Heckman, Wallace, 1851-1927

Chicago lawyer and businessman.

Wallace Heckman was born May 2, 1851 in Moscow Mills, Missouri. He attended Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, graduating in 1874. After marrying and relocating to Chicago, Heckman served as senior member of the law firm Heckman, Elsdon, & Shaw from 1885 until 1903. He then became business manager and counsel of the University of Chicago, a position he held from 1903 to 1924. Under his financial supervision, the university began significant expansion, purchasing lands surrounding the Midway Plaisance and extending from Washington Park in the west to Dorchester Avenue in the east. Heckman also served at different times as a vice-president of Chicago Surface Lines, President of the Illinois Civil Service Reform Association, a member of the executive committee of the Municipal Voters’ League, and as a trustee of Hillsdale College.

In 1898, Heckman purchased a plot of land near Oregon, Illinois, which he named Ganymede Farm. A strong patron of local artists, Heckman agreed to lease fifteen acres of the land to a group who came to be known as the Eagle’s Nest Artists’ Colony. Included among the members of the Eagle’s Nest were artists Ralph Clarkson, Charles Francis Browne and Oliver Dennet Grove; writers Hamlin Garland, Henry B. Fuller and Horace Spencer Fiske; architects Irving D. and Allen B. Pond; sculptors Lorado Taft and Nellie Walker; organist Clarence Dickinson; and University of Chicago Secretary James Spencer Dickerson. So long as each member of the organization presented an annual public lecture or demonstration, Heckman provided the land for a fee of one dollar per year. Taft’s famous 50-foot concrete Black Hawk statue still stands on the site of the Eagle’s Nest Colony. In 1945, through the combined resources of the state assembly, the Department of Natural Resources, and the city of Oregon, the 273-acre plot of Ganymede Farm was purchased and renamed Lowden State Park as a memorial to former Illinois governor Frank O. Lowden.

Heckman was active as a writer and public speaker throughout his life, speaking regularly at meetings and ceremonies of the University Club, Quadrangle Club, Cliff Dwellers, and City Club of Chicago.

Heckman died on March 7, 1927 in Chicago, a few days after the passing of former university president Harry Pratt Judson. The Wallace Heckman Memorial Fund, one of the oldest University of Chicago Law Library book funds, was established by Heckman’s wife Tillie in 1929.