THE PIONEER
Price: $1,100.00
Artist: Brian Morgan
Type: Original
Year: 2015
Medium: Vinyl, Acrylic, India Ink on Board
Size: 20" x 16"
Vermont born Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard (1802-1886) came to Chicago as an indentured servant for a fur trader in 1818. By 1834 he had made Chicago his permanent home and went on to become a leading fur trader, land speculator and insurance man. He opened the first meat packing plant and stockyard in Chicago to help supply Fort Dearborn with meat. The Chicago Tribune wrote that he “settled in Chicago, where he built the city’s first hotel, was its first banker, organized and directed the Board of Trade, and built the first water system of hollowed logs.”
“The hardy pioneer days of Chicago seem so far away from these days that it hardly seems possible that they should have been included in the span of one man’s life, Mr. Hubbard has seen the city grow from half a hundred to half a million people,” wrote the Chicago Tribune on Hubbard’s 84th birthday in 1886.
In a speech Hubbard wrote in 1879 he described present day Chicago: “But, true to her past, she is already arisen, more beautiful than ever, and, in spite of the last few years of business depression, is prospering and increasing; is ‘enlarging her boundaries and strengthening her stakes,’ and, I believe, [Chicago] has a future as far beyond my powers of prophecy as the present is greater than the Chicago I first saw, now more than sixty years ago.”
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