Henry B. Clarke House
Clarke House may have been modeled on the home of William B. Ogden. The Clarke house is often described as the oldest surviving house in Chicago, although part of the Noble-Seymour-Crippen House in the Norwood Park neighborhood was built in 1833. (However, Norwood Park was not annexed to Chicago until 1893.) The Clarke House was designated a Chicago Landmark on October 14, 1970. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 6, 1971.
History of the University of Chicago
The old Bronzeville campus left a deep and lasting legacy on the University of Chicago. The affinity for Gothic architecture first began in 1857 at the Bronzeville campus as did the University of Chicago's tradition of public debate as sport. The current quarter system practiced at the University of Chicago was an innovation that began at the Bronzeville campus and continues uninterrupted to this day. Alumni from the pre-1890 Bronzville campus are recognized as alumni of the University of Chicago today while more than half of the university's post-1890 trustees and donors (including its largest donor John D. Rockefeller) had a relationship to the University of Chicago prior to 1890. The university's current mascot of a Phoenix rising from the ashes is a reference to the fire, foreclosure, and demolition of the original Bronzeville campus with the current Hyde Park campus emerging triumphantly in its place. As an homage to this pre-1890 legacy a single stone from the rubble of the original Douglas Hall in Bronzeville was brought to the current Hyde Park location and set into the wall of the Classics Building. To honor Stephen A. Douglas, a bronze bust of the university's founding donor was placed in Hutchinson Commons which is today the main dining hall and student center on campus. All told these connections have led the Dean of the College and University of Chicago and Professor of History John Boyer to conclude that the University of Chicago has a "plausible genealogy as a pre– Civil War institution".
The University of Chicago's Hyde Park campus began in 1890 through the efforts of the American Baptist Education Society and oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, who later called it "the best investment I ever made." The University of Chicago held its first classes there on October 1, 1892. The original tract of land, comprising the current main quads, was donated by Marshall Field, owner of the Marshall Field and Company department store chain. The modern university emerged from a reorganization of the predecessor institution of the same name, later renamed as the Old University of Chicago. The earlier institution was founded by prominent members of the Chicago and greater Illinois community including Justice Stephen A. Douglas and Chicago Mayor James Hutchinson Woodworth. Graduates of the Old Chicago University were later assimilated into the ranks of the alumni of the University of Chicago.