In 1836, hardware merchant Henry B. Clarke and his wife Caroline built a grand new house to replace a log cabin on their 20 acres at what’s now Michigan Avenue and 16th Street.
The Clarkes’ house is still standing 189 years later and is considered the oldest house built in Chicago, even though it’s been moved twice. The first time, right after the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, the house was moved 3 1/2 miles south. The second relocation was a century later, when the house was hauled back to within a few blocks of its original site to become the museum it remains today.
In between, the house spent three decades being restored and protected from demolition by a Black pastor and his church. However, they were denied official acknowledgment of their preservation for half a century after selling it to the city.
Then the landmark that had been known only as the Clarke House got a new name — a long one.
The Greek Revival-style house on Indiana Avenue is now known as the Henry B. and Caroline Clarke/Bishop Louis Henry and Margaret Ford House, or simply the Clarke-Ford House.
The Clarke-Ford House in 2025.
The Clarkes built the house when Chicago was in its infancy; the Fords, its third owners, saved it when nobody else would.
When the City Council voted to rename the landmark, the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events announced the house would close for a six-month, million-dollar restoration. Nearly three years later, it remains closed and WBEZ’s Reset was not allowed inside.
Clarke-Ford isn’t the oldest house in Chicago; that’s the Noble-Crippen-Seymour House in Norwood Park on the Far Northwest Side. Built in 1833, it’s three years younger than the Clarke-Ford house, but at the time, the area was well outside city limits.
That’s how there came to be a soft rivalry between the two houses — one is the oldest house in Chicago, while the other is the oldest house built in Chicago.
In 1836, New Yorkers Henry and Caroline Clarke built the house in the temple-like style that was popular back east. They lived on a site bounded by 16th and 17th streets, State Street and Lake Michigan. At the time, the shoreline was close to Michigan Avenue, about three-quarters of a mile from where it is today at Northerly Island.
Henry died in 1849. Caroline sold 17 of the 20 acres before she died in 1860.
The house, which was well south of the Great Chicago Fire’s Burnt District, was not at risk from the blaze. Still, that same year, the family sold it to John and Lydia Chrimes, who moved it out of the city. They hauled the structure to a semi-rural setting at what’s now 45th Street and Wabash Avenue. It remained outside the city until 1889, when Chicago annexed Hyde Park Township.
The Chrimes family had the house for seven decades. By the late 1930s, the third generation, sisters Lydia and Laura Walter, couldn’t afford the upkeep. They tried to get city officials to take over their century-old house, already known as the city’s oldest, but got no takers.
A community garden with fresh flowers and produce on the side of the Clarke-Ford house.
In 1941, a young minister in the Church of God in Christ bought the house from the sisters to start his church. Bishop Louis Henry Ford, who’d followed the Great Migration from Mississippi, took preservation of the house seriously. Early on, he put on a new roof and rebuilt the stairs and the rooftop cupola.
The old Clarke house was now a parsonage with a campus growing around it. In 1969, Ford asked a Chicago Tribune reporter, “Who’d believe, up on the north shore and such places, that here, in the heart of the ghetto, grass is growing all around, and flowers. So many people think the black community is supposed to destroy everything.”
Ford had been quoted in newspapers as early as 1951, saying he wanted to eventually turn the house into a historical museum. He finally got his wish in the ’70s: The church sold the house to the city for use as the centerpiece of a proposed Prairie Avenue historical collection 32 blocks north. The move took 12 days and entailed lifting the 150-ton house over the CTA’s Green Line tracks.
Despite the care and restoration Ford put into the house, his name was “relegated to a plaque in the basement,” said Kevin Anthony Ford, his grandson and successor as pastor at St. Paul Church of God in Christ, in 2021.
Even Chicago Tribune articles covering the move in 1977 made no mention of Ford or his congregation.
Kevin Anthony Ford said city officials promised his grandfather that the church’s role in saving the house would be highlighted. The Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events did not respond to requests for comment.
“If it were not for a Black church, a Black pastor, my grandfather, Chicago wouldn’t have this house anymore,” Ford said in 2021.
In November 2022, the Chicago City Council voted to acknowledge Bishop Ford’s work with a new name for the house.
Dennis Rodkin is the residential real estate reporter for Crain’s Chicago Business and Reset’s “What’s That Building?” contributor. Follow him @Dennis_Rodkin.
K’Von Jackson is the freelance photojournalist for Reset’s “What’s That Building?” Follow him @true_chicago.