The Tremont House, Chicago’s most venerable hotel and one of the most storied, went through multiple incarnations as it fell victim to three different Chicago fires. The first Tremont House, a three-story wooden building at the northwest corner of Lake and Dearborn streets, was built in 1833, the same year Chicago became a town and four years before it was incorporated as a city. This burned in an 1839 fire. The second, which met a similar fate ten years later, was also three stories and was located diagonally across the street, on the southeast corner of the same intersection.
This Jevne & Almini lithograph is of the third Tremont House, located on the same site as the second. which enjoyed for a time a reputation as the leading hotel in the West. The view here is south along Dearborn Street. Five stories, built of brick, and including 260 rooms, the hotel was the work of architect John M. Van Osdel. It was among the largest buildings to be lifted when Chicago raised its grade beginning in the 1850s.
The Tremont House figured importantly in the famed senatorial election of 1858. In Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery: In the Crucible of Public Debate, David Zarefsky describes the evening of July 9, when Douglas launched his campaign with a speech from the hotel’s balcony. Lincoln, in Chicago for the opening session of the United States District Court, was in attendance. When he heard Douglas attack his “House Divided” speech as endorsing radical abolitionism, Lincoln announced that he would appear at the hotel the following evening, as he did, to respond.
Although Douglas owned an estate named Oakenwald that overlooked the Illinois Central tracks and the lake at Thirty-Fifth Street, he would often stay at the Tremont House when he was in Chicago. He arrived in the city for what would be the last time on May 1, 1861, less than three weeks after the outbreak of the Civil War, and checked in to the hotel. He became suddenly ill from a combination of maladies and passed away there on June 3. He was entombed in a section of Oakenwald that is now a tiny state park. The tomb includes a 96-foot column atop which is a statue of the Little Giant that is visible from Lake Shore Drive.
