Wednesday April 25th
Helix Photo Building, 310 S. Racine, 8th Floor
Refreshments at 6:30, Business at 7:00, Speaker at 8:00
Tom Lutz, Author
THOMAS J. LUTZ
Born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Thomas Lutz studied architecture at the University of Minnesota receiving his degree in 1972. He joined the Minnesota Historical Society, eventually becoming head of the historic sites survey program. In 1975, he joined the Midwest Office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation at Chicago becoming assistant director, before leaving in 1979 to return to Red Wing, Minnesota. There he spearheaded a two-year community-wide revitalization effort before rejoining the National Trust in Washington, DC, where he joined the National Main Street Center in 1981. In1987, he became a private consultant for local and regional, community and economic development programs, taking retirement in 2000 as executive director of the non-profit Economic Development Corporation of Cass County, Minnesota.Living in Chicago in 2002, Lutz began genealogical research into his father's family, tracing their roots from Germany down to Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where the initial family settled in 1847. He learned to his surprise that his grandfather’s cousin, Theodore Caspar Lutz, became the leading maritime contractor for the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and formed a partnership with James Sears Dunham, eventually becoming the second in command of Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Company in Chicago. Under him, they became the largest maritime contractor in the nation, and ultimately one the largest in the world. Fascinated by his own family’s maritime roots, Lutz became even more intrigued with the involvement of Dunham, a man about whom little has been written, but who had such an enormous impact on the development of Chicago when it was the nation’s preeminent, 19th-century maritime city. His writing about Dunham led to receipt of the Henry Barkhausen award for Original Research from the Association for Great Lakes Maritime History in 2006, and subsequently to the publication of this book.