LUTHER DANIELS BRADLEY
from George Washington himself a commission as marshal of the State of Connecticut. The mother, Sarah Ruggles Bradley, came of a Vermont family similar in patriotic tradition. In New Haven Francis Bradley held the double position of cashier of the City Bank and instructor in astronomy in Yale College, whence his father had been graduated in 1800. Passing his days in the bank, and his evenings in gratifying his love for science, Francis Bradley set his son a high example of industry.
The Bradleys had heard of Chicago, Illinois, as a city of promise, a vigorous and growing community of more than 80,000. A brother of Francis (William H. Bradley, afterwards for many years clerk of the Federal courts in Chicago) was living there, and was enthusiastic about the West. So Francis and Sarah Bradley left New Haven forever, and with their son and two daughters entered the company of "early Chicagoans," whose memories are of a courthouse square across which people walked to work; of farmers' wagons standing at State and Washington streets; of sidewalks on stilts; of "Long John" Wentworth and Stephen A. Douglas; of wooded places now known as Hyde Park and the "north shore." In this chaotic but virile community the Bradleys made a new home.
In that same year, 1857, Lyman Baird, another New Haven man whose ambitions led him westward, became a citizen of Chicago, and a year later went into partnership with L. D. Olmstead, who in 1855 had established a real estate business. Mr. Olmstead died in 1862, whereupon Mr. Baird persuaded Francis Bradley—then auditor of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad—to enter partnership with him. Thus began a business relationship, and a friendship, that was to continue for many years, and was to establish in Chicago's shifting soil one of its permanent things: the successful real estate firm now known as Baird and Warner. One would like to dwell upon the struggles and triumphs of that pair of pioneers whose names were so long linked as "Baird and Bradley, Real Estate," to tell how they breasted calamities like the civil war and the "great fire of '71." But this is not their story. And Luther Bradley's destiny, after a few years when it seemed about to be bound up with that business enterprise, branched away.
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