I GREW UP IN GLENVIEW, Illinois, on the edge of a 123-acre forest preserve called The Grove—a large, unpopulated area of forest and prairie meadow that separated my housing development from its nearest neighbors. Just one block from my front door, where a dead-end street gave way abruptly to grass, stone, and weeds, lay the entrance to The Grove. The path was wide and so well worn that bikes could easily navigate through the arch of branches above it.
I was more interested in the smaller, less visible arterial paths that branched off the central trail and into the core of the forest. They gave me an idea: I would use The Grove to become an explorer. To put my idea into action, I planned journeys down these paths that often occupied entire summer days and took me into territory that seemed totally foreign to the suburban streets and cul-de-sacs nearby. I discovered large meadows where the forest opened up to acres of tall native grasses and prairie flowers. I slogged through swampy areas, turning over the waterlogged limbs of fallen trees to uncover the snakes and salamanders that lived beneath them. I crept silently along thick carpets of dust and pine needles, in areas of the forest so densely wooded that nothing grew beneath the tall trees. I went looking for adventure, and found it down every narrow, twisted path.
After dozens of journeys, I finally discovered the true jewel of The Grove, down a barely visible path that zigzagged around low-standing waters, fallen trees, and other formidable forest hurdles. The path ended at the overgrown but once magnificent backyard of a large two-story, wood-planked house. Neglected and abandoned, every detail of the house had faded into the rain-washed, colorless facade. Just the sight of the place set my mind spinning. How could such a home be abandoned? Was everyone who lived there murdered? Maybe, I desperately hoped, the house was haunted! I never climbed the steps of that house to look in through the dust-filmed windows. It was better not to know what it looked like inside. But I trekked in and around its yard at every opportunity, and considered it my own hidden treasure.
Years later, the home’s story became the talk of the entire Glenview community, when the park district took over the property, restored it to its former grandeur, and shared its history with the community. It turns out that the home belonged originally to Dr. John Kennicott, the area’s first physician and a noted horticulturist, who built the majestic gothic revival house in 1845 for his growing family and went on to develop the first major nursery in northern Illinois. But I am especially interested in the story of his son, Robert Kennicott, because it captures the spirit of early frontier entrepreneurialism. Robert grew up in the home I stumbled across in The Grove. His fascination with nature led him to explore the wild areas behind his house, just as I would over one hundred years later. In 1853, the 20-year-old Robert began collecting and cataloging snakes for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Robert was pursuing his first entrepreneurial idea: he wanted to form a national collection of facts, information, and specimens of his country’s natural world. Within just four short years, he helped found the Chicago Academy of Sciences and the Northwestern University natural history museum.
His idea expanded, and his journey continued. In April 1859, he set off on an expedition to collect natural history specimens in the subarctic boreal forests of northwestern Canada and beyond the Arctic tundra. Robert became popular with Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders in the area and encouraged them to collect and send natural history specimens and Indian artifacts to the Smithsonian. In 1864, Robert was part of an expedition to Alaska funded by the Western Union Telegraph to find a possible route for a telegraph line between North America and Russia by way of the Bering Sea. When Robert died just two years later, he was buried at a Kennicott family plot in The Grove, which is now a national historic landmark.1 If the Kennicott house wasn’t haunted, as I’d so desperately wished, it certainly was the home of an entrepreneurial spirit.
I greatly envy Robert Kennicott’s experiences, while feeling a real kinship with the eco-entrepreneurial curiosity and ideas that drove his adventures. I would never have discovered the Kennicott house in its wild, abandoned state if I had stayed with the other kids or kept to the sidewalk that ran safely along the outer perimeter of The Grove. I wouldn’t have seen the open meadows, explored the dank swamps, or thrilled at the hidden treasure of that “haunted” house hidden deep within the trees. Without the driving idea that something worth finding was out there waiting for me, I might not have developed my entrepreneurial spirit—that willingness to step outside the known boundaries to explore what lies beyond them.