On the morning of November 22, 1905, a gunshot rang out inside a mansion on Prairie Avenue in Chicago. Marshall Field Jr. , 37 years old, the only son of the richest merchant in America, lay on the floor of his bedroom, conscious and bleeding heavily from a bullet wound to the abdomen. A rifle lay nearby.
The household staff had been given the day off. He was scheduled to leave that evening for a hunting trip in South Carolina. What happened next would define the family’s fate for a century. Dr.
Frank Billings, the personal physician of Marshall Jr. ‘s father and one of Chicago’s most respected doctors, arrived within the hour. He made the first critical decision: the wounded man would be treated at home, not in a hospital. Mercy Hospital stood less than two miles away.
The surgical risk in 1905 was severe, but a sterile hospital environment was the standard of care for an abdominal wound of this kind. Instead, the patient stayed in his own bedroom, attended by a doctor effectively employed by his father, in a house that offered something a hospital could not: privacy. The family released a single statement, repeated almost word for word over the next five days. Marshall Jr.
had been cleaning his hunting rifle for the upcoming trip. The weapon discharged accidentally. The doctors were optimistic. Over the following days, the optimistic tone became guarded, then critical.
Marshall Jr. remained conscious throughout, yet he never gave a clear account of what had happened. He died on November 27, five days after the shooting. The official cause of death entered into Cook County records was accidental gunshot wound.
The verdict has never been revised. What the family did not address raised questions that never fully closed. Why had the servants been dismissed on a morning when the head of the house was preparing for a long journey? Why had the patriarch of a fortune worth an estimated $120 million chosen to treat a life-threatening wound in a bedroom rather than a hospital?
And why had an experienced hunter, a man who had handled rifles his entire adult life, pointed a loaded weapon at his own torso while cleaning it? The Tribune printed the family statement but also noted the existence of rumors it refused to elaborate on. The reason the paper would not print them was that the rumor was specific in a way the law did not permit in 1905 without proof. The prominent story circulating through Chicago placed Marshall Field Jr.
not at his Prairie Avenue mansion at all, but at a notorious establishment a mile and a half north of his home. The Everleigh Club, run by sisters Ada and Minna Everleigh, was the most exclusive brothel in America. Fifty rooms across two townhouses, gold-leafed music rooms, dinners costing $50 a person in a city where most working men earned less than $2 a day. The sisters kept a guestbook that included visiting royalty, United States senators, and, according to multiple accounts that surfaced in later years, Marshall Field Jr.
as a regular patron. The story that ran beneath the official narrative went like this: he had been at the club on the night of November 21st or early on the 22nd, an altercation had occurred, a gun had been fired, and he was wounded too badly for the sisters to pretend he had simply gone home. To protect the club, the Field family, and the network of police payoffs that kept their establishment running, they had him carried by carriage in the early morning hours back to his home at 1919 Prairie Avenue. The servants had been sent away.
The rifle was staged nearby to support the story the family would tell. None of this was ever proven. The Everleigh sisters denied it for the rest of their lives. Historians have spent more than a century unable to either fully confirm or fully refute it.
But the surrounding details remain consistent: the staff dismissed, the treatment at home, the refusal to elaborate, the silence from the victim himself across five days of consciousness. What the cover protected, if there was one, was not really the dying son. It protected the father. Marshall Field Sr.
, 71 years old, recently widowed, had boarded the next train from New York when he heard the news and arrived to find his son already weakening. The version of events that said hunting accident, he could survive. The version that said his only son was shot in a brothel argument and carried home in a carriage at four in the morning would have been the last thing he saw in print before his own death. Marshall Field Sr.
died on January 16, 1906, just over six weeks after his son was shot. He had been staying at the Holland House in Manhattan for business meetings that any of his lieutenants could have handled. Pneumonia was the official cause. His sister had begged him not to go.
Through most of December he had spent his nights walking the halls of his mansion while everyone else slept. The people closest to him said he had stopped wanting to live. Dr. Frank Billings, who had managed his son’s wound seven weeks earlier, reportedly told the family that the patient lacked the will to recover.
By the time the fever took hold, he had been refusing food for days. The estate was estimated at between 120 and 140 million dollars, a fortune equivalent to more than 3 billion in modern purchasing power. His son was dead. His daughter-in-law was preparing to leave the country.
His grandchildren were minors. The will, updated within days of his son’s funeral, placed the bulk of the fortune in a trust that held back the principal from his grandson for decades, managed by trustees in Chicago. The boy was 12 years old. In May 1906, Albertine Field boarded a steamer with her three children and sailed for England.
Within three years she remarried an English doctor. The children were raised in Sussex, schooled at Eton and Cambridge, and spoke with English accents for the rest of their lives. The Marshall Field fortune crossed the Atlantic with them. Marshall Field III grew up in England, enlisted in the British Army during the First World War, served on the Western Front, and married an American woman before returning to the United States in 1920.
He bought a 1,700-acre peninsula on Long Island called Caumsett, built a self-contained estate with a working farm, a polo field, and two private beaches, and spent the next decade figuring out what an American he no longer recognized was supposed to do with a fortune that had been waiting for him since childhood. He started giving money away. He founded the Field Foundation in 1940. He backed civil rights organizations decades before it was fashionable.
In 1941 he founded a Chicago newspaper, the Sun, specifically as a liberal alternative to the Tribune. He wrote a book in 1945 arguing that the American economic system was leaving too many people behind. He lived at Caumsett for the rest of his life and died of natural causes at 63. His son, Marshall Field IV, took a different path.
He graduated from Harvard, served as a gunnery officer in the Pacific during the Second World War, and returned to Chicago in 1947 to run the Sun. He merged it with the Times to create the Sun-Times, which under his management became profitable, and expanded Field Enterprises into one of the largest privately held media operations in the Midwest. The paper won Pulitzers. He was good at the job.
He kept doing it through years of treatment for depression, managed with a combination of prescribed barbiturates and early antidepressants. He died on September 18, 1965, at 49 years old. The cause of death entered into the record was accidental overdose of barbiturates. The family did not contest the official version.
Sixty years after his uncle died on Prairie Avenue, another Marshall Field had died under circumstances the family chose not to elaborate on. By then, almost nobody outside the family noticed. The Prairie Avenue mansion where the fortune had been built was demolished in 1955, sold for fill and converted to parking. The State Street store, the headquarters of Marshall Field’s empire for over a century, was rebranded as Macy’s in 2006.
The clock on the corner still says Marshall Field because the city designated it a landmark. The Field Museum survived because its endowment was structured to outlast the family. Caumsett survives as a state historic park, open to the public. The fortune that passed from the richest merchant in America to his only son, and then over an entire generation to a boy raised in England, was spent on a Long Island peninsula, a Chicago newspaper, a museum, and four generations of heirs who lived comfortably without ever building anything close to what the first Marshall Field had built.
The bet the old man made on his deathbed, that distance and trustees and an English upbringing could protect a child from what his own son had become, never really got answered. One heir lived a long and complicated life. The next did not. The file on Marshall Field Jr.
remains open. The official cause of death has never been formally revisited. The Everleigh rumor has never been formally confirmed. Two versions of the story sit in the historical record next to each other, and the family that could have settled the question is gone.
What is certain is the sequence of events: a bullet fired in a house with no witnesses, a five-day decline in a private bedroom instead of a hospital, a death recorded as an accident, and a father dead of pneumonia and heartbreak 42 days later. What happened on the morning of November 22, 1905, remains a question no document has ever answered.