Ann Hamilton Manierre (Reid)

Ann Hamilton Reid was born October 23, 1823 (said Katharine Newbury Manierre), in Scotland. (Julie Manierre Mann said AHR was born there, but that her birth date was October 14, 1825)

She was the daughter of William Reid and Mary Drew Reid. She had many siblings. One, a brother named George Reid, continued to live in Fontana, Wisconsin, in the family homestead, which their father established in the mid 1840s, George and his wife Dorliska had at least one child, named Edna Reid. Edna and her husband Henry Kemmett Sr. lived in Fontana. Their son Donald Kemmett had a son, Henry Kemmett Jr. (Waubun Drive), and a nephew, Jon Kemmett (844 Featherstone Drive), who live in Fontana to this day (2009).

Ann Hamilton Reid married George Manierre I either in Fontana, WI, or in Detroit, Michigan on September 17, 1842.

Ann Hamilton Reid Manierre’s husband George died at the age of 47 in 1863. At that time, the Manierre family was living in a wood-constructed house at 180 Michigan Avenue, on the corner of Jackson, less than one block south of where the Art Institute of Chicago now stands. Britannica Centre (originally known as the Straus Building) was erected on the site in 1924. It was the first building in Chicago with 30 or more floors. (MRD: George Manierre IV told me in the 1970s that a bronze plaque in the lobby of Britannica Centre displays an image of the Manierre house.)

Across the roadway from the Manierres’ Michigan Avenue home was a wide lagoon bound on the east by a railroad causeway.

After her husband died in 1863, Mrs. Manierre continued to occupy the Michigan Avenue house until the time of the “Great Chicago Fire” of October 8-10, 1871, when this disaster consumed the house and a huge area around it. Fortunately no member of the Manierre family was injured by the blaze. The fire began with the burning of the O’Leary barn, one mile south-southwest of the Manierre house, at about 8:30 pm on October 8. Prevailing wind blew toward the north and east. By 2:30 am it crossed the south branch of the Chicago River at Polk Street, and by sunrise had reached the neighborhood of the Manierre residence. A map of the fire published in 1871 (the third edition by the R.P. Studley Company, St. Louis) shows that the Manierre house was just a couple of city blocks within the area which was consumed by the fire.

In its reporting about residents at the fire’s southern edges, the Chicago Tribune reported on October 11, “With ample time to move all that was movable, and with a foreboding of what was coming, in their neighborhood at least, they were out and in safety long before the flames reached their dwellings.” People fled in all directions, thousands in the direction of Lake Michigan’s beaches, some even entering the chilly waters in order to escape the inferno.

There is a 1871 photo by Jex Bardwell is of Trinity Episcopal Church. It stood a very short distance from the Manierre house on the south side of Jackson Street between Michigan and Wabash (the next street to the west).

There is a dramatization of the great fire in the Oscar winning 1937 motion picture In Old Chicago, starring Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, and Don Ameche. The fire occupies the last 25 minutes of this Twentieth Century Fox film. It was issued on DVD in 2005.

Much of the rubble from buildings destroyed by the fire was dumped into the long railroad lagoon across from the Manierre home. What then became new land was eventually developed as Grant Park.

Google's satellite photo taken of the intersection of Michigan Avenue (across the center of the picture, from left to right) and Jackson Street shows an interesting contemporary view of what was the Manierre property.

In 1876 Ann Hamilton Reid Manierre built for herself the stone and brick house pictured here, at 1928 Calumet Avenue. The site is a mile and a half south of the previous house, and similarly, faced Lake Michigan, and was as close to it as any building could be. She was 53 at the time, and had been a widow for thirteen years. Her children, well before she moved in, were each living in their own homes.

The area is steeped in Chicago's history. In 1812, the area was the site of the so-called Fort Dearborn Massacre, where hostile Indians attacked a band of European settlers. Following the Fire of 1871, Prairie Avenue, one block to the west, became the center of Chicago's most fashionable neighborhood, home to the wealthy Armour, Kimball, and Pullman families and once referred to as the "sunny street that held the siften few." Marshall Field, founder of the great Chicago department store, and the wealthiest man in Chicago, lived at 1905 Prairie Avenue, right behind Mrs. Manierre’s house.

In 1979 the 1800 and 1900-blocks of South Prairie Avenue were designated the “Prairie Avenue District,” a Chicago landmark. Although many of the mansions were demolished in the mid-20th century, one of the few remaining buildings which provide a sense of the neighborhood's former character is the Glessner House at 1800 S. Prairie Avenue. It was designed by Boston architect Henry Hobson Richardson, and built in 1886. It is open for public tours.

A look at a contemporary satellite photo of the site of Mrs. Manierre’s Calumet Avenue house presents an industrialized neighborhood near tracks of the Illinois Central Railway, to the east of which are South Lake Shore Drive, Soldier Field and McCormick Place.

In 1898 the Chicago Tribune published a story about the demographic changes that accompanied and encouraged the transformation of Prairie Avenue from Chicago's grand residential street into an industrial enclave. Implicit in the story’s description of a street of widows and widowers was the awareness that their children had moved to newer elite communities on the North Side or more distant from the city's center, just as the Manierre children had. This generational change had occurred in other places of course, but it was unusual in this neighborhood, because its industrial surroundings were undesirable to those who could afford its houses, and its houses were too expensive for those who might accept the location.

Toward the end of her life, Mrs. Manierre also maintained a summer home at Saranac Lake, New York, and sometimes wintered in Bermuda.

She died June 9, 1900, at 76 years.

The news of Ann Hamilton Reid Manierre’s death appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune newspaper, June 9, 1900, page 7. The picture of Ann Hamilton Reid Manierre displayed here was printed in Mrs. Manierre's obituary in a Chicago newspaper in 1900.

Average American life expectancy in 1900 was 47 years. In 1950 it reached 68 years. Although her husband died at the age of 46 in 1863, Ann managed to survive 29 years longer than he had. (Average life expectancy in classical Greece and Rome was 28, and in Medieval Britain it was 33, In America in 2003 it was 77.5. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ and wikipedia.org)

Herbert Reid, the Reid family historian cites the following reference to the birth of Ann Hamilton Reid from the Baptismal Register for Glasgow City Parish: "William Reid, writer, and Mary Drew, a lawful dau., Ann Hamilton, born 23rd Oct. Witnesses, Dr. John Nimmo and Dr. John Gibson." [Herbert Reid, M.C., M.A., H.C.F., The Reids of Kittochside, Part II (Distributed for the author by John Smith & Son (Glasgow), Ltd., 57 St. Vincent Street, Glasgow C.2., 1945), page 40].

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From a calendar of evidence

regarding the family of William Reid and Mary Elizabeth Drew

prepared (2010) by Neil Reid Ford:

23 October 1823. William Reid, Writer, & Mary Drew a law: daur. Ann Hamilton bo: 23d Oct: Wit: John Nimmo & John Gibson.

Source: Registrar General for Scotland, New Register House, Edinburgh, Baptismal Register for Glasgow, reference OPR.644.1/33, frame 3810.

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