Racist actions of previous namesake lead to change for historic Glencoe cottage

The Booth Cottage is now the Ravine Bluffs Cottage, according to the structure’s owner, the Glencoe Historical Society Board of Directors, which in a news release announced that Sherman Booth’s racist actions in the early 20th century led to the decision.

The society recently found out that Booth was behind the Glencoe Homes Association, which in the 1920s schemed to keep people of color, specifically the Black community, as well as individuals of Italian and Greek descent, out of Glencoe. Local researchers uncovered that Booth was the organization’s general counsel and secretary who issued and notarized deeds with racist covenants, among other documents.

Booth reportedly continued his deplorable efforts to displace Black residents by weaponizing the Glencoe Park District’s eminent domain power.

The historical society’s release says that Booth’s activities were pivotal to the Black population in Glencoe dropping from 9.9% in 1920 to 4.9% in 1930 and to less than 1% today.

“Going forward, the Cottage will be known as the Ravine Bluffs Cottage. We cannot change our history, but we are committed to truthfully reporting it and learning from the mistakes of those who came before us,” the society’s board said in a statement.

The cottage

Booth and his wife, Elizabeth, bought a 15-acre plot of land in Glencoe in 1910. Booth’s friend and client, Frank Lloyd Wright, designed the Booth family’s cottage that was built in 1913 as a temporary home while a larger one was constructed.

The cottage was sold in 1916 and then moved to 239 Franklin Road. It remained there for 100 years, and in 2020 was at risk of demolition by the property’s new owners. A movement to save the cottage began, and in July 2020, the Glencoe Historical Society — in conjunction with the Glencoe Park District and Village of Glencoe — moved it to Park 7N, or Ravine Bluffs Park, which was originally land owned by Booth.

The board’s co-president Karen Ettelson said that at the time of the move the historical society was unaware of his significant role in Glencoe redlining, and Booth, generally, held a positive place in Glencoe history prior to the recent research.

Booth’s legacy

Not long after the move, the historical society began developing a special Black history exhibit, Glencoe Black Heritage, which opened in 2022.

Even after the exhibit was up, researchers continued to dig into Glencoe’s history of racist housing practices. Ettelson said it took multiple trips to the county recorder of deeds to get the full picture, including that Booth played a “commanding” role in a scheme to displace Glencoe’s Black community.

“The documentation we found was showing a substantially greater role on his part, a leadership role, than we had previously known,” Ettelson said. “When we moved the cottage, we didn’t know about it at all. … This was a surprise.”

In the 1920s, the Glencoe Homes Association, of which Booth was a leader, raised money to buy up minority-owned Glencoe properties through a secretive land trust that Booth created.

The deeds to the land, which Booth signed, included covenants prohibiting sale or occupancy to “anyone who is not a caucasian.” Detail was later added to the covenants’ language, declaring “that said premises shall never be sold to, used or occupied by what are commonly known as Negroes, or Italians, or Greeks, or descendants thereof and that if this provision is violated … then the title thereto shall revert” to the Glencoe Homes Association.

Historical society research shows the Glencoe Homes Association bought and put racial covenants on hundreds of properties.

When protest began to stall the GHA practices, Booth became a founding officer of the Glencoe Park District and used the agency to further keep land from people of color. He reportedly encouraged the park district to use eminent domain to create parks and swallow land along Green Bay Road, South School and what is now Watts Park. This removed many Black and Italian homeowners from the community.

Hilde Carter is a director with the historical society. A Black girl growing up in Glencoe, Carter noticed the town’s segregation and other things — parks along Green Bay Road, open fields where there should be homes — that didn’t make sense to her. The society’s research gave her some answers.

“As a young adult, you assumed (Glencoe) was segregated because it was segregated,” she said. “The shocking thing for me was to find out how it was segregated. It was shocking to everyone on the board.”

Time for a change

The research related to Booth was compiled and presented to the historical society’s board of directors. The directors discussed the issue at length, and Ettelson said every director — all 22 — participated. The vote in December 2023 to remove Booth’s name from the cottage was unanimous.

“The rewarding thing about it was when the board found out, they voted unanimously,” said Carter, who has lived in Highland Park for 30 years. “It felt very good that they did that, because they didn’t have to.”

Since the decision, the historical society has worked with the Glencoe Park District to receive approval for new signage for the Ravine Bluffs Cottage.

The name change is a positive step for Glencoe, said Ettelson, who added that the historical society does not usually have the power for direct change.

She said the cottage is special because of its architecture and affiliation with Frank Lloyd Wright, not because of its first owner. In the future, the historical society hopes to explain that and more in a museum near the site of the cottage, Ettelson said.

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