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. Herrington and Colonel Richard Hamilton, a powerful Cook County politician, had used their connections to get the county authorised in the first place, and the two of them were the townsite proprietors who deeded the county its public square, so the commissioners were in effect ratifying an arrangement already made. The tavern served as the first courthouse. In 1837 the county offices moved into a purpose built courthouse on the corner of Fourth and State, put up for three thousand dollars. The rival on the record was neither Batavia nor St Charles but Clybournville, a hamlet at the mouth of Mill Creek that never grew into anything much. Removal was agitated for years afterwards and was finally settled by building big, a hundred thousand dollar courthouse in the late 1850s that ended the argument. That building burned on the night of 13 March 1890. The Romanesque courthouse that replaced it in 1892 cost a hundred and ninety five thousand dollars and still hears civil cases, a block south of the square the county first platted. State Street, running past it, carries Illinois 38, and Geneva is one of the ten Illinois towns named in the Lincoln Highway Association's proclamation of 1913, so a county seat argument of 1836 and the first transcontinental road settled on the same few blocks by different routes.