What’s in a name? How the popular North Side neighborhood came to be known as Andersonville
CHICAGO — Nestled in the larger Edgewater community area on Chicago’s North Side, Andersonville is one of many unique neighborhoods that make up the city’s fabric.
Its Chamber of Commerce website says, “Andersonville is known for its Swedish roots, historic architecture, and bustling urban main street, Clark Street. When you arrive in Andersonville, you feel you have arrived someplace special.”
Andersonville is home to one of Chicago’s largest LGBTQ+ populations and, according to its Chamber of Commerce, is also recognized as the “shop local capital of Chicago” for supporting a large network of local and independent businesses.
If you go by the City Neighborhoods Map, passed by City Council in 1993, Andersonville is bordered by the neighborhoods Bowmanville to the east and Ravenswood to the south and is enveloped by the rest of Edgewater to the north and east.
It also sits across from the Uptown community area to the southeast and is across from Rosehill Cemetery, Chicago’s largest and oldest cemetery, to the northeast.
By these metrics, the major streets comprising the borders of Andersonville are North Ravenswood Avenue on the west, West Foster Ave. on the south, West Bryn Mawr Ave. on the north and North Magnolia Ave. on the East.
Of course, borders are often a matter of interpretation when it comes to Chicago’s neighborhoods, depending on who you ask — like real-estate agents, for example — so Andersonville can also be considered as extending further east into Edgewater and southeast into Uptown.
Whatever the interpretation, North Clark Street is at the heart of Andersonville.
Why the name?
So, how did the neighborhood come to be known as Andersonville?
The answer is essentially a business decision.
According to the non-profit Edgewater Historical Society in a website post about the beginnings of the Andersonville Chamber of Commerce, merchants in the 1960s were looking for something to revitalize the neighborhood’s once-vibrant commercial strip, which was starting to become dotted with empty storefronts.
The “Uptown” moniker previously applied, the EHS says, had developed negative connotations, so business leaders were seeking a different name for their commercial district, one that would honor the Swedish heritage of the area.
The area was officially dedicated as Andersonville, the EHS says, on Oct. 17, 1964, with a parade and speeches by Gov. Otto Kerner, Sen. Charles Percy and Mayor Richard J. Daley.
The EHS says a June 20, 1969, Chicago Tribune article by Mary Daniels credits the naming of the neighborhood as Andersonville to Dr. Grant Johnson. The surname Anderson, with its “-son” suffix, denotes a Swedish lineage, which is very prominent in the neighborhood.
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In a phone interview with WGN, LeRoy Blommaert — one of the founding members of the EHS, who has probably researched more about the history of Edgewater than anyone — confirmed Andersonville’s naming origins.
But Blommaert also noted that when Dr. Johnson chose the name, it was meant only to apply to the commercial district there. Over the years, however, residential areas north, east and south of the commercial district also came to be considered Andersonville.
“It was successful beyond his wildest dreams,” Blommaert said of the doctor’s choice of the Andersonville name.
And that name has developed a sterling reputation, which has only allowed the neighborhood to extend its borders. As mentioned, these can be fluid, so real-estate agents and developers won’t hesitate to put a little extra shine on any properties near the area by claiming they’re in Andersonville.
“Andersonville has positive cache,” Blommaert says.
Named after a plaque?
While we know why Andersonville first got the name it carries today, why was it named that way? There has to be some notable Anderson from the first part of the name Andersonville, right?
Well, yes. But who exactly that Anderson was, how the Andersonville title should actually have been spelled, and why Dr. Johnson chose that name, render an interesting historical tale.
As you would assume, Andersonville got its moniker from someone’s surname, but that’s not why Dr. Johnson chose it.
Blommaert did some digging on that, and he laid out his conclusions in a summer 2011 entry that’s on the EHS website archives. You can check out his full article HERE.
It’s a lot of history to sift through, and Blommaert does a great job of it. Here are the main conclusions he reached about why Dr. Johnson chose Andersonville:
There was an old school in the neighborhood, where a Lake View township organizing meeting was held in 1857.
On the building that replaced the old school, a bronze plaque was placed to commemorate it and the significant meeting that was held there.
The name of the school was Andersonville, as commemorated on the plaque.
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So, Blommaert concluded and affirmed with WGN, it’s actually the plaque, not a person or even the school named Andersonville itself — which was gone by then — that was “undoubtedly” the reason for why Dr. Johnson chose Andersonville as a name for the commercial district in the 1960s.
So it wasn’t a person’s name, but a school’s name, that inspired the doctor’s decision.
Who was Anderson (or Andersen)?
So now we know why Andersonville got the name that stuck and why it was chosen.
But that still doesn’t answer this question: Who was Anderson? If the neighborhood was named after a school that was commemorated on a plaque, then why was that school named Andersonville in the first place?
Now the story gets more tangled.
At one time, Blommaert confirmed, it was believed that the Andersonville moniker came from John Anderson, who in the late 1840s acquired land north of the area.
The “-son” suffix in Anderson would line up with the Swedish heritage Andersonville is known for.
So this is a logical answer to explain why people figured the old school was named Andersonville, and why the neighborhood carries that name today: John Anderson came to the area with a Swedish lineage, a school was named after him, and business leaders in modern times decided to go with that name, too.
But not so fast.
In his research, Blommaert has found that Andersonville was not named after John Anderson at all. The facts just don’t line up.
For one, John Anderson’s farm wasn’t even in the location we call Andersonville today. For another, Swedes didn’t really begin settling in large numbers to the area until after 1905, which is when residential and commercial development in what is now Andersonville really started to grow.
As for the old school named Andersonville, Blommaert says that came from the subdivision in the area that first bore the Andersonville name.
And the man who inspired that subdivision’s name, Blommaert concludes, was Rev. Paul Andersen, a Norwegian. Note the important distinction between the “-son” and “-sen” suffixes, with “-sen” being of Norwegian descent.
Blommaert found this major evidence in his summer 2011 article:
A special “Andersonville” special from the Oct. 7, 1964, edition of the Swedish American Tribune states that “Andersonville owes its name to Rev. Paul Andersen,” and the school — and therefore the plaque later commemorating the school — was named after Andersen, not Anderson.
This story gives no source for its claim, but there was indeed a Rev. Paul Andersen, and a short history of his life and work was provided by A.T. Andreas in his “History of Chicago (Vol. 1),” published in 1884.
According to Andreas’s work, Andersen was born in Norway in 1821, came to Chicago in 1848, founded the First Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church, and assisted Swedish immigrants new to Chicago, which gave rise to the city’s first Swedish Lutheran Church.
Therefore, according to the facts, it seems clear that Rev. Paul Andersen is indeed the man behind the Andersonville name, not John Anderson.
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Unfortunately, Blommaert says, you can’t find the document from the founding of the original Andersonville subdivision in the mid-1800s to truly prove it. That’s because those records were destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.
There is one final question: If the neighborhood owes its name to Rev. Paul Andersen — who died in October 1891 — and not John Anderson, then why is it Andersonville and not Andersenville?
Blommaert has done extensive research on that, too, and he’s concluded — as is often the case with historical research — that there’s no satisfactory answer.
Most likely, Blommaert reasons, it’s all just due to clerical discrepancies. He notes that Andersen’s own name was often spelled differently, referencing newspaper clippings and area directories that used an “o,” while his obituary in the Tribune used an “e.”
It wasn’t unusual for immigrant surnames to be misspelled or changed upon arrival in America in those days, so the simple morphing of Andersenville to Andersonville in popular usage is a very plausible scenario.
Whatever the origins or intended usage of the name, one fact is clear: Andersonville is what everyone calls the neighborhood today, and that probably won’t change anytime soon.
So after all his research, Blommaert says he’s developed a simple answer if asked why Andersonville is called what it is today.
“An ancient name that was resurrected later to mean something different,” he says.
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