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. The Southwest Plank Road opened in September 1848 and ran nine or ten miles out of the city to Doty's Tavern at Lyons, reached Brush Hill and Fullersburg in 1850, and by way of the Naperville and Oswego plank road made a total of twenty two miles by 1851. The surface was heavy stringers laid along each side of a sixteen foot roadway with planks of pine and hemlock, or better, oak and walnut, set across them and left unspiked. Tollgates stood at intervals of five or six miles, and on the original ten mile section a man on horseback paid twelve and a half cents, a single team two bits, and a four horse vehicle three bits. The unspiked planks were the flaw. They warped, rotted, slipped and floated off, and some were carried away by settlers who found a use for them, so the tolls came off as the surface failed. The route survived the surface. In 1877, after the death of Chicago's first mayor, the Southwest Plank Road was renamed Ogden Avenue for William B. Ogden, and it later became US Route 34. The Lincoln Highway, proclaimed in 1913 as the first transcontinental automobile route, is a different road: it was laid out to avoid Chicago altogether and crossed northern Illinois by way of Chicago Heights, Joliet, Aurora, Geneva, DeKalb and Rochelle. The two meet at Aurora, and only there.
Getting there
41.8025, -88.0627
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.
