An Everyday Wilderness: Dwight Perkins and the Cook County Forest Preserve

Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, the architect Dwight Perkins spent nearly two decades campaigning to preserve 67,000 acres of native prairie forests surrounding Chicago, efforts that marked him as an early pioneer in the conservation and cultural heritage movements and that ultimately resulted in the creation of the Cook County Forest Preserve in 1913, one of the largest county-owned nature preserves in the United States. Entirely overlooked in histories of preservation, Perkins’s nascent environmentalism challenges many received tenets of the discipline, particularly the assumption that preservation works in opposition to urban market forces and concentrates on singular monuments. The Cook County Forest Preserve was not a sublime, distant landscape but an “everyday wilderness” that was accessible to nearby communities, thus Perkins’s preservation battles were local, concerning ordinary people and everyday spaces. Informed by the social sciences, he viewed the forest preserve as an urban-planning strategy capable of rationalizing urban expansion, not as a counterpoint to the metropolis, and also as a didactic strategy for acculturating diverse ethnic and economic groups to democratic practices. The final result was a plural landscape, both functional and cultural, where nature and the metropolis, imagined histories and extant realities, social ideals and failures, coexisted. Such a complex, layered model of preservation may help expand our definitions of what constitutes cultural landscapes and how those landscapes should be interpreted, as well as provide a sustainable model for a responsible treatment of our lived, not just preserved, environments.