The Historical Museum eagerly collects reminiscences and oral histories by Wilmette folks. You can also read stories about people in our Feature Stories section elsewhere on the website. Here are a few favorite memoirs from our collection.
In the 1950s, the old elms that still lined Greenleaf Avenue, formed a tunnel through which the tracks of the North Shore Line carried…
Frank Peter Collyer, Sr. and Elizabeth “Bess” Collyer [nee King] were my grandparents, who moved to their home at 730 Ninth St. near…
I entered the world without ceremony on July 28, 1924, in Grant Hospital near Chicago’s Lincoln Park. I expect to leave it without…
Even at 71, I would consider myself a young old-timer in the History of Wilmette. It is a little strange to think that during my lifetime we…
After finishing the grade school in Wilmette, the Central School, I went to New Trier High School. I graduated from the Evanston…
When Chicago was a struggling frontier settlement in 1827, very little was known of the region northward and to the northwest…
The wrens are very busy in our back yard, — first gushing and then scolding. From the pother they make you would never dream they…
There is an old theory to the effect that every seven years one is a completely new beginning; that there remains not even the…
I have been asked to tell you some incidents of my early days in this Village, because there is I think, no one else left who could…
We came to Wilmette in April, 1877. That was the Spring Henry A. Dingee’s mortgages came due and half of the people gave up their…
Once upon a time there was a little hamlet situated deep in the heart of the wildwood, beside an inland sea. The aborigines…