Chicago

Place

Coordinates

41.8819° N, 87.6278° WGoogle Maps: ChicagoDownload KML

Eras

Modern era

Concepts

communityreligionmigrationmaritime

Summary

Chicago is a major Great Lakes city on Lake Michigan’s southwestern shore. This article is limited to Chicago’s documented ties to Beaver Island: it was a destination for islanders who left to work or marry there, the home of an organized diaspora club that raised money for the island’s Catholic parish for at least a decade, and a home port for yachts, including Chicago-Mackinac race entrants, that called at the island’s harbor. It is not a general article about the city.

History

The Beaver Beacon records a “Chicago Beaver Island Club” (also called the “Beaver Island Club of Chicago”) active from at least 1955 into the mid-1960s, with its ongoing generosity toward the parish still being commemorated in 1975 and 1977 (below). The club held annual parties, several timed to Saint Patrick’s Day, and used them to raise money for Holy Cross Church on the island: a 1955 notice records a $319.00 gift toward the church’s oil heating system, and a May 1965 notice records $300.00 sent to the church from that year’s Chicago party. Beacon issues through the period name island residents who traveled to Chicago to attend the club’s events, indicating an active, two-way relationship between island families and Chicago-based relatives and former residents rather than a one-time gift.

The Chicago club’s giving was formally memorialized on the island. In October 1975 Holy Cross Parish announced plans to dedicate one of a set of new church lights to the memory of the Beaver Island Club of Chicago’s members, paired with a companion light for the Beaver Island Club of Grand Rapids, a sister diaspora organization that made similar gifts to the parish. The lights were dedicated at a ceremony after Sunday Mass in June 1977, at which Fr. Alvin Yard stated that “the generosity of the Chicago Beaver Island Club over the years helped in many ways to keep the parish thriving,” while Francis E. Pike represented the Grand Rapids club. A March 2011 Beacon retrospective, dated to 1961, records the “7th annual Beaver Island Club of Chicago’s party,” announced for the Eagles Hall with a corned beef and cabbage dinner at the Parish Hall — a seventh annual event in 1961 consistent with a founding around 1954-55, though this account names a different venue than the St. Kevin’s Church Hall used for a separately recorded Chicago fundraising party in later decades (see Rev. William Bernard Scheid); no source read for this article states whether the two are the same event.

Individual out-migration to Chicago is also documented: the March 1957 obituary of Margaret “Aunt Maggie” Boyle, born on the island, records that she left for Chicago at 19, married there, and after her husband’s death returned to live on the island, while her son Jack Boyle remained in Chicago. Numerous shorter Beacon notices from the 1950s and 1960s record births, engagements, and deaths among island-connected families living in Chicago, consistent with an established pattern of relocation rather than isolated cases.

Chicago also appears in the record as a yachting connection. Boats hailing from Chicago, including entrants returning from the Chicago-Mackinac race, are recorded calling at Beaver Island’s harbor through the 1950s, and in 1960 crews from the yachts Sabre and Gypsy, race participants, organized the Beaver Island Yacht Club at the King Strang Hotel following that year’s race.

Significance

The Chicago Beaver Island Club is the clearest documented instance in the held corpus of an organized off-island diaspora group supporting the island’s church, and its activity spans at least a decade in the Beacon record. Chicago’s yachting connection, through the Chicago-Mackinac race, is a separate and more occasional tie, tied to the island’s position on a recreational sailing route rather than to emigration or institutional support.

Added 1 August 2026 · revised 9 August 2026. Recent changes