Eagle's Nest Art Colony photographs

Scope and Contents

Black and white photographs copied from original lantern slides and photographs include portraits of many colonists, the interiors and exteriors of their cabins and group pictures of costumed campers in pageants and processions.

Biographical / Historical

Eagle's Nest Colony was established in 1897 as a summer home by a group of Chicago artists and writers led by Lorado Taft. Artists Ralph Clarkson, Nellie V. Walker, Charles Francis Browne, and Oliver Dennett Grover; writers Hamlin Garland and Henry Blake Fuller; poet Harriet Monroe, and architects Allen and Irving Pond were among the residents who shared 13 acres of forest on a Rock River bluff. The campers staged outdoor plays, lectured, and contributed paintings to exhibitions at the local library. Lorado Taft's "Black Hawk," a reinforced concrete sculpture, was a gift to the colony. Following Taft's death in 1936, their lease continued until the death of the last original signer, which was portrait artist Ralph Clarkson in 1942. The camp was acquired by Northern Illinois State Teachers College (now Northern Illinois University) in 1950.