which another 80 acres had been added, was
sold to Serge and Natalie Koussevitzky.
Mr. Koussevitzky was the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a
man with a dream of one day creating a summer musical festival for the
symphony. In 1978 after the death of the
Koussevitzky’s, the organization purchased the property, and it now lies at the
heart of the Tanglewood Music Festival.
When she died, Kate
Buckingham left a half million dollars to friends and relatives. She left another $126,000 to her maid,
chauffeur, children of her caretaker, her nurses, doormen and elevator men at
the Lakeview cooperative building. In
today’s dollars those gifts would total over nine million dollars. She left another $3.1 million for art and
cultural organizations, including two million to the Art Institute of
Chicago. [Owens, Carole. Pittsfield: Gem
City in the Gilded Age]
The Tribune article that conveyed the news
of Kate Buckingham’s death ended with “a well authenticated anecdote,” dealing
with “one of her rare visits to the Continental Illinois National bank and
Trust company, in which she was an important stockholder.”
“On this occasion,”
the story went, “she stopped at the cashier’s cage to get money. She had no identification papers with her and
the teller asked if any one in the bank could identify her. She cast a brief, flashing glance around the
nearby desks. ‘They’re all dead,’ she snapped.”
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