From: Richard Barry, Media Relations Volunteer, Church of the Holy Family
            [email protected]  312.607.5888
 
MEDIA ADVISORY 
Church of the Holy Family/Saint Ignatius College Prep Accepts Portrait of Chicago’s First Architect, John Mills Van Osdel, Who Designed Holy Family’s Interior 
 
CHICAGO, ILL.- July 11, 2025--Well before Chicago earned its reputation as a major center of distinctive architecture, when such figures as Louis Henry Sullivan, John Wellborn Root, Daniel Burnham and Frank Lloyd Wright practiced here, there was John Mills Van Osdel (1811-1891), who was recognized as “Chicago’s first architect.” 
 
On Thursday, July 31 at 11 a.m., on the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the world-wide Jesuit religious order, in the Jesuit-owned Church of the Holy Family, Burtram “Bud” Collver Hopkins, II, great-great-grandnephew of John Mills Van Osdel, will present an original oil painting of his architect relative who was commissioned in 1859 by Holy Family’s founding pastor, Rev. Arnold Damen, S.J., “to furnish plans and specifications” for the interior of the massive Victorian Gothic church. 
 
The portrait graces the cover of Hopkins’ new book, “John Mills Van Osdel, Architect, and his Chicago” (Friesen Press, 2025). The 441-page book is an illustrated encyclopedic work of the Van Osdel family and John Mills Van Osdel’s career.
 
Considered to be Van Osdel’s most important ecclesiastical commission, Holy Family is the second oldest church in Chicago, once one of the largest churches in America, one of five public buildings to survive the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and has the oldest stained glass in Chicago dating to 1860. Holy Family was saved from demolition in the late 1980s and restored to service over the following decades. 
 
John J. Chandler, President of Saint Ignatius College Prep, will accept Van Osdel’s portrait on behalf of Father Lukas M. Laniauskas, S.J., President of Church of the Holy Family.  The artist, Elizabeth Van Osdel Cowan, Van Osdel’s niece, studied under Alfred Payne at The Art Institute of Chicago and was a well-known portraitist in the 1880s and 1890s. Cowan was also the founder of the 57^th Street Jackson Park Artist’s Colony in Hyde Park.  
 
Ward Miller, Executive Director, Preservation Chicago, who served as the project architect in restoring Church of the Holy Family in the 1980s and 1990s, will participate as will members of Saint Ignatius College Prep’s Architect Club. 
 
Following the unveiling, the group will adjourn via the Collins Transitus, a new connector to Saint Ignatius College Prep, for author Bud Hopkins’ visual presentation on Van Osdel in the historic Brunswick Room. Former president of the American Institute of Architects Dallas chapter, Hopkins is a retired architect with more than 30 years of experience. On display will be rare Church of the Holy Family contracts signed by Fr. Damen and John Mills Van Osdel. 
 
Ward Miller, executive director of Preservation Chicago who served as project architect in restoring Church of the Holy Family, will introduce Hopkins and field questions from the audience.   A buffet luncheon will follow.
 
Members of the Saint Ignatius College Prep family, including architects who are alumni as well as members of the school’s Architect Club, will attend.  
 
A Baltimore native, who apprenticed to his father, James, a master carpenter and builder, Van Osdel practiced architecture in Chicago beginning in 1837. He designed early Chicago bridges, grain elevators and ship’s joinery and opened the city’s first architecture office in 1844. He was instrumental in establishing architecture as a discipline and drafted the Chicago Architect’s Code, one of the first of its kind. 
 
During a 60-year career, Van Osdel was known as a “cross-over architect” who designed more than 800   churches, seminaries, synagogues, apartments, hotels, schools, theatres, fraternal buildings, courthouses, banks, prisons, warehouses, factories, offices and residential structures in the Chicago area and throughout the Midwest and Arkansas. 
 
One of his first major commissions was to design a residence for William B. Ogden, Chicago’s first mayor, in 1837. The Greek Revival residence at 50 East Ontario Street with a rooftop observatory occupied a four-acre site at Ontario, Rush, Erie, and Wabash in Chicago’s River North area. It was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, as were scores of Van Osdel’s buildings.
 
Van Osdel also designed such original structures destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, as the Cook County Court House, Chicago City Hall, Tremont House, the first Palmer House, the Masonic Temple and all of the five-story iron-front buildings in the city during the era.
 
In addition to the Church of the Holy Family, among  the 28 other existing remaining structures designed by Van Osdel are:
 

• Illinois Governor’s Mansion, 410 East Jackson, Springfield, 1855, termed, “the people’s house;” the oldest governor’s mansion in the Midwest and the third oldest governor’s mansion to have been continually used as the official residence of their governors.

 

• Page Brothers Building, State and Lake Streets, 1872, adjacent to the Chicago Theater, an example of cast-iron architecture; the upper five floors of the Lake Street facade are among the last remaining cast-iron fronts in Chicago, of which Van Osdel designed many.

 

• Old Main, North Central College, Naperville, 1870, which contains classrooms and administration offices.
• McHenry County Courthouse, 101 N. Johnson, Woodstock 1857, one of Van Osdel’s oldest early courthouses to survive. It has recently been renovated as a event center known as the “Old Courthouse Center.” 

 

• Three townhouses designed by Van Osdel in the once fashionable Jackson Boulevard District Chicago in the 1884-85 period: Andrew Talcott Merriman House, 1516 W. Jackson; George Ross House, 1514 W. Jackson; and William Chisholm House, 1531 W. Jackson.

 

• James Gregson Wright’s home, 1025 Aurora, Naperville, 1847, designed for Wright, an immigrant from England, and his wife Almira Van Osdel, Van Osdel’s sister, on a 160- acre estate. In 1963, the owners, James and Judd Polivka, converted the mansion to the Wil-O-Way Manor restaurant. In 1990, it was leased to Hossein Jamalie for a restaurant he named Meson Sabika, which has become a well-known event facility.

 

• Couch Estate, 143 N. Wabash, Chicago 1872

This building was designed for the James and Ira Couch estate. The facade of the top four floors of this five-story building is all that remains of the original design.
 

• Peck Estate, 137 N. Wabash, Chicago 1872

This building was designed for the Phillip F. W. Peck estate. The facade of the top three floors of this five-story building is all that remains of the original design.