Before the family moved to Joliet, Illinois, some fourteen miles from Chelsea, William Van Horne’s world was defined by the homestead and its immediate surroundings. Most important was the spacious log house built on the brow of a hill overlooking a valley. In the woods, not far from the house, was a stable and other log outbuildings, while nestled in the valley, beside Hickory Creek, was a largely inactive sawmill.
When he was six years old, young William began attending school. Weather permitting, he would trudge a couple of miles to the small schoolhouse, undoubtedly a one-room building, where children of all ages were taught by a single teacher in a room heated by a wood-burning stove. To reach this Spartan place of instruction, he made his way through woods, hoping all the while that he would not encounter one of the wolves that also made its home there.
These rambles sowed the seeds for two hobbies that would become lifelong passions — paleontology and art. He had few toys to play with, so he began to collect pebbles from the stream that flowed at the base of the hill near his home. One day, when he was still very young, he found a thin piece of shiny black stone.
He eagerly scooped it up, but, to his great disappointment, it changed to a lacklustre grey as it dried. Still, he carried it home to his resourceful mother, hoping she would be able to restore its bright colour. She could not, but she did something even better.
She told William that his stone was a piece of slate and that he could use it to make marks on another piece of slate. Intrigued, he began to scratch on slate at every opportunity and soon moved on to crude drawings of children, dogs, and horses. When the soft slate wore out and he could not find any more pieces to replace it, he turned to drawing on the white-washed walls of the family home. Mary, who also had a gift for art, encouraged him to continue, and Cornelius aided and abetted the cause by bringing home chalks and pencils from Joliet. Before long, young William had covered every wall in the house, as high as his small arm could reach, with drawings. His parents had opened a new world of art to him, and, in time, he became a proficient amateur artist.
When William was seven, his parents took him with them on one of their visits to Joliet, a small town some thirty-seven miles southwest of Chicago and named after the French-Canadian explorer Louis Joliet. It was William’s first trip outside the valley, and he never forgot how awestruck he was by the number of two-storey houses he found in the town. The following year, 1851, Cornelius moved the whole family to Joliet, no doubt to obtain better schooling for his children and more opportunities for himself. All at once, young William’s horizons expanded dramatically.
Joliet, a flourishing town of some two thousand inhabitants, seemed huge and impressive to the young boy. It had a school, a church, a courthouse, shops, and also the National Hotel, with such wonders as fresh spring water in its basement kitchen and a bell system connecting the rooms to the office. Ever since the opening of the Illinois-Michigan canal in 1848, this landmark hostelry had provided accommodation for the thousands of passengers who travelled by boat along those waters. And, when the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad came to Joliet in 1852, the hotel began shuttling passengers from its front door to the station in a bright yellow bus drawn by a team of grey horses.
No sooner had Cornelius Van Horne resumed his law practice and settled the family into their new home than he plunged into municipal politics. In 1852 Joliet was incorporated as a city and, in its first municipal election, Cornelius was elected mayor. As he also served as justice of the peace for Joliet and Will County, he had considerable status in the community.
William revelled in the new opportunities he found in Joliet for collecting rocks and in his free time eagerly explored the grasslands along the banks of the Des Plaines River. He noticed that some of the rocks contained fossils, so added a separate category in his collection for them. One day he found a perfect trilobite outline embedded in a stone on Joliet’s main street, and he returned that night with a hammer to chip it out. So began his hobby of collecting fossils, and, in the course of his life, he would discover and classify many new species. Like so many other Victorians, he became a zealous naturalist, keen not only to build up his collections but to organize them, too.
In his later years, William Van Horne became convinced that every boy should have a hobby that involved a collection of some sort. There was no better way to prepare the mind for complex management, he wrote to a friend:
The best thing a boy can do is to begin to collect. Let him collect something — I don’t care what it is — and you will find he begins to notice, and from noticing, he begins to classify and arrange. Interest develops, and wherever he goes there is nothing connected with his collection about which he is not keenly interested. The real education for a boy is simply a matter of impressions. These cannot be selected for him, but they colour the whole of his life.
The school that William attended in Joliet was typical of its time: it drilled him in the “Three Rs” — reading, writing, and arithmetic — but covered little more. Nevertheless, despite the dull routine and strict discipline, he mastered the basic skills well. He also became an avid reader, grabbing every book he could lay his hands on and soaking up knowledge like a sponge.
Young William’s love of books even caused him to switch Sunday schools. He and his brother Augustus initially went to the one at the church their mother attended, St. John’s Universalist Church. When William heard that the Methodist Sunday school had “the better books,” he persuaded his parents to let him go there. And so he was exposed to the teachings of Methodism, whose emphasis on self-denial, personal holiness, and careful stewardship helped to inspire the lives of many well-known capitalists, such as Sir Joseph Flavelle, one of Canada’s most respected businessmen and philanthropists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If these qualities helped Flavelle in his meteoric rise from humble beginnings to celebrated businessman and financier, they probably influenced William, too — even though he had no interest in organized religion as an adult.
William’s world was suddenly shattered in July 1854, when he was only eleven: his father came down with cholera and died. Although he left no description of how his father’s death affected him personally, this loss must have been profound. It was probably responsible for the bouts of melancholy that afflicted him in the years just before his marriage. Cornelius Van Horne left a good name, but, his son did say, he also left “a lot of accounts payable and some bad accounts receivable.” As a lawyer, he seldom took fees, and, even when he possessed not a penny himself, he often refused payment for his services. In a draft letter written to his grandson decades later, William Van Horne confessed, “I could not understand it then, and I am not quite sure that I do now, but this occurred in a newly settled country where all were poor alike.”
Mary was left with five children to raise and, ever resourceful and courageous, she managed to keep “bread,” usually hominy, on the table by taking in sewing and by selling produce from her garden. Even so, the family was forced to move from a comfortable home with spacious grounds to a small cottage. While still a child, William learned that life is a struggle and that his progress through it would depend to a great extent on his own efforts.
To help support his family, William worked whenever he could out of school hours, splitting logs and delivering telegraph messages from Joliet’s telegraph operators. While waiting for the messages, he listened carefully to the tapping instrument and watched the tape slowly unwind as it spelled out the message in dashes and dots. Later he wrote: “I was put on the station service and as I was very young, the men didn’t mind my asking questions, and what is more, they answered them and told me things.” He learned more than anyone realized at the time, and it is quite probable that this new technology subtly but effectively gave him a sense of the larger world beyond Joliet.
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