Lorado Taft Field Campus of
Northern Illinois University
In 1949, the new President of the Northern Illinois State Teachers College (NISTC), Leslie Holmes, expressed his desire to see NISTC develop an outdoor laboratory to train teachers to teach in the outdoors. The Lorado Taft Field Campus formed in 1951 when sixty-six acres of land were transferred from the Illinois Department of Conservation including a fifteen-acre parcel that was formerly the site of the Eagle's Nest Art Colony. The campus was named for the colony founder and sculptor, Lorado Taft.

Initially the campus was used only to offer college students exposure to outdoor teaching methods. However, later the College of Education developed a masters degree in Outdoor Teacher Education. Over the next forty-five years, more schools were given the opportunity to bring their children to the Taft Campus.

Today the campus has expanded to 141-acres. Over 7000 children and teachers attend the environmental education program at the Lorado Taft Field Campus each year, and an additional 4000 people attend various conference programs. Whether they come as a school or a conference group, teachers, youth leaders, and children experience a sense of relaxation and renewal.

Visit www.niu.edu/taft for more information.

Eagle's Nest Art Colony
Following the Columbian Exposition of 1893, a group of artists and writers decided to remain in Chicago and continue to encourage each other's art. They chose to escape the heat and overcrowding of the city by summering at a farm in Bass Lake, Indiana, until an outbreak of malaria forced them to seek a new location. Wallace Heckman, a Chicago attorney and patron of the arts, offered the use of his Oregon, Illinois summer estate, Ganymede Farm. The art colonists visited in the summer of 1898 and entered into a lease that ran for as long as one of the founding members remained alive. From that summer of 1898 until the death of the last member in 1942, the Eagle's Nest Art Colony was a source of beauty, nature, and an endless stream of visitors.

Lorado Taft, 1860-1936
Lorado Taft was born on April 29, 1860, in Elmwood, Illinois. When Taft was a boy, he moved with his family to Champaign, Illinois, where he first studied drawing, modeling, and sculpting. He went on to receive his Bachelor's degree in 1879 and Master's in 1880. Later he studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris from 1880 to 1883.

Taft opened his first studio in Chicago upon returning from Paris, and went on to win a number of awards at national and international expositions, including the Columbian Exposition in 1893, the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904, and the Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915.

Taft is best known in Oregon for his sculpture of the Eternal Indian, often known as Black Hawk. The fifty-foot statue resides on a promontory overlooking the Rock River.