The North Division, notably the blocks along and just west of Pine Street (now Michigan Avenue), was the preferred neighborhood for successful Old Settlers, those who had come to Chicago mainly in the 1830s and early 1840s, when it was still a small settlement, and helped ensure its future growth by building their businesses and taking an active role in civic leadership. They built large and comfortable homes on sprawling grounds, so near and yet so far from their offices in the South Division and the much more modest dwellings nearby (especially west of Clark Street) where many working class immigrants lived.
Isaac N. Arnold set up residence on the west side of Pine Street in the block between Erie and Huron streets. Arnold was an attorney who came to Chicago from upstate New York. In addition to practicing law, he served in the Illinois and United States House of Representatives, helped form the Free Soil and Republican parties, was active in multiple cultural institutions, and became a close friend and biographer of Abraham Lincoln. Arnold's home, with its extensive art collection, its library of eight thousand books, and its Lincoln memorabilia represented the best of what Old Settler life had to offer.
Writing in Bygone Days in Chicago, his memoir of Chicago in the 1860s, Frederick Francis Cook described (in the present tense) this neighborhood and Arnold's home:
"Not only is every street shaded, but entire wooded squares contain each only a single habitation, usually near its centre, thus enabling their fortunate owners to live in park-like surroundings.... These spacious domains exhibit a native growth remarkable for its variety. The Hon. Isaac N. Arnold is at this period the proud owner of one of these preserves, acquired in the thirties when this region was first platted, and when entire squares, at opportune times, were bought for less than the present value of a single lot, with fifty or more to the square. Mr. Arnold's plot retained much of its original aspect up to the fire, and he could point out among other varieties of timber (as he loved to do) fine specimens of oak, ash, maple, cherry, elm, birch, hickory, and cottonwood."
