Residents and staff celebrate Dundee Avenue Corridor

Residents and Elgin city staff shared concerns and celebrated successes in the Dundee Avenue corridor and nearby neighborhood on Tuesday during a walk hosted by the Summit Park Neighborhood Association and Settlement.

The one-hour tour, which took participants from Arthur Newsome Park at the northwest corner of Dundee Avenue and Kimball Boulevard, down Dundee and to a historic home on Fremont Street, was designed to open communication among residents and city staff.

Residents shared dreams for future development opportunities along Dundee, including a mix-used condominium development, more streetscape improvements such as brick pavers and parkway trees and enhanced pedestrian crossings on Dundee at Kimball and Summit Street.

During the walk, which included RuthAnne Hall from the Elgin city manager's office; Tom Armstrong, the city's principal planner; representatives from the Boys and Girls Club of Elgin and several residents, participants stopped to view the varied types of buildings on Dundee between Summit Street and Kimball Boulevard.

Hall told the participants the city has purchased one vacant property at the northwest corner of Ann and Dundee for future redevelopment. Immediately south of Lee Auto Parts, the property abuts a large vacant parcel which could be redeveloped in the future.

"The city tries to facilitate redevelopment by assembling parcels like this," she told the group. "We have not solicited building proposals yet."

Participants also learned the city is applying for possibly upward of $100,000 from a Safe Routes to School Grant through the Illinois Department of Transportation. The money could make the area more bike and pedestrian friendly, with enhanced crosswalks on Dundee, and more portable pedestrian signs, and bike racks at Sheridan Elementary, Ellis Middle and as many as 20 other Elgin Area District U-46 schools ringing the downtown.

The grant would also potentially educate parents and students on the health benefits of walking and riding a bike to school.

The tour group concluded its walk in front of the neighborhood's resident officer home on Fremont Street - one block from a site the neighborhood is hoping to erect a bronze historical plaque, which for the first time will commemorate the history of an eight-block area originally known as the Settlement this fall.

The Settlement, Elgin's original African-American neighborhood from the 1860s to desegregation in the 1960s, had its roots in slave refugees from the south as early as 1863.

One prominent resident of the Settlement neighborhood was Arthur Newsome. Newsome was the first trustee of Elgin's Second Baptist Church and for a half century was the patriarchal leader of Elgin's African-American community. Newsome Park is named after him.

According to E.C. "Mike" Alft, Newsome was born a slave on the Newsome plantation in North Carolina around 1826. While still a child, he was taken to northwestern Alabama where the Newsome's found more fertile cotton land near the village of Cherokee in the Tennessee River Valley.

As an adult, Newsome's master approved his marriage to a woman who bore him three children during their seven-year union. When the master died and the estate was divided among his sons, Newsome's wife and children were auctioned off to a plantation in Arkansas. Despite pleas to be sold with them, the new master valued Newsome's services in the fields too much to part with him. A request to visit his family at Christmas by traveling on foot was also denied, and he was mated to another woman, Minerva.

Floggings on the Newsome plantation were frequent, but the Civil War awakened a hope of freedom, according to Alft. Soon after the battle of Shiloh on April 6-7, 1862, Union forces occupied portions of northern Alabama and many slaves fled behind federal lines. Among them were Newsome, who was put to work driving wagons for a Minnesota regiment; and Minerva, who was among the contrabands' captured enemy property sent north to Elgin in October 1862.

On March 17, 1863, a homeward-bound Minnesota soldier brought Newsome to Elgin. Newsome built many homes on Ann Street.

Small and wiry, but a hard worker, according to Alft, Newsome once told a group of African-American children, "If there is a dollar floating around this country, I get a cent of it, and so may everybody here, but they've got to 'wrestle' for it."

Born a slave and only semiliterate, Newsome lived to see a grandson graduate from Elgin High School. He died a free man in 1913 in the house he had built on Ann Street, according to Alft.