Wright, John S. (John Stephen), 1815-1874

John Stephen Wright was born in Sheffield, Massachusetts, on July 16, 1815, the eldest son of John and Huldah (Dewey) Wright. His father was a storekeeper, his mother a former schoolteacher. The baby was named for his grandfather, John Wright and Stephen Dewey II. It is ironic about the time of John Stephen's birth, his father took a year's trip to the West in hopes of bolstering his failing health with liberal doses of fresh air, during which trip he visited the site of Chicago, then a tiny village of less than forty inhabitants. In 1832, father and son set off with a stock of goods, intending to settle at Galena, Illinois. However, when they arrived at Chicago on October 29, they decided to remain, building a log merchant house at Lake and Clark. This site was so far from the town's business center that it became known as "The Prairie Store." Not yet twenty, Wright not only took a census of Chicago in 1833 but published a lithographed map of the town in 1834, the year he began a real estate business. By the time he achieved legal majority on his twenty-first birthday, his property was worth $200,000. This handsome fortune was wiped in the panic of 1837. Wright began again as secretary and general manager of the Union Agricultural Society for whom he began a newspaper, the Union Agriculturist. A merger with the Western Prairie Farmer followed, and by 1843 Wright became its owner and changed the name to the Prairie Farmer. Although he maintained his connection with the paper until 1857, he hired an editor and began investing his interests elsewhere. Following his marriage to Catherine B. Turner of Virginia on September 1, 1846, Wright again entered the real estate business and over the next decade acquired an impressive second fortune, which was swept away in the late 1850s as a result of his financial backing of a "self-raking" reaper manufacturing concern. Shortly afterwards, he formed a land company designed to interest Eastern capitalists in the midwest. Among Wright's civic interests was public education; the first public school in Chicago, a log structure, was built at his own expense in 1835. He was also a promoter of the Chicago park system connected by wide boulevards-a system designed, but far from completed, at Wright's death. Always a Chicago booster, he compiled Chicago: Past, Present, and Future (1868) which has been described as "a rambling, bombastic volume." Other similar books were added to his bibliography; his later works are said to exhibit evidence of a weakening mind, and indeed, shortly after the Chicago fire of 1871, his family was forced to commit him to an asylum. The remainder of his life was spent in and out-but he died at the age of fifty-nine, and was buried in Rosehill Cemetery, Chicago, on October 1. John and Catherine (Kitty) were the parents of four children: Augustine Washington (b. 1847), Walter (1848-1849), Maria Alexander (b. 1849) and Chester Dewey (b. 1852). All four children were born at their grandfather's Virginia home, so ardently did their mother dislike Chicago, an animosity which she never fully conquered.

From the description of Papers, 1848-1866. (Chicago Public Library). WorldCat record id: 429346329