I tend to think of my family as unnoticed, but what about Captain Streeter? My great-grandfather, Sylvester Streeter Strickland, someone I actually met as a small child and remember, was a descendent of Captain George Wellington Streeter, a name familiar to Chicago historians.
As I understand it, in 1886, Captain Streeter's boat got stuck on a sandbar in Lake Michigan, so he declared the boat an independent territory and tried, through forgery and chicanery, to lay claim to 186 acres of waterfront property in Chicago. When the rich owners of the acreage refused to pay him off, Streeter turned to selling parts of the property to uninformed buyers. This somehow led my working-class grandmother to claim in court that she owned downtown Chicago. To this day an upscale part of Chicago is called Streeterville.
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