Taege Hall, where ‘Arlington Hts.’ officially began

In 1869, Charles Taege built a hardware store in the town of Dunton at the northwest corner of Campbell and Myrtle streets.

It was a brick building, the first of its kind in town, and replaced a wood frame structure that had burned down several years previously. It was a modest store at first, but grew over the years and supplied the local residents and farmers with the tools and goods necessary to perform the tasks of everyday life on the prairie.

The store was so successful and Charles’ command of English so limited, that in the 1890s a lawyer attempted to wrest control of the hardware store from Charles. But now we’re ahead of ourselves, so let’s back up.

Fearing the constant political turmoil in Germany following the failed Revolution of 1848, Charles and his wife Alina had immigrated to the United States in the 1850s. After working briefly as a tinsmith in Sheboygan, Wis., Charles and Alina moved to Long Grove and finally to Dunton in the mid 1860s. By this time they were no longer alone but accompanied by four little ones, William, Yetta, Emil and Charlie Jr.

One can only speculate as to why they left a grove for a treeless prairie. Perhaps it was the growing community of other German-speaking people with whom they could share memories, or, a blank slate onto which they could write their future.

With a horizon so wide, and heavens touching the earth in all directions, perhaps this endless vision gave them the inspiration to build their new life on this new land.

The hardware store prospered and in 1876 “Charles Taege,” as the Cook County Herald reported, “has fitted up a neat hall over his hardware store.”

Aside from one documented event 11 years later, in January 1887, there’s no record of what the hall, then referred to as Taege Hall, was actually used for. If later history is a guide, it likely functioned as a social gathering place as well as a space in which to entertain the community.

Whatever its past significance was, it did meet the occasion on Jan. 18, 1887 when residents, merchants, farmers and laborers of the surrounding area gathered at Taege Hall to vote and ultimately decide the future of their community. From that day on this community would become a village, and the village would be called Arlington Heights.

The ensuing years saw Taege Hall transformed into the first town hall for the new village. Located at the center of town, close to the railroad and home to the new village government, the hardware store soon came into the cross hairs of an unscrupulous lawyer from Chicago, whose intent was to seize control of the store for nonpayment of a note.

The lawyer would have succeeded had not Charles’ two younger sons, Emil and Charlie Jr., come up with the necessary money to pay off the note. The lawyer failed and the store came under the ownership of the two brothers, becoming known as The Taege Bros. Hardware Store. This would last only a few years into the 1890s whereupon the business was dissolved. Emil Taege started a tin company making milk cans and Charlie Jr. went to work for the Mills Company in Chicago which made automated violins and pianos.

Before shuttering the hardware store, Charlie Jr. took possession of a handsome maple workbench that he would continue to use at his home at North Vail and St. James Streets.

Things in life change. Myrtle Avenue would eventually be renamed Dunton Street. The Taege Hardware Store would remain vacant for a number of years before returning as the Landmeier Hardware Store and more recently as Flaherty Jewelers. Taege Hall would be followed by larger and more favorable spaces around town such as Temperance Hall and Koelling’s Hall in the early 1900s and today, The Metropolis Centre for the Performing Arts.

But certain needs do not change, namely the need for a people to come together as a community and unite under a flow of shared emotions. For a brief moment in time, Taege Hall provided the physical space for that to happen, and to happen in a nonsectarian atmosphere. Today, in our time, that physical space is perhaps even more necessary if only to combat the ubiquitous stream of stay-at-home entertainment.

One hundred and twenty-five years ago, hardworking men and women came together to talk about the future. Their commitment to come together under common goals is now our legacy. Today we have that future that they in their time could only dream of. This now becomes our trust and our obligation, making sure that we share in the requirements of maintaining that vision, and to continue to imagine an unbounded future that will play into the hearts and minds of generations to come. The Metropolis Performing Arts Centre can and should be at the center of that vision.

Charles Taege died in 1906, 44 years before I was born. He was my great-great-grandfather. And the workbench that Charlie Jr. saved from the hardware store 120 years ago, I now proudly use everyday in my work.

About the author

Jack Kehe is a piano craftsman and the fifth generation to call Arlington Heights home. He is the owner of <a href="http://www.flahertyjewelers.com/">Piano4te</a>, a piano restoration company in Rolling Meadows, which presently is donating its services and materials in restoring the Baldwin concert grand piano used onstage at The Metropolis Centre for the Performing Arts. He is the great-great grandson of Charles Taege and the grandson of Paul Taege, who was Arlington Heights’ building commissioner in the 1930s and ’40s.