The Rebellion · 1888 – 1890
Gladstone Park's Road Rebellions
Because Snell had a monopoly on every major road leading from the city center to the northwest, farmers and merchants had no choice but to pay whatever he wanted. Then they revolted.
Source: GladsttonePark.net
The 1800s
In a cruel twist of fate, the diagonal roads that were the lifeblood of Gladstone Park and the northwest farmlands in the mid-1800s were free game once they exited the Chicago city limits. Like in frontier times, there were no laws regulating them. Anyone could buy them and treat them — and the people who wanted to use them — with impunity.
When local farmer-turned-businessman Amos J. Snell discovered the old Indian trails that merchants were traveling on were up for grabs, he bought N. Northwest Highway from the county in 1870, ripping out old planks and installing an even better roadbed of gravel. Then he charged tolls to pay for the improvements. Somewhere along the way Snell also got ahold of the sometimes impassable byway we know now as N. Elston. Laying wood boards crosswise atop a log foundation spanning the mud pathway, he improved it to a plank road and also charged tolls. N. Milwaukee also came under his ownership and people began referring to it as the "Snell Toll Road."
Because Snell had a monopoly on all the major roads that led from the Gateway of Chicago into the city center, he gave northwestern farmers and merchants no choice but to pay whatever he wanted if they wanted to market their goods.
"By then his tolls provided him with nearly $800 a day with fees collected at three locations on N. Elston alone: its southern entry point at W. Division Street, at W. Lawrence, and at the northern end where it merged with N. Milwaukee in Gladstone Park."
— Hayner & McNamee, Streetwise Chicago
The Chicago Tea Party
Disguised as Native Americans
Making it sound like a Laurel and Hardy slapstick routine, Hayner and McNamee described rankled local farmers taking matters into their own hands by dressing up as Native Americans and staging their own "tea party." Just like the Sons of Liberty had done nearly 70 years earlier when they'd thrown tea into Boston Harbor to protest British taxes, the malcontents supposedly chopped down and burned the tollbooths, setting things straight.
But the real tale may be darker and from a different decade altogether. We catch up to Snell in 1888, by then a multimillionaire, when he was shot to death in his West Side home on February 8 of that year. Calling the murder of the largest individual owner of real estate in the city the "most sensational ever committed in Chicago," the Tribune documented it in excruciating detail.
The Murder
Presumably the case was closed after police arrested suspected killer William B. Tascott on his deathbed at the Cape Nome Gold Diggings in Alaska in 1889. But in an unexpected twist 21 years later, James Gillan, labeled a "professional crook," confessed on his deathbed that he, not Tascott, had killed Snell while burglarizing his home. Some authorities still consider the case unsolved.
The Connection
Slightly more than two years after the millionaire was killed, those who had had to pay to travel on the only major routes from the city center to the northwest revolted. They reportedly killed the toll collector in the process of burning down his gate and toll booth.
The Legal Outcome
Not more than a month after the burning, Snell's family tried to take over the toll roads the patriarch had owned. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled they had no authority. The reason: Snell could not legally pass the right to collect tolls to his heirs. The family appealed, taking the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court which, in 1894, upheld the state's decision.
Finally the roads Gladstonians know as N. Northwest Highway, N. Milwaukee, and N. Elston were free.
Primary Source
GladsttonePark.net — History: Streets. gladstonepark.net