click to enlarge John Greenfield
Judging from contemporary accounts, Chicago founder Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the Black trading post proprietor for whom local African American leaders propose renaming Lake Shore Drive, was a virtuous, cultured, likable, and good-looking man.
While there s little hard information available about DuSable s early life, according to tradition he was born in 1745 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. By the late 1700s he was working as a trader in the Great Lakes region, and letters from other traders indicate that in 1779 he was living at the mouth of Trail Creek in present-day Michigan City, Indiana, a stone s throw from the current Shoreline Brewery location.