Gaylord Building

George Gaylord

George Gaylord (1820-1883), a prominent Lockport merchant, used the I&M Canal to connect the east coast to the Illinois frontier. Over his store counters, he sold lace curtains, parasols, and silk handkerchiefs-finished goods from his native New York. Gaylord also purchased Illinois corn, wheat, and beef from local farmers and shipped it east through the I&M Canal. In 1878, he moved his store to the fine limestone warehouse now known as the Gaylord Building.

Gaylord had been in business long before he came to the building that now bears his name. Like many who rose to prominence in Illinois in the 19th century, George Gaylord had roots in the east. Born in White Hall, New York, Gaylord came to Illinois in 1839, finally settling in Lock-

Portrait of George Gaylord
in the lobby of the Gaylord Building

port in 1847. Gaylord engaged in a variety of work, including farm laborer, school teacher and blacksmith before he and a partner (Dennis Smith), opened up a dry goods store in 1847. (Smith retired in the fall of 1849.)

In 1850 the Lockport Telegraph ran an ad for Gaylord & Co. that read “Staple dry goods, Groceries, Crockery, Hardware, Boots, Shoes. Prices Uniformly low. Cash or merchandize given in exchange for all kinds of country Produce.” Imagine going into your local megastore today and asking to barter some of your homegrown tomatoes for that new dress or shirt. Later that year Gaylord traveled to New York and returned with the latest stock. Gaylord’s was the kind of place where you could buy almost anything you needed.

During the Civil War Gaylord went into the grain business in a big way, handling up to 400,000 bushels a year. According to one account, he was the first in Lockport to buy grain at legal weights, eventually convincing others to do the same. For a time Gaylord also owned Oak Hill Quarry just south of Lockport.

In 1878 Gaylord bought the building from George B. Martin, the man behind the 1859

storefront addition. Martin had been a leading grain merchant, he built grain elevators built behind the building. He quickly gained the confidence of the entire community and engaged in an immense trade. Flush with success, in 1859 Martin hired master stone mason Julius Scheibe to build a three-story structure to house his office and dry goods store. In 1878 Martin went bankrupt, leading a 19th century history of Will County to use blunt language quite unusual in works of this type. “[T]here are few cases on record of a more complete betrayal of confidence. Many hard-working people had deposited their savings with him, and it is even said that washerwomen had money deposited in his hands, when, without warning he failed most disastrously. . . He is said to have been of most excellent family, was not a fast man nor a high liver, but is supposed to have managed badly, paid too much interest, and traded too high on borrowed capital.” (History of Will County, 1878, p. 434.) Gaylord swooped in on the heels of this misfortune, purchasing the building on September 28, 1883.

George Gaylord's silhouette outside the
Gaylord Building

At some point Gaylord contracted the most dreaded of all 19th century diseases, tuberculosis. Consumption, as it was known as then, literally consumed a body from the inside, resulting in violent hemorrhages from the lungs. Doctors could do little more than recommend a change of climate, and in June of 1883 Gaylord traveled to Colorado in hopes of a cure. To no avail-he died October 1st, 1883, at the age of 63. The local newspaper heaped praise on him. “George Gaylord as a business man, as a citizen, a public man or as a friend to the poor needs no eulogy from us, as his host of friends will testify. As an opponent, those opposed to him long ago learned to honor and respect him. In his death Lockport and vicinity suffer an irreparable loss.; his family lose the best and kindest husband and father.” In a final tribute, all businesses in Lockport were closed during his funeral. While he owned the building for only five years, George Gaylord’s name has become synonymous with the building.