Beaubien Tavern

Mark Beaubien was a French Canadian innkeeper and fiddler who came to Chicago in 1826, when it was a garrison and a scatter of cabins, and kept the Sauganash Hotel at Wolf Point where the branches of the river meet. It was the city's first hotel and its social centre, and he was one of its best known figures. In 1834 he built a second house, the Exchange Coffee House at the northwest corner of Lake and Wells. Then in 1841 he traded away his interest in the Sauganash. What he took in exchange was a country tavern on the road out of town, built in the 1830s by William Sweet, together with the 106 acre farm around it, at the northwest corner of what are now Ogden Avenue and Fender Road. Beaubien left the city he had helped make for a building on a dirt track, which turned out to be the shrewder position. He put money into the plank road that was coming out of Chicago, and in 1851 he set a tollgate on it beside his own inn, with his son collecting. The tavern ran as lodging, eating house and family home from 1841 until he left in 1859, and for six of those years, from 1851 to 1857, it was a toll station as well. The building outlasted the road that fed it. In 1989 it was dragged east along Ogden Avenue and south on Park Street to Lisle Station Park, where the exterior was restored and it stands among other early structures, which is why an 1830s tavern now sits beside a railway platform rather than at the crossroads it was built to watch.