This photo was donated by the Konyvesy/Neubieser family, one of the earliest white families to settle in the wetlands of what would later become Southeast Chicago. The region belonged to Potawatomi Native Americans whose lands were taken from them in the 1830s through treaties with the U.S. government. Fredericka and Joe Konyvesy, were German/Hungarian immigrants who moved to the shores of Wolf Lake in Hegewisch in 1859. They brought with them their two-year-old daughter Annie. The wooden cabin where the Konyvesys lived originally belonged to a Native American family who had abandoned it, associating it with bad luck after two children died there. Native Americans, however, returned yearly to burial sites near the cabin and taught Joe Konyvesy to fur trap.
In the period during and after the Civil War, the Konyvesys made their living by farming, fishing, and trapping on Wolf Lake. They also received guests from the growing city of Chicago to the north who travelled by train to stay at the family’s cabin for weekends of rowing boats and fishing. Early visitors included Mrs. Sally Todd Lincoln and her boys, who were rescued from a near drowning incident by Joe Konyvesy. Annie Konyvesy remembered gathering wild strawberries as a young girl for Mrs. Lincoln. In 1876, Annie married August Neubieser, a German immigrant shoemaker who came to live with her on squatted land along Wolf Lake. The Neubeiser family had ten children and continued the famliy business of receiving visitors to the lake. Their son, Joe Neubieser, would also continue the family hunting and trapping tradition long after the steel mills and other industry had become the dominant features of the Hegewisch landscape. He would make his living by trapping muskrat and mink, hunting, fishing, bee-keeping, and renting out boats to visitors until in death in 1943.
