New Year's Day is a time of reflection. Janus, the Roman god of gates, mythically oversees the year's transitions.
On Jan. 1, 1863, the Chicago Daily Tribune noted, "... the great doors of the two-faced Janus are slowly swinging upon their hinges ..."
Some approach the new year with a more routine regimen.
On Jan. 1, 1915, Jesse Lowe Smith described his trek to Stipes Woods through the snow amid "fine sleighing" and "icy sidewalks" after working for a half day at Elm Place School. The Great War had not yet touched Highland Park.
In 1919, Sebastian Stipe would lease more than 79 acres of Stipes Woods to the founders of the Northmoor Country Club, where manicured greens have replaced the North Shore woods.
Smith's neighbor on Vine Avenue in Highland Park, John Finney, wrote this in his diary exactly 50 years earlier while with the Illinois 65th Volunteer Infantry in Tennessee after the bloodiest battle he experienced: "1865 Jan the 1st Rec[eived] orders to be ready to move at a moments warning. in what Direction we do not know."
Finney became a municipal civil servant after surviving the Civil War. Elected multiple times in Highland Park (alderman 1879; city clerk 1881-92 and 1895-1910), he retired to California and witnessed many New Year's Days not far from where a current tradition plays out — football at the Rose Bowl.
Nancy Webster is the archives director for the Highland Park Historical Society.