LFLB History Museum

Adam Dick and Rebecca Wible both hailed from Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, but they married in Quincy, Illinois, after migrating to help start a new church congregation there. They settled in Galesburg, where their children grew up. The eldest, Albert Blake Dick, was born in 1856.

After receiving education in the Galesburg public schools, Albert went to work for a local farm equipment manufacturer. He rose in the ranks and later became a partner in a lumber company. By 1884, he had founded his own business, A. B. Dick Company, a lumber enterprise in Chicago.

In this business, he often found it necessary to send out a large number of letters each day, essentially the same, a slow and expensive endeavor. It was to this problem that A. B. Dick found the eventual solution in a duplicating device which worked by pressing or rolling ink through perforations in a wax paper stencil. Thomas Edison already had a patent for an electric pen that performed a similar but far more cumbersome process. Edison was quick to see the benefits of the new invention, and A. B. Dick obtained the license to produce his device, which was marketed as the Edison mimeograph and soon began to revolutionize office work in Chicago and throughout the country.

Meanwhile, as A. B. Dick Company transitioned from a small lumber concern to a world-renowned producer of duplicating machines, the small college town of Lake Forest was growing as well, as more and more people became drawn to its beauty and society and transitioned from visitors to residents. One such family were Frederick and Gertrude Newell Aldrich, who began spending summers in Lake Forest in the early 1890s. They purchased a house on Sheridan Road, which they remodeled and called “The Nook.” Their daughters Anita and Helen grew up knowing “The Nook” as home.

Frederick Clement Aldrich had started in the grain commission business and eventually went on to preside over the Chicago Stock Exchange. His fondness for outdoor sports was one of the draws of Lake Forest – he and Gertrude were both avid golfers, and helped to found the Onwentsia Club in 1895. Whether he was an accomplished horseman as well it is less certain – his daughter Anita, looking on in the photo, does not seem particularly impressed.

In the early 1890s Albert Blake Dick's family was growing. His wife, Alice Mathews, had passed away several years earlier, leaving him with one young daughter, Mabel. In 1892 he remarried, to Alice's younger sister, Mary Henrietta. A. B. and Mary Dick had four more children, all boys: Albert Blake Junior, always called “June” by the family; Charles Mathews, Edison, and Sheldon. They had a home on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, but soon began to follow the example of many of their friends and spent summer months in Lake Forest.

It was 1902 when the Dick family's Lake Forest home on West Deerpath was completed. They called it Westmoreland, after the Pennsylvania county of A. B. Dick's grandparents. Westmoreland was more than a manor house: it had greenhouses and a chicken coop, barns and wheat fields, and a water tower, seen at right in some of the photos, that became a local landmark. The gates, also seen here, are one of the only features of the estate that still exist.

Both the Dick family and the Aldrich family found themselves becoming more and more attached to Lake Forest. Like F. C. Aldrich, A. B. Dick was a golfer, even serving as a member of the executive committee of the USGA. Westmoreland provided a perfect starting place for the Onwentsia Hunt, as seen in the center photo. The Dick boys and Aldrich girls became part of the same set, meeting at the Winter Club or the Horse Show. Both families attended First Presbyterian Church; often, after the Sunday service had ended the Aldrich family and their friends would all gather at The Nook, which was nearby, where the children would play on the lawn and the adults would retire indoors for what they called the “T.A.R. Club” - T. A. R. standing for “Thirst After Righteousness,” as the older generation explained to the younger many years later.

When she was young, Helen Aldrich would attend the Bell School in the mornings and ride her pony on Deerpath past the Dick estate to play with her friends the Armours in the afternoons. Soon she was visiting Westmoreland itself, as well: in 1917, Helen Aldrich and A. B. Dick Jr. married. Shortly thereafter he enlisted in the Navy as a seaman second class, eventually going on to attain the rank of ensign. It was not the family's first brush with World War I: in 1914, Mary and A. B. Jr. were marooned across the Atlantic for a few months when the war broke out during their European vacation.

A. B. Jr. and Helen Aldrich Dick had two children, Albert Blake III and Helen. (There aren't quite as many Albert Blakes or Helens in this family as there were Thomas Atteridges, but it's close.)

After the war, Albert Blake Jr. became vice-president and treasurer of A. B. Dick Company, which was flourishing under his father's direction. As his son later observed, A. B. Sr. “was not only the chief executive officer in title, but...in every way. He developed sales literature. He personally directed sales activities. He was the Controller and mentor of the bookkeeping department. He laid out all production schedules. He was the inventor of new products and at all times he not only was the head of, but he was the personnel department.”

Sometimes even A. B. Dick took a break from it all. Westmoreland Camp, a tract of land on Clear Crooked Lake in Wisconsin, was purposefully remote, a day-long trip by horse cart from the train depot, where the men slept in carpenter tents and the ladies in cabins. Even the cabins did not keep out the mosquitos, though, as poor young Helen Dick discovered.

Even here, far from the telegraph or telephone, A. B. Dick still devised ways to remain informed about company business. He employed a young man who spent his summer going back and forth from Chicago by train, carrying messages to and from the company and its president.

A. B. Jr. and Helen Aldrich Dick moved into a home called Applegate at 1050 N. Green Bay Road. They hired architect Harrie Lindeberg to design a high garden wall, designed to protect their children while playing in the yard from cars speeding down Green Bay. A. B. Jr. built a toboggan run off the second floor of the house toward the hill at the back – this labor was not only an unselfish act, since the adults used it nearly as much as the children.

In 1934, A. B. Dick Sr. passed away, just months after the 50th anniversary of the company he'd started. By that time, the Edison-Dick mimeograph had become virtually indispensable to every kind of public and private institution.

It was a few years later, in the late 1930s, that it became quite clear that the facilities at Alice Home Hospital were not adequate for the growing Lake Forest community. The Dick family had always been benefactors of the hospital, as well as the college where it started, but on this occasion they surpassed themselves. In 1939 Mary Dick donated 23 acres of land as a site for the new hospital. The timing was perfect: materials were purchased and construction began before wartime rationing took effect. Architect Stanley Anderson took the design of Westmoreland as a model in creating the hospital building.

At her death in 1944, Mary Dick left 60 additional acres of the Westmoreland estate for the hospital campus. In 1948, the house and most of its outbuildings were razed.

Throughout the history of the hospital since then, the Dick family have been involved, presiding over boards, establishing scholarships, and helping start the Gift Shop and Rummage Shop for fundraising.

The Dick family were active in other aspects of life in Lake Forest as well. A. B. Jr. was elected mayor of Lake Forest in 1928. The family name was in fact so well-known in town that it gave rise to this anecdote, reported by the editor of the Lake Forester: “A young girl of perhaps 15 or 16 years...walked into the Lake Forest library during the week that the motion picture adaptation of Melville’s famous book about the whale was being shown at the local theatre. She approached the desk and inquired, “Can I get a copy of the book Abie Dick?” … The Mayor’s rejoiner was that he had often wondered why the nickname ‘Moby’ had not been attached to at least one member of his family – but this girl got it reversed.”

In 1947, A. B. Dick III took over as president of the company, and A. B. Jr. became Chairman. It was a couple years later that the new company headquarters in Niles, pictured here, opened to rave reviews.

Among the many wonderful images in the Dick family albums that I found were some truly excellent photographs of cars. Helen Aldrich's aunt had one of the first electric cars around – back in 1915, she was trendsetting for 2015. Helen's future mother-in-law, Mary Dick, was fond of driving as well. In 1908 she was a bit taken aback when a Glencoe officer fined her for speeding: according to this Tribune article, she said, “‘If you are catching every one that drives as fast as we do, Glencoe must be getting rich. It takes us two hours and a half to drive from Lake Forest to Chicago, and many of our neighbors drive the distance in an hour and a half.’” Even today, an hour and a half commute isn't so bad.

The Dick family have been Lake Foresters for five generations, and I can think of no way to better illustrate this than in these photographs of the family veil. Gertrude Newell was the bride of F. C. Aldrich in 1890; it was in her generation that the veil was split in half for the Newell sisters. Gertrude Aldrich passed it on to her daughter Helen, who married A. B. Dick Jr. in 1917. Helen Aldrich Dick's daughter Helen wore it, as did several granddaughters and great-granddaughters – including Maddie Dugan and the daughter of John Dick.

A. B. Dick Family