St. Joseph, where they were taught by nuns from Milwaukee's School Sisters of St. Francis until 1981; the Archdiocese of Chicago closed the school in 1986, but parish families reopened it a decade later. The German language was frequently used in the classrooms up until World War I, when the school abandoned this practice due to anti-German feeling in the United States. Prior to then, because Masses were only celebrated in German, English-speaking Catholics petitioned the Archdiocese of Chicago to open a second parish in the area, which would become St. Francis Xavier Church in 1904. Upon the death of Fr. Netstraeter in 1924, it was discovered that he bequeathed a large monetary sum of his estate for the construction of a new church. The money was temporarily borrowed by Cardinal George Mundelein, but returned in 1938 and was used to construct the new, current, St. Joseph's church, which opened in 1939. St. Francis Xavier Church would be merged with St. Joseph Parish in 2019 with much controversy. In 1897 Gross Point opened up a small public school west of Ridge Road on Wilmette Avenue. The Gross Point Public School was housed in a two-room, two-story brick building built on that had been donated by the Nanzig family. Its building would later become the home of the American Legion Post 46. The 1890s By the early 1890s the Chicago & Milwaukee Railroad had double-tracked its line in Wilmette. In 1890 Wilmette constructed its first village hall. In 1892 the village began purchasing treated water from Evanston and had begun to set up telephone service. In 1895 the village established the Wilmette Public Works Department to provide maintenance to the village's infrastructure. In 1897 the railway built a new and larger Frost & Granger-designed station house for its Chicago & Milwaukee station, on the east side of the tracks. The 1874 station building was relocated and used for freight, and later for general storage. The Chicago, North Shore and Milwaukee (North Shore Line) began service in Wilmette in 1899. Its route (from south to north) entered Wilmette along the Northwestern Elevated tracks. After leaving the Linden station, the trains ran west on Greenleaf Avenue, before running north alongside the tracks of the Chicago & Milwaukee railroad. The segment which ran parallel to the Chicago & Milwaukee railroad is today occupied by the 9-mile Green Bay Trail. Wilmette was home to a