Williams Island: the Idlewild park named for a heart surgeon

The little island in the middle of Idlewild Lake is named for a man who did something startling one hot Chicago night in 1893. A stabbing victim came in with a wound near his heart. Dr. Daniel Hale Williams cut a small trapdoor into the man’s chest and sewed the wound shut. The patient, James Cornish, lived another twenty years. Williams became known as one of the first doctors anywhere to pull off a successful heart operation. Two years earlier he had founded Provident Hospital in Chicago, where Black and white doctors and nurses trained together.

Williams was exactly the kind of person Idlewild was built for. In the early 1900s, most American resorts turned Black families away. This stretch of Lake County was platted as a vacation colony where they were welcome. Williams bought property here and put up a summer home. His name carried weight: a famous surgeon choosing Idlewild told others it was a place worth choosing. He also helped fund the resort’s early development and its clubhouse.

The island in the lake became the resort’s beating heart. It held a park with a pavilion, and by the 1950s the nightclubs where Sarah Vaughan and Louis Armstrong sang to summer crowds. When the community later rebuilt the island, it gave the place his name. So the green space at the center of “Black Eden” honors not an entertainer or a developer but a doctor — the one who proved the human heart could be operated on and survive.

It’s a fitting trade. Idlewild gave Williams a lake to rest beside; Williams gave the island a name that outlasted the orchestras.