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. Naperville sits on the county's southern rim, and the 1882 county history says plainly that its remoteness from the centre gave other ambitions their pretext. Wheaton was central, and it had the railway first: the Galena and Chicago Union came through in 1849 after the Wheaton brothers gave the right of way free, while Naperville waited until 1864 for a line of its own. A referendum in 1867 went 1,686 to 1,635 for Wheaton, a margin of fifty one votes. Naperville would not hand over the records, so Wheaton built a courthouse anyway at a cost of twenty thousand dollars and dedicated it on 4 July 1868, and later that year a party of Civil War veterans from Wheaton and Danby came and took the records in a raid before dawn. It is remembered as the midnight raid, and by some accounts the raiders were chased home having dropped part of their load. The county history, written in 1882, says only that a few records were lost. The rest is a story the county's own recorder still calls a legend: seven boxes of deeds off a wagon, carried to Chicago for safekeeping, burned in the fire of 1871. DuPage is genuinely missing plat books fifteen to twenty.
Getting there
41.7743, -88.1467
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
