Gillette House

Dr. Horace Gillette (originally spelled Gillett) built this house after retiring from a career in medicine and business.

Dr. Gillette graduated from the Yale School of Medicine in 1829 and married Sarah Watson in 1834. He practiced medicine in South Windsor, Connecticut before moving the family to Chicago in 1863 to establish a business. Soon after his move to Chicago, Gillette enlisted in the Volunteer Corps of Surgeons and served in the Civil War. The Gillette's daughter, Ellen, married Chicago merchant Lorenzo C. Ward in 1869, and moved to a house on property that is now part of Pottawatomie Park. Ward owned and operated a butter and cheese plant in St. Charles. Horace and Sarah Gillette joined them in St. Charles when the Gillette House was completed in 1876.

The Gillettes lived in their St. Charles home for only a few years prior to Horace's death in December of 1878 and Sarah's death only three months later.

Their daughters, Sarah Gillette and Ellen Ward, inherited the estate. The house was sold to Julius Butler, who with his brother, Oliver, owned several St. Charles paper mills. Julius lived at this location until 1897.

This grand residence also served as the St. Charles City Hospital. St. Charles' first city hospital was established by doctors Richard and Edith Bell Lambert on Main Street as the Lambert Convalescing Home. By the 1920s, The Lambert Convalescing Home had become too small to meet the demands placed on it by a growing St. Charles population. The American Legion, St. Charles Post 342, took over the operation of the hospital in 1924, and moved it to the former Gillette residence. The St. Charles City Hospital provided care for up to twenty patients at a time. In 1932, the American Legion leased the hospital to a group of doctors who had organized as The St. Charles Service Corporation. Unable to survive the financial strain of the Great Depression, the hospital closed in 1935. St. Charles residents were forced to rely on the Community Hospital in Geneva for their medical care until Dellora and Lester Norris donated Delnor Hospital to the city in 1940. The Gillette home stood vacant from 1935 until the mid-1940s when it was converted into apartments.

Architecturally, the home is a combination of two styles. When originally built, the contractors, F. W. Alexander and J.F. Elliot, designed it in the Italianate style. The Neoclassical front porch, with its large columns, was added when the owners made the former single-family residence into apartments.

Today, the former private residence remains divided into three apartments.

Sources

■ Badger, David Alan. St. Cmrles of lflimis. Havana: David Alan Badger, 1985.

■ Clauter, Hazel. Our Community--St. Charles. 1967.

■ "Example of Research for Plaquing the 3 Faces (Phases) of the H.C. Gillette House." Charlemagne Gazette Dec. 1978.