Meet Ulysses G. Swartz
He made Whiting history, and he wrote it.
Jerry Banik, November 2025
Ulysses Grant Swartz, an early citizen of Whiting, is a name not always heard in discussions of Whiting history. No Whiting street bears his name. He was not a Whiting mayor, judge, nor upper echelon manager of the Standard Oil Company, yet he was a crucial figure who shaped the town’s formation.
He was many things, including a historian. In 1923, after spending six years gathering information and data, he published a detailed history of the area’s early pioneer days and the arrival of Standard Oil’s Whiting refinery. Published in four separate installments in the Stanolind Record, the official newsletter for refinery’s employees, it was and still is regarded as “a masterpiece of literary effort and one of the most complete in detail and exactness ever printed.”
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Mr. Swartz was born in 1862, in Wooster, Ohio, a small town near Akron, established by mostly German settlers. He was the eleventh of twelve siblings; six boys and six girls.
He married in 1887 and came to Whiting in 1890 to seek employment at what was to become John D. Rockefeller’s giant, new Standard Oil Refinery. He hired on in the main office as a clerk, and because of his abilities and his skills with men he was soon transferred to the labor department, where he was made superintendent.
After forty years of service at the refinery, he retired in 1930, but all the while throughout those years he did so much more than just work for Standard Oil.
In 1893, he was one of the original organizers of the Owls Club, a social and athletic club.
In those early Whiting days there were very few ways for local residents to interact socially. The club “provided clean sport and recreation for employees of Standard Oil.” It was so successful that it was said to be known and admired across the country. The Owls built their headquarters and gathering place on 119th Street, where the Elks Club stands today.
You can find a more in-depth look at the Owls club here: https://www.wrhistoricalsociety.com/whiting-owls-club?rq=owls.
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Politically, Mr. Swartz was a staunch Democrat, and the founder and first president of the Whiting Jefferson Club, an organization that carried considerable political clout in Lake County and downstate as well.
In 1894 he founded one of Whiting’s first newspapers, The Whiting Democrat.
Two years later he was made Whiting’s postmaster. Because of the new responsibilities of that position he found it necessary to sell the paper, which later changed its name to The Whiting Sun. Despite no longer owning the paper, he managed to continue writing for it.
He used his skills as an editor and a writer to produce many influential articles that helped shape Whiting’s future. When the city of Hammond annexed Whiting, Mr. Swartz relentlessly led the fight to break the annexation, a fight which Whiting won. In 1895 he was appointed by the county commissioner to hold an election that resulted in the incorporation of Whiting, and he led the nominations and elections of its first town officials.
A special, 1894 census had been taken in connection with that struggle, though it did not record street addresses and much of the information found in our every-ten-years U.S. census. It did, however, list Mr. Swartz as a resident of Whiting at that time. Later, the official, 1900 U.S. census showed that by then he was living on 62nd Place in Chicago with his wife, Ada, a son, Ulysses Jr., and daughter Elizabeth, but by 1910, census records show him living back in Whiting on Sheridan Avenue with the same family members.
After retiring from Standard Oil, his health began to fail him. In 1933 he was taken to St. Catherine’s Hospital in East Chicago where he was diagnosed with a heart ailment. He passed away there at age 71. His funeral was held in the family residence on Sheridan Avenue, and he was buried in historic Oak Woods Cemetery in South Chicago.