There are not too many houses in Des Plaines today that can be called a big country house. The most prominent of these is the stately, 100 year old E. A. Manuel house, commanding two acres on the corner of Rand Road and Elk Boulevard. The craftsman style home wasn’t on a corner at all when it was built; in fact, when Rand was widened and Elk was built in the late 1950s, it went right through the home’s tennis court.
Dr. Edward Albert Manuel was a Milwaukee veterinarian before coming to Des Plaines in 1895. Reading of a livery and boarding stable for sale across from the depot, Manuel purchased it and came to the village in a horse-drawn buggy. Manuel’s first home was behind this stable, now the site of the driveway to Metropolitan Square. He built a thriving business and established the local public transportation system. Starting with the stable, he moved from hiring out horses and a horse-drawn bus, to automobile sales, taxis, and motor buses. Manuel died in 1931 but the business lived on. It grew from Suburban Auto Coach into United Motor Coach, which at its peak in the 1960s was the fourth largest independent bus company in the state with over 80 buses. It eventually was absorbed into what is now Pace, which locally operates out of the former United Motor Coach facilities on Northwest Highway.
His house was widely considered a showpiece of the community; a 1916 book described it as “one of the most beautifully laid out homes in the town, (with) delightful gardens… made thus by landscape genius Ransom Kennicott.” Kennicott would go on to become the first chief forester of the Cook County Forest Preserve. The house is two stories high with two parlors, six bedrooms, a finished attic, a dining room and kitchen. Manuel demanded the strictest attention to detail in the building of the house, and it shows in the cut glass and carved woodwork inside, as well as the boulders he personally collected on his veterinary rounds to serve as a foundation. The grounds also featured a figure-8 driveway with a port-cochere, a small orchard, a stable-garage the size of a small house, and several elaborate gardens.
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The house remained in the family until Bernice Manuel died in 1991. It sat vacant for several years and a condominium development was proposed in 1996. Outcry from neighbors over traffic concerns scaled the project down from 72 units to 54 to 33 to 27 before the Zoning Board of Appeals blocked the project entirely. Its future remained in doubt until Dennis Larson purchased it. He has owned and maintained it ever since. The house was recently listed for sale for $899,000.
