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. Within a year there were enough people for a separate town organisation, and the Board of Supervisors granted it in 1855 under the name Milton. The village that grew up at the station was called Malta, and the township spent the next few years catching up with it. The township's name changed twice. Milton became Etna in September 1856, for the Sicilian volcano, and Etna became Malta in December 1858. The Chicago and North Western's own book of place names, published in 1908, records that the station was Aetna first and that the present name was taken from the island in the Mediterranean. Either way the place was named by the railway rather than by anybody living in it. Malta has stayed almost exactly the size it was. Boies's county history put it at probably over twelve hundred people in 1868, and the 2020 census counted one thousand one hundred and forty three. It is a platted grid of about two thirds of a square mile beside the tracks, with a grain elevator at the middle of it and Illinois 38 along the north edge. Kishwaukee College, which opened in September 1968, stands a little over a mile to the northwest, outside the village limits with farmland in between.