Dr. Albert Bruning

Dr. Albert Herman Bruning may be the only person we profile on Washington Rewind who never lived within 100 miles of Washington, but he had a great effect on Washington, and his story very interesting.

Bruning was born in 1884 in Richmond, Minnesota.  By the ripe old age of 21, Bruning was in business practicing the new and controversial chiropractic treatments.  As early as March 1905, he was practicing in Minnesota, and within the year had moved the practice to Aberdeen, South Dakota.

Bruning's advertisements were sensational, and not unlike the quacks of the day claiming to cure everything from insanity to gout with their singular treatment.  The medical community would fight back against the quacks, of which Bruning was lumped into.  In late 1906, Bruning was tried and convicted of practicing medicine without a license, specifically for using the "Dr." title.

Bruning moved to Iowa, started the same practice, and, in 1908, pleaded guilty to the same crime.

From there it was on to Chicago.  Bruning must have felt that chiropractic was not the way to go.  It is assumed that Bruning took a class at Oakley Smith's new school of Naprapathy in the windy city, a brand-new form of treatment.  Oakley Smith was the father of naprapathy.  He even named it.  It is basically a less violent form of chiropractic treatments.

Bruning settled in Joliet and opened a naprapathy practice around 1909.  The same claims of healing began to spread, and Bruning was very successful there into the 1920s.  Joliet loved him.

To this day, Illinois and New Mexico are the only states that recognize naprapathy as a licensed and accepted practice.

Probably because Bruning had accumulated some wealth, he started investing in real estate.  In 1926, he purchased 82 acres of farmland along the DuPage River.  He subdivided the land and sold small lots for summer cottages for residents of Chicago and Joliet.  This development is now the town of Shorewood, Illinois.

The formula was simple.  Buy it, give it a beautiful name, break it up, sell it off in pieces, make money.

Bruning expanded his range throughout the state, looking for sleeping giants.  In late 1936, he purchased a 90-acre farm from Henry Esser on the west side of Washington Township.  Naming the area Sunnyland, He platted out five streets and subdivided the land into lots, which sold quickly.

This was not the first development in the Sunnyland area.  George Doering had purchased land a couple years earlier, now Cherry Lane & Stahl Avenue, but that materialized much more slowly than Bruning's land, now Theodore, Berry, Albert, Esser & Loren streets.

Two years later, Bruning purchased 173 acres from Adam Vohland, which was platted out and became Beverly Manor.

Even later, he would do the same thing with the Lawnwood and Briargate areas of Sunnyland.  Lawnwood is the area south of Oliver Thomas Park (Florida & Massachusetts Avenues).  Briargate surrounds the street of the same name, south to the 200 block.

To list all the different areas and subdivisions that Bruning started in Central Illinois, let alone the entire state, would be exhaustive and probably not complete.  Suffice it to say, Bruning welcomed the risk of real estate and communities like ours benefited from his investments.  He continued his work until his passing in 1961.