The land on which Marina City was built was granted to Illinois by the United States government in the 1820s as part of “canal lots” along a ten-mile-wide strip of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. The canal ran 96 miles from the Chicago River to LaSalle, Illinois, on the Illinois River. Completed in 1848, it established Chicago as a transportation hub by allowing boats passage from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico. With the popularity of railroads, canal traffic slowed in the 1890s and eventually shifted to recreational use.
To raise money to help build the canal, the lots were auctioned and many of the buyers were early settlers. The first owner of the future Marina City site was Dr. Alexander Wolcott, Jr. He paid $685 in cash on September 27, 1830, and died 28 days later.
Wolcott was born in East Windsor, Connecticut, and graduated from Yale in 1809. He moved to Chicago in 1820 as the U.S. Government’s Indian Agent.
His predecessor, Judge Jowett, had started work on an agency house, a simple log cabin on the north side of the Chicago River near what is now North State Street. Wolcott finished the cabin, and it became the first building erected on the property. It would soon earn the nickname “Cobweb Castle” due to Wolcott’s poor housekeeping.
On August 21, 1821, 3,000 Native Americans gathered around the cabin for the signing of a treaty giving the U.S. ownership of five million acres in southwestern Michigan. In return, the Native Americans were paid $6,000 per year (equivalent to about $160,000 today), which they collected at the agency house.
In 1823, Wolcott married Eleanor Marion Kinzie (1804-1860), who was the daughter of pioneer merchant John Kinzie. Eleanor was the first person born in Chicago who was not a Native American. John Kinzie had the only other cabin north of the Chicago River, just east of what is now Michigan Avenue.
It was the second marriage performed in Chicago. They lived at nearby Fort Dearborn, what today would be a few blocks away, from 1823 to 1828, but then returned to the cabin.
Wolcott was the first physician to live in Chicago. When he died on October 25, 1830, his will was the first will probated in Cook County. Eleanor Wolcott moved to Fort Howard in Wisconsin in 1831 and remarried in 1836.
The next owner was Thomas Dyer (1805-1862), who was mayor of Chicago, 1856-1857, and the first president of the Chicago Board of Trade.
Dyer sold the land to John S. Wright (1815-1874), a Chicago merchant and real estate investor whose fortune was wiped out twice before he formed a land company designed to interest eastern capitalists in the Midwest.
He was also editor and publisher of Prairie Farmer, the nation’s oldest farm publication. In 1835 at his expense, he built the first public school in Chicago. Shortly after the Chicago fire of 1871, Wright was committed to an asylum.
Wright paid for Block 1 in four installments over three years.
The next owner was Galena & Chicago Union Railroad, which in 1848 connected Chicago with lead mines at Galena. In 1850, the railroad was completed as far as Elgin. The population of Chicago tripled over six years around this time and the city became the largest railroad center in the world.
Galena & Chicago Union Railroad merged with several other rail lines to form Chicago & Northwestern Railroad. C&NW was a major midwestern railway system until 1995, when Union Pacific acquired it.
