Grills, Greenhouses and Swing Sets: Redefining the Home in the 1950s

By Carol Summerfield

In the 1950s, the interpretation of the American lifestyle underwent a seismic shift that was felt both inside and outside the home.

As World War II ended and the massive factory-based industries that supported it sought new ways to use their machinery and floor space, they turned to the new needs of the American home. The ease of producing aluminum, glass, and plastic materials opened myriad possibilities. The factories offered three important things to building this new economy: large floor space, cheap electricity, and a production model that was already bringing these materials in. All that was needed was inventiveness as to what was possible.

A girl in Lake Forest stands on a swing in 1957. One such invention came from Chicagoland Weber Brothers Metal Works, who worked to produce metal buoys for the Coast Guard during the war. In 1952, George Stephen, a resident of Mount Prospect and an employee at Weber Brothers Metal Works, came up with the idea to take two of the half spheres for the buoys and create an outdoor grill. While free-standing metal braziers and traditional barbecue pits had been in use for some time, it took this new grill to create a backyard barbeque craze. By 1959, Weber-Stephen produced 15,000 Weber grills a year for the Chicagoland market.

Another major industry that developed in the 1950s was the commercial greenhouse. Up until then, gardeners grew their summer blooms from seeds. Many of the large estates in Lake Forest had greenhouses on their grounds, along with having full-time, or at least part-time, garden staff. By the early 1950s, greenhouses were producing large quantities of plants, because fluorescent lights coupled with the easy production of cheap plastic pots, meant that they could grow vast quantities and varieties of plants, ready for spring planting. While annuals had been part of gardens from the beginning, the new commercial greenhouses introduced a whole new model of the hardy annual, suitable for any climate. And gardeners were now free to choose grand transformations of their gardens from one summer to the next. You could plant the wildly popular golden Marvel of Peru (mirabilis jalapa) one year, the rich purple Bolivian Heliotrope (Heliotropium arborescens) the next and wrap up the third year with a festival of colors from your new Chinese Chrysanthemum collection. That these plants didn’t survive a Lake Forest winter didn’t matter.

By the 1970s, you could pop into the local hardware store in the spring and get plants. Pasquesi’s Home and Garden, which began as an Ace Hardware store in 1975, moved to Lake Forest in 1984 under its new name: Pasquesi Home and Farm Suppliers, beginning their four-decade run in Lake Forest and Lake Bluff.

One of the most important changes to the American garden, though, was the invention of Scotts Weed and Feed for lawns. Up until then, lawn management was labor intensive and driven locally by management of an on-staff gardener for the large Lake Forest estates. Scotts introduced the first commercial weed control and fertilizer combination in a single dry-applied form, which was soon rebranded as the iconic Weed & Feed in 1953. Scotts gave the suburban homeowner a single bag that took a complicated agronomic problem into a simple Saturday morning ritual that could be managed by a teenager. And the backyard is born.

The land behind houses in Lake Forest had been either a utilitarian space, with kitchen gardens and even farm animals, or grand ornamental gardens for the larger estates. Supporting the backyard was an entirely new array of consumer products beyond the backyard grill: lawn furniture, swing sets, and new lawn games (Jarts, anyone?). The backyard became the new symbol of modern American life.