Hegeler Carus Mansion: Zinc, Philosophy, and the Gilded Age

The fifty-seven-room Second Empire mansion sitting just south of the Illinois River in La Salle is one of the more improbable buildings in the Midwest: a monument to zinc, German idealism, and the belief that American industrial wealth should fund the life of the mind.

Edward Hegeler was a German immigrant who arrived in the Illinois River valley in the eighteen fifties and recognized that the region's coal and lead deposits made it ideal for zinc smelting. His Matthiessen and Hegeler Zinc Company grew into the largest zinc producer in the United States, and in eighteen seventy-four Hegeler hired Chicago architect W. W. Boyington to design the mansion that would serve as both family home and intellectual salon. Boyington, who was in the middle of a prolific career that included the Joliet prison and Chicago's Water Tower, delivered an extravagant edifice whose decorative brackets and towers reflected the French Second Empire fashion of the moment. A large number of the house's ornamental features are cast in zinc, a material choice that doubled as advertising.

The mansion's second act began when Hegeler's daughter Mary married a German philosopher named Paul Carus. Carus became the managing editor of Open Court Publishing, a company Hegeler founded in eighteen eighty-seven with the explicit mission of publishing serious works on philosophy, religion, and science for a general American audience. Open Court published early English translations of Buddhist texts, popularized the philosophy of Ernst Mach, and introduced American readers to formal logic at a moment when those ideas were barely accessible in the United States. The publishing offices were housed in the mansion itself.

Mary Hegeler Carus eventually took over the zinc company and steered it through the Depression while Paul grew the publishing house. The Hegeler-Carus family occupied the mansion until two thousand four. It is now a museum and a National Historic Landmark.