The Clarence Buckingham Memorial Fountain officially opened on May 26, 1927, but its story began much earlier. The Buckinghams were an important family of art patrons and philanthropists in Chicago in the late-19th and early-20th century. The fountain was constructed after Clarence Buckingham death in 1912 by his sister Kate Sturges Buckingham.
In 1924, she gifted a sum of money amounting to a million dollars to the city to construct and maintain a magnificent fountain as a permanent memorial to her brother.
