In Memoriam

1948 – 2024
Donor

Leslie Heaton Evans became a friend to the Maxwell Street Foundation through the proprietor of the Maxwell Mansion in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. She contacted the mansion about the Maxwell portraits that had graced her parents’ stairway wall in the Detroit home where she and her siblings grew up, that had ended up in her care in her home out east. Leslie and her siblings never knew the connection of the Maxwells to their family until Leslie’s unravelling of the family genealogy. Her personal research through communications with family members and even sources in Lake Geneva, WI, where Philip Maxwell built his retirement home in 1856, resolved the five-generation family connection to the Maxwells through the Maxwell’s daughter Ophelia, who brought the Maxwell portraits to Chicago following her marriage that eventually found their way to Leslie’s Detroit family home. Her research culminated in a summer visit to Chicago where she visited the Maxwell Street Market on Desplaines Street, and then the Maxwell mansion and the Geneva History Museum where she gave a presentation about her genealogical journey.  In Chicago and in Lake Geneva, she was chaperoned by Maxwell Street Foundation board member, Lori Grove, who introduced her to the welcoming Geneva Lake community.  Leslie donated the 1822 oil on panel portraits of early Chicagoan Dr. Philip Maxwell (for whom Maxwell Street is named) and his wife Jerusha that continue to be loaned for display at St. Ignatius College Prep.