Local Stories in Illinois
24 places
History·Kane County
Aurora's Light Towers
In the spring of 1881 Aurora contracted for sixteen arc lamps of two thousand candlepower at six thousand dollars a year for five years, and on the evening of 8 November the system was switched on. The lamps went up on seven towers of about a hundred and fifty feet, some free standing and some set on top of a tall building or a school bell tower, with two or three lamps apiece: four on the east side of the Fox River, two on the west, and one in the downtown centre on Stolp Island.
Industry & Science·Kane County
Batavia's Windmill Works
On 29 August 1854 a Connecticut machinist named Daniel Halladay patented a windmill that looked after itself. The Halladay Standard turned to face a shifting wind without help and held a steady speed in a gale by changing the pitch of its sails through a counterweighted governor, so it could be left standing on a prairie farm unattended. It is generally called the first commercially successful self governing windmill made in America. John Burnham organised the U.S.
History·DuPage County
Beaubien Tavern
Mark Beaubien was a French Canadian innkeeper and fiddler who came to Chicago in 1826, when it was a garrison and a scatter of cabins, and kept the Sauganash Hotel at Wolf Point where the branches of the river meet. It was the city's first hotel and its social centre, and he was one of its best known figures. In 1834 he built a second house, the Exchange Coffee House at the northwest corner of Lake and Wells. Then in 1841 he traded away his interest in the Sauganash.
Industry & Science·Ogle County
City of Rochelle Railroad
Rochelle owns a railroad. Not a museum line or a preserved branch, but a working freight short line, built by the city in the mid 1980s with state money to serve industry on the east side of town and connect it to the two main lines crossing on the west side.
History·Kane County
Geneva's Courthouse
Kane County was created in January 1836, and the choice of a seat came down to which settlement had a post office. Three commissioners appointed by the legislature picked the cluster of cabins on the west bank of the Fox that became Geneva, because James Herrington's tavern and inn held the only post office in the county.
Industry & Science·Ogle County
Global III
In 2003 Union Pacific opened a hundred and eighty one million dollar intermodal terminal southwest of Rochelle and called it Global III. The point of it was to get containers out of Chicago. Freight arriving from the west coast had to thread the most congested rail terminal district in North America, and a yard seventy five miles short of it, at the junction of Interstate 39 and Interstate 88 and beside the main line, could lift containers off trains and onto trucks before any of that began.
History·Ogle County
Hangtown
Rochelle has had three names in seventy years and got rid of the middle one on purpose. The town was platted on 30 July 1853 by Robert P. Lane, a Rockford physician and banker who bought forty acres for six hundred dollars from Charlotte Bartholomew, the widow who had inherited the ground, and it was called Lane after him. He appears never to have lived there. Then in June 1861, after a second arson fire took a row of grain warehouses and elevators, a mob seized a man named Thomas Burke.
Nature·DuPage County
Joy Morton's Thornhill
The Morton Arboretum was paid for with salt. In 1880 Joy Morton put his life savings of ten thousand dollars into E. I. Wheeler and Company, a Chicago salt agency; when Wheeler died in 1885 he bought out the interest and renamed the firm for himself, and it was incorporated as the Morton Salt Company in 1910. Its girl with an umbrella and its line about rain and pouring, both adopted in 1914, became one of the most recognised trademarks in the American grocery trade.
Quirky·Ogle County
Lincoln Highway Fountains
Illinois is the only state on the Lincoln Highway that got drinking fountains, and they came from one man's memorial to his mother. Carl Parker donated them in memory of Amanda Sutherland Parker, who had grown up in the Garden Plain country of Whiteside County. The plan was one every ten miles across the state, which proved impossible because there was no water supply at most of those points, so the fountains were given to towns instead.
Transport·DeKalb County
Milton, Etna, Then Malta
In 1854 the citizens of South Grove petitioned the Galena railroad for a station. Their own township had no line. The Dixon branch ran through Malta Township, immediately to the south, so a station there was the nearest thing they could ask for. After some months' delay the company acceded, and the effect on the ground was immediate: land that had been slow to fill filled quickly, because a farm within a wagon ride of a loading platform was worth more than one that was not.
Industry & Science·Ogle County
Rochelle Municipal Utilities
Rochelle has generated its own electricity since 1896, when the city put up a power plant near what is now Spring Lake to light the downtown streets. Municipal utilities were not unusual in the 1890s, when private companies had little interest in wiring small towns and towns that wanted light had to do it themselves, and a surprising number survive: more than two thousand public power utilities still operate in the United States, thirty two of them in Illinois.
Industry & Science·Kane County
The Aurora Watch Factory
Aurora won its watch factory in a bidding contest between towns. The move was got up by a Chicago jeweller named Wendell, the first directors were jewellers from Aurora, Chicago, Quincy and Kankakee, and what settled it was the inducement: a capital base of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, seventy five thousand of it raised from Aurora's own citizens, and the land.
History·DuPage County
The Blodgett House
Israel Porter Blodgett was born at Amherst, Massachusetts on 4 March 1797, the fifth blacksmith in a direct line. He was apprenticed at sixteen to Israel Scott of Hadley, then worked at the United States Armory at Springfield, where he became foreman of the welding room, and was sent on to the new armory at Harpers Ferry in Virginia.
Education·Kane County
The Child City
The Loyal Order of Moose bought a dairy farm in Kane County and built a town on it for the children of members who had died or been disabled. On 14 December 1912 the order's leaders agreed to buy Brookline Farm, seven hundred and fifty acres of Batavia Township, with adjoining land that brought the purchase to one thousand and twenty three acres. Possession came that March, and the place opened on 27 July 1913 with Thomas R.
History·DuPage County
The County Seat War
DuPage County was created out of Cook County on 9 February 1839 with Naperville as its seat, and the first courthouse went up on the block that is now Central Park. The town still points at it: Court Place runs along the park's east edge and Center Street begins at its northeast corner, both named for a courthouse square that was expected to become the middle of Naperville. What undid it was position.
Nature·DeKalb County
The Fairdale Tornado
On the evening of 9 April 2015 a tornado touched down in Lee County at twenty to seven, crossed Ogle and DeKalb counties and lifted forty one minutes later in Boone County, having travelled thirty miles with winds estimated at two hundred miles an hour. It was rated EF4, the strongest tornado recorded anywhere in the United States that year and the first of that strength in northern Illinois since the Plainfield tornado of 1990.
Industry & Science·DuPage County
The Kroehler Works
For most of the twentieth century Naperville was a furniture town. The business was founded as the Naperville Lounge Company on 9 March 1893, and in 1896, after the death of J. L. Nichols, an employee named Peter Kroehler became one of four full partners in it. By 1 April 1915 the firm was running four factories under different names and unified them under one, Kroehler Manufacturing Company. What drove the growth was a patent.
Transport·Ogle County
The Lincoln Highway
Before there were numbered federal highways there was the Lincoln Highway, laid out in 1913 as the first road intended to carry a motorist from New York to San Francisco, and it came through Rochelle. The route is Illinois 38 through the town, and it makes a ninety degree turn in the middle of it, which is the kind of detail that mattered enormously in the era it was built.
Education·Kane County
The Riverbank Ciphers
George Fabyan was a Boston dry goods heir who bought ten acres on the west bank of the Fox at Geneva in 1905, went on buying until the estate ran to several hundred, and spent the family income on whatever questions took him. Riverbank Laboratories, founded there in 1913, worked on genetics, acoustics and ciphers at once. In 1918 Fabyan built an acoustical chamber to the specifications of the Harvard physicist Wallace Sabine, who had complained about his own laboratory at home.
Industry & Science·Ogle County
The Rochelle Canneries
Ogle County grows corn, and for a long stretch of the twentieth century Rochelle was where a great deal of it was put into cans. Sweet corn and peas are harvested in a rush over a few weeks and will not keep, so a cannery had to sit close to the fields and close to a railroad, and Rochelle had both.
Transport·Ogle County
The Rochelle Diamond
Two of the busiest freight main lines in North America cross each other at grade on the west side of Rochelle, and the crossing is why the town calls itself the Hub City. The older of the two arrived first: the Air Line Railroad reached the settlement then called Lane in 1854, running west out of Chicago, and in time became the Chicago and North Western and then Union Pacific.
Industry & Science·DuPage County
The Sears Kit Houses
Between 1908 and 1940 Sears, Roebuck sold more than seventy thousand mail order house kits through its Modern Homes catalogue, in something near four hundred and fifty designs, and from 1911 until the Depression ended the practice in 1933 it lent the buyer the money as well.
Transport·DeKalb County
The Seedling Mile
The Lincoln Highway Association had a problem in 1913 that argument could not solve. It had proclaimed a transcontinental route, but almost all of it was dirt, and the counties that would have to pay for pavement had never seen any. So the association built demonstration stretches, one mile long, dropped into the middle of ordinary mud roads, and called them seedling miles. The point was the contrast at either end.
Transport·DuPage County
The Southwest Plank Road
Ogden Avenue began as a road made of wood. The prairie west of Chicago turned to deep mud every spring, and a loaded wagon could take days to cover ground a rider crossed in hours, so in the 1840s Illinois followed a craze imported from Canada and chartered plank roads by the dozen.