The challenge of overland travel west of Chicago: A brief history…

Until we run into one of our area’s seemingly never-ending detours or other serious road construction projects, most of us continue to take fast and easy road transportation for granted. These days, we think nothing of jumping into our autos and cruising 50 miles or more to shop in some specialty store or to eat in a fancy restaurant.

It wasn’t always so. In fact, it wasn’t that many years ago that getting from place to place out here in once overwhelmingly rural Kendall County and the rest of northern Illinois was a real—often literal—pain.

The earliest White settlers who started arriving in the late 1820s had two choices. They could ride a horse from place to place or they could walk. As for shopping in fancy stores or eating in exclusive restaurants, well, those things just didn’t exist.

Back in the days of horse travel, 20 miles was about the limit of a day’s journey. A man, back in those hardy days, could also walk about 20 miles a day without too much trouble. When the Kendall County was established in 1841, the county seat was centrally located at Yorkville. But when voters moved it from Yorkville to Oswego, those folks down in the southern part of the county were obliged to stay overnight if they had some county business to transact, since a round trip of 20 miles (I0 each way) was about the  limit of a day’s travel. That’s one of the main reasons the county seat was moved back to centrally-located Yorkville by vote of the county’s taxpayers in I859.

The Fox River Valley in northern Illinois was close enough to Chicago for farmers to drive livestock directly to market there, a market that exploded in size when U.S. Army engineers opened a channel through the sandbar at the mouth of the Chicago River. That created a safe harbor for ships and immediately made Chicago one of the nation’s busiest port cities.

If you were in a big hurry to go a long distance in the 1830s, you took a stagecoach, in which your journey was completed in stages. At each stop (10-20 miles apart) the horses on the stagecoach were exchanged for fresh ones so the trip could be completed as soon as possible. In Kendall County, there were a number of stage stops, some owned by the Frink and Walker Stage Coach Company, and others owned by private parties.

But those early roads in the 1830s were little more than dirt tracks across the prairie, most of which had originally been Indian trails. Even calling them trails might not be quite accurate.

In March 1831, Juliette M. Kinzie traveled with her husband John and a small party from Prairie du Chien in modern Wisconsin to Chicago. The travelers, with someone described as an experienced guide, planned to take what was then known as the Great Sauk Trail east to the Fox River of Illinois, where they planned to then turn north-northeast to Chicago. But as she reported in her book Wau-Bun: The Early Day in the North-West, the supposedly experienced guide could not find the reportedly well-traveled Sauk Trail, and the party was forced to make its way as best it could across the rolling prairies of northwest Illinois. Fortunately for them, the Fox River’s pretty hard to miss and they did reach it, although some miles north of where they’d expected to.

Native People here in northern Illinois usually walked from place to place. They weren’t the horse-riding war-bonneted Western types seen in movies. And they walked astonishing distances. Once a year, most of the Sauk and Fox tribes of western Illinois hiked all the way to Canada and back to trade furs for guns, jewelry, axes, and other items with British traders on the afore-mentioned Great Sauk Trail.

Given the difficulty in getting through them, roads bypassed Specie and Au Sable groves and the Big Slough that divided them. Grove Road, at the right in this clip from an 1876 map, made a sweeping curve around AuSable Grove, and it still does to this day

Since the trails were used by people walking afoot, they took the route of least effort, going around sloughs, swamps and other impediments and using the best fording places across the regions numerous rivers and creeks. A modern remnant of this early travel history is Grove Road south of Oswego, where motorists may note it takes a big sweeping curve for no apparent reason. Back in the 1830s though, there was a dense wooded area there surrounding a large wetland—which the settlers called the Big Slough—that had to be bypassed. And so it went.

But as soon as settlers began arriving, though, formal roadways began to be laid out. These included roads from Chicago to Ottawa at the head of navigation on the Illinois River that boasted three separate branches and the two branches of roads from Chicago to the rich lead-mining Galena region.

The road to Ottawa was the first one laid out, connecting Chicago at the foot of Lake Michigan to the Illinois River and thence down to the Mississippi.

In the summer of 1831, the Cook County Board formally established the first county road west of the growing village, leading to Ottawa. According to the county board of commissioners’ minutes, that earliest branch of the Ottawa road was to run “from the town of Chicago to the house of B. Lawton, [Bernard Laughton’s tavern at modern Riverside] from thence to the house of James Walker on the DuPage River [at Plainfield] and so on to the west line of the county.”

The road began on the lakefront at Chicago and headed west across what travelers and city residents alike described as the “Nine-Mile Swamp” on modern Madison Street to Western Avenue where it became known as the Barry Point Trail and then southwest to Laughton’s Tavern.

Barry’s Point was a patch of timber that extended east from the Des Plaines River named for an early settler. By the time the road was officially laid out from Chicago, Mr. Barry had died and his widow, the Widow Barry, was living there.

Realizing steamboats could speed both passengers and mail during the Illinois Rivers’ three ice-free seasons, Frink purchased the small steamboat Frontier to connect with his stages at either Ottawa or Peru, depending on the depth of the river. (Illustration from By Trace & Trail, Oswegoland Heritage Association, 2010)

The purpose of the road was to regularize the northern portion of the already well-used and familiar trail known as the Potowatomi Trace. By the 1830s the trace was more often called the High Prairie Trail, leading from the lakeshore at Chicago to the head of navigation on the Illinois River. During most of the year, that point was at Peru, although during periods of sufficiently high water on the Illinois River, steamboats could make it to the docks of the larger town, Ottawa.

Plank roads were the first real transportation improvements in Illinois as roads were paved with planks sawn or split from oak, walnut, or other hardwood trees. As you can imagine, such a road would use a tremendous amount of wood. And since wood rots, plank roads weren’t very durable. But in a time that considered forests as inexhaustible, plank roads were a very sensible way to weather-proof major highways. All the plank roads in the Illinois-Indiana area were toll roads. While one was planned to extend from Indiana through Plainfield to Oswego, no plank roads were ever built in Kendall County.

The Illinois and Michigan Canal was the first real economically feasible mass passenger and freight transportation system proposed for northern Illinois. The canal was designed to link the Illinois River with Lake Michigan, funneling everything from grain and livestock to lumber from northern forests down the Illinois and Mississippi River systems to the seaport of New Orleans—-and allowed international trade to flow the other way as well. The I&M Canal produced an economic miracle as the swampy little town of Chicago suddenly exploded into an economic giant.

Railroads soon followed the canal, and eventually led to its downfall as the prime transportation artery of our area. The Chicago and Northwestern, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, the Illinois Central, and other railroad companies all sprouted to meet need for efficient transportation. The first railroad (the Burlington) ran through Kendall County in 1853, bypassing Oswego, which still favored plank roads. The Fox River Valley Railroad was constructed through Oswego in 1870, finally giving Oswego a transportation window on the rest of the U.S.

And at the turn of the century, interurban trolley lines began running, with one line running from Aurora to Yorkville through Oswego, and another running south from Yorkville to Morris, the Fox and Illinois Union Electric Railway.

But farmers still had to get their crops and livestock to market and farm and town families alike had to get to places—school, shopping, church—that weren’t necessarily convenient to either rail or trolley lines. It was far from easy.

When this photo was taken at the Robert Johnston farm on the west side of the Fox River near Oswego, the dirt road was still frozen. But when the annual spring thaw came, getting to town would be a challenge. (Little White School Museum collection)

On March 12, 1890, the Joliet News had observed: “The farmers of Will and Kendall counties are just now realizing what public road economy means. Only those living on gravel roads have been in Joliet since before Christmas. Hay, butter, eggs, poultry, and onions have been commanding good prices in this market, and just a few farmers could avail themselves of this condition. The buyer and seller might as well be a thousand miles apart.”

Until 1913, Illinois townships were responsible for financing road construction and for their maintenance outside municipal limits. The system barely worked even while most travel was by horse-drawn vehicles. By the time the 20th Century dawned and growing numbers of autos and (as they were called at the time) auto trucks, were traveling the roads, the system was at the breaking point.

The financing method put unfair burdens on sparsely populated townships. Road mileage might be the same as in heavily populated townships, but in less populated areas of Illinois, fewer taxpayers were available to shoulder the burden.

Then in 1911, a new state law allowed collection of motor license fees, with the money earmarked for road construction and maintenance. As soon as the state was involved in road financing, they began investigating better construction techniques. A major benefit of good roads, it turned out, was because it was much cheaper to drive a vehicle on a hard-surfaced road than on one with a dirt surface.

Well bundled against the cold, Mr. Bower, one of Oswego’s mail carriers around the turn of the 20th Century, pauses with his mud-spattered carriage. Bad roads made getting the mail through a challenge. (Little White School Museum collection)

During tests in Cleveland, Ohio, five two-ton White trucks with full loads were driven over various road surfaces. They averaged nearly 12 miles per gallon on concrete roads, but less than six miles per gallon on dirt roads. Concrete also beat the asphalt roads of the era (nine miles per gallon). Brick roads were nearly as good as concrete, but were labor-intensive to build. Gravel roads, too, were much better than dirt, with a fair gravel surface allowing the trucks to average about seven mpg, and a good gravel surface giving 9.4 mpg.

So if motorists, those driving autos as well as commercial trucks, could save so much gasoline, state officials figured part of that savings could be used to build the better roads so many seemed to be demanding. The calculation went as follows: Assuming the average motorist drove 8,000 miles a year, half over medium to poor roads at eight miles per gallon, over hard roads the mileage would double, saving 250 gallons of gas a year, or $57.50 a year (at the then-current price of 23 cents a gallon). So any annual fee under $57.50 would save motorists money. In the event, auto taxes were figured not to rise to more than $12 a year to fund good roads.

With the advocacy of several groups, and spearheaded by William G. Edens (namesake of today’s Edens Expressway in Chicago and several northwest suburbs), a statewide organization was formed to lobby for hard roads, and to draw up specifications for them. Edens, a born organizer, had started out as a railroad brakeman and conductor who rose to organize the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen. Then in 1897, he was tapped by President William McKinley to organize the post office department’s new Rural Free Delivery system. Leaving government, he became a successful Chicago banker, active in Chicago’s social and political scene.

Edens, with the support of Illinois Gov. Edward F. Dunne, helped organize the Illinois Highway Improvement Association, including the association’s first convention in Peoria on Sept. 27, 1912. Each member of the General Assembly was invited, and was also asked to appoint three residents of each legislative district as delegates. Also invited were the state’s agricultural, commercial, labor, banking, real estate, automobile, good roads, medical, rural letter carrier, central women’s club, highway commissioner, teacher, and lawyers’ organizations.

Advertising postcard by the Portland Cement Association, 1916, touting the book “Concrete Facts About Concrete Roads” by C.M. Powell illustrating the first concrete highway in Kendall County. The road was built from Aurora’s municipal boundary to Waubonsie Creek in Oswego in 1914. (Little White School Museum collection)

Attending the convention from Kendall County were George S. Faxon of Plano, representing the Illinois Postmasters’ Association; and Dr. R.A. McClelland of Yorkville, representing the Kendall County Automobile Club.

The convention’s platform urged state officials to mandate state and county cooperation in the construction of main highways and bridges, establish a “non political” state highway commission, use state funds to improve main highways connecting county seats and other principal cities, improve other roads controlled by township and county officials, use state prison inmates “when practicable” for road building, and use state automobile taxes to finance the system.

Gov. Dunne, in his 1913 message to the General Assembly, contended: “The loss to farmers, because of inaccessible primary markets, and the abnormal expense of transportation due to bad roads, must be considered as a contributing cause of the high cost of living. In some Illinois counties, highways are impassable to ordinary loads for a full third of the year.”

As indeed they were. On March 11, 1903, the Kendall County Record reported from Yorkville that: “It took Harry Leifheit, [mail] carrier on Route 2, two days to make his trip to Plattville and return. Left Yorkville at 7:30 Monday morning and got back at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday. No mail taken out Tuesday–the roads are about impassable.”

Not that the effort was entirely clear sailing, since township officials opposed loss of their traditional control. But James F. Donovan of Niantic, president of the State Association of Highway Commissioners and Town Clerks, managed to persuade a majority of his group’s members to get on board.

Farmers protested the cost and wondered whether better roads would benefit them. Skillful political work at the state, county, and township level blunted their objections. Eventually, the Illinois State Farmer’s Institute, precursor of today’s Farm Bureau, came out foursquare in favor of good roads, tipping the balance in favor of support.

Later in 1913, a bill featuring many of the good roads convention’s recommendations passed with the support of dozens of organizations. Prominent among them was the Kendall County Automobile Club.

John D. Russell was appointed Kendall County’s first superintendent of highways in 1913. Little White School Museum collection)

Locally, the biggest change following the law’s passage was creating a county superintendent of highways. John D. Russell of Oswego, a well-known local politician and farmer, was appointed in Kendall County. Russell served as Oswego Township Road Commissioner from 1887-93. In 1896, Gov. John Peter Altgeld appointed Russell his military aide-de-camp, with the rank of colonel—although he had no military experience. He went on to serve as Oswego Township Supervisor from 1897-1907 and was always a strong good roads supporter.

The new legislation made state funds available for hard roads, but there was no overall transportation plan. In 1914, a short demonstration stretch of 15-foot wide concrete roadway was built along the Fox River south of Montgomery past the site of what would one day become the Boulder Hill Subdivision. Another stretch, financed by Kendall County, was begun from Yorkville along Van Emmon Road towards Oswego on the east side of the Fox River. But without a plan to link these isolated stretches, their economic impact was diluted. It would take another governor and more public pressure to create a viable hard road program.

In November 1916, Democrat Frank O. Lowden was elected governor and immediately pushed the good roads program begun by his predecessor.

“Good roads are a good investment,” Lowden told the General Assembly in January 1917. “Motor vehicles are rapidly supplanting horse-drawn vehicles. When good roads have become the rule, and not the exception as now, auto trucks will likely take the place of horses and wagons in the transportation of the products of the farm.”

Lowden, like Dunne, tapped William G. Edens to organize the statewide good roads effort. Unfortunately, just as pressure mounted for good roads, the nation plunged into World War I.

But On Nov. 5, 1918, while fighting still raged in France, a statewide referendum was held on a $60 million bond issue to build thousands of miles of all-weather concrete roads in Illinois. Led by Edens’ “Pull Illinois Out of the Mud” campaign, the measure easily passed. The vote in Kendall County was overwhelming, 1,532 yes to 90 no.

The measure called for improving 800 miles of roads at state and federal expense; improving 4,800 miles of roads with the bond money to be maintained by auto and truck license fees; using joint state-county funding to improve another 11,200 miles of local roads selected by county boards with approval of the state highway commission; and improving 80,000 miles of township roads with counties providing 25 percent of the cost.

The plan called for bond issue concrete roads to pass through all 102 Illinois counties. In Kendall County, Route 18 was to be our hard road. It was to head south out of Aurora on Lincoln Avenue, along the east side of the Fox River through Montgomery to Oswego on that existing stretch of road laid down in 1914, then south to Yorkville, across the Fox River to Plano on to Sandwich and, eventually, Princeton—the route championed for years by the Cannon Ball Trail Association.

Car westbound from Oswego on the Cannon Ball Trail, soon to become first Ill. Route 18 and eventually U.S. Route 34 in a photo taken on Oct 27, 1912 by photographer Dwight S. Young. (Little White School Museum collection)

But after the referendum passed, Gov. Len Small, a Republican, replaced Lowden. Small turned out to be one of Illinois’ more corrupt governors, who was politically beholden to the motor transportation industry. So when engineers for the Illinois Department of Public Works and Buildings laid out Route 18’s actual right-of-way, a roar of protest went up. Instead of following the route promised during the referendum campaign, the engineers proposed running Route 18 down the west side of the Fox River as an extension of River Street, past the sheep yards in Montgomery, across the Chicago Burlington & Quincy mainline at the Wormley crossing north of Oswego. From there the route headed southwesterly, bypassing Yorkville to the north and Plano’s business district slightly to the south on a rough airline through Sandwich and on to Princeton. It was the route today of River Street, Ill. Route 31 south to the junction with Route 34 at Oswego, and then on west. Paved spurs were to connect Route 18 with downtowns in Yorkville and Oswego.

The route, the Kendall County Record charged in December 1920, violated several of the requirements laid out in the bond issue legislation. The new route was longer and didn’t use two sections of concrete road already laid in the county along what would become Ill. Route 25 and Van Emmon Road. Further, a costly viaduct over the CB& Q mainline at the Wormley Crossing was required.

“In consideration of Route 18, which the state engineers have so arbitrarily placed as to miss Oswego and Yorkville entirely and to abandon a route which was built with the sanction of the state and was to be eventually taken over as Route 18, the question arises as to whether or not the law is being lived up to,” Record Publisher Hugh Marshall contended on Jan. 26, 1921.

Local consensus was that the new route was picked thanks to the meatpacking and other commercial interests with undue influence on Small to create a direct route from Aurora and Chicago west rather than one that passed through and benefiting local communities.

Newly paved Route 18—later to become U.S. Route 34—looking east towards the west end of the Oswego Bridge across the Fox River in 1923. (Little White School Museum collection)

Despite the protests and the loyal Republicans who predominated in the counties Route 18 would pass through, state officials refused to consider the old route. In fact, by the end of September 1921, all the right-of-way for the new route had been purchased. The final surveys of the right-of-way and design started in 1921, with actual construction starting later that year. By late May 1924, the 18-foot wide concrete highway had been completely laid from Chicago to Princeton and was curing.

Meanwhile in Oswego, state officials approved connecting the concrete section of modern Ill. Route 25 with the Route 18 concrete spur across the Oswego Bridge. In July a new concrete bridge was built across Waubonsie Creek. The old iron bridge it replaced was moved to the Pearce Cemetery entrance road. The connection was finished and opened to traffic in early December.

The section of modern Route 34 from Oswego to Naperville had to wait; work didn’t start until the fall of 1932. By October 1933, the road was paved along its entire length, with the exception of the intersection with the Lincoln Highway, today’s U.S. Route 30, and the Elgin Joliet & Eastern Railroad overpass. Not until May 1934 were plans finished to bridge the tracks and to cross under Route 30. The railroad bridge and the highway interchange were not finished until another year had passed.

With the end of the project, Route 34‘s course as we now know it was finished. Eventually the other hard road links, Ill. Route 71, Ill. Route 126, Ill. Route 25, Ill. Route 47, U.S. Route 30, and U.S. Route 52 were finished and Kendall County was linked directly with Chicago and the rest of Illinois via a system of all-weather concrete roads that’s still serving the county to this day.

Today, with traffic on the roads in Kendall County and the rest of Illinois west of Chicago heavier than anyone in 1919 could have conceived, we’re still dealing with the effects those transportation design decisions made so many years ago have on our daily lives.

One-room schools were the foundation for today’s public education system

School kids’ summer vacation isn’t here yet, but if my grandchildren are any indication, students have begun counting the weeks and days until the last day of classes for the current school year.

During “The Year of the Early Spring” in 1833—exactly 190 years ago—settlement in the Fox River Valley boomed, drawing pioneer families from settled Eastern states to the prairies of northern Illinois.

Some of the first institutions these new arrivals established were churches and schools. And kids back then looked forward to summer vacation as much as their modern descendants do.

While a few of those early settlers were from southern states, most were from what our school history books called the old Middle and New England colonies—mostly New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts—joined by other families, like the Pearces who settled at Oswego in June 1833, most recently from Ohio but from farther east before that.

Those Eastern settlers brought their view that both religion and education were required to produce solid informed citizenry in a thriving democracy, a view sharply at odds with their southern countrymen. Public education already had a long history in the northeast by the era of heavy Illinois settlement—public education was mandated in Massachusetts as early as 1647—but it was a rare, virtually nonexistent thing in the South. The Southern planter class who ran the region like their own private fiefdoms felt, not without some justification, that an educated population tended to ask uncomfortable questions, including demanding rights the planters wanted to keep for themselves. And, of course, it was flatly illegal to educate a large percentage of the South’s population, the Black slaves who produced most of its wealth., suggesting just how dangerous the southern upper crust knew education could be to the established order.

In fact, public education didn’t become the law in Southern states until after they lost the Civil War when establishing systems of public schools was one of the requirements to be readmitted to the Union.

Here in Illinois, where the earliest settlers in southern Illinois were from Southern states, tax support for public schools wasn’t available until the early 1850s. But that didn’t keep the new arrivals here in northern Illinois from establishing schools funded by subscriptions collected from students’ parents.

The interior of this preserved log school in Winterset, IA is typical of those found all over the Midwest during the early 19th Century. (Madison County Historical Society photo)

According to the county’s first historian, Rev. E.W. Hicks, the first school in the county was built in what soon became the thriving settlement of Pavilion on one of the busy trails from Chicago to Ottawa—now Ill. Route 71. According to Hicks, “It was a log house, with slabs for benches.”

Our neighbors to the north in Aurora managed to organize their school a couple years after Pavilion’s school started. Wrote Hicks: “The first school was begun in Aurora that season, 1836, in a log school house covered with bark. Mrs. Spaulding was the first teacher.”

Meanwhile here in my hometown of Oswego, the folks didn’t get their act together to establish a school until 1837. Probably because it was free, the subscribers picked for their school a vacant log building along what is now Ill. Route 25, about a city block north of modern North Street. Tradition had it the building was constructed by missionaries to the resident Potawatomi Indians, but despite checking with the Catholic and Protestant religious organizations that were active in the area during that era, researchers at Oswego’s Little White School Museum have not been able to find any proof of that. It seems more likely the cabin was a temporary trading post abandoned when the U.S. Government removed the local tribes people in 1836, forcing them west of the Mississippi River.

But in any case, classes were held there in the fall of that year with young George Washington Kellogg hired as the teacher. Interestingly enough, his family is still prominent in Kendall County politics and social life after all these years—one descendant was just elected Kendall County Board Chairman—suggesting a certain stability for these parts that belies the constant hurly-burly of modern life.

The old log cabin only served for a year—we can only imagine how decrepit it must have been—before it was replaced. Explained Hicks: “The next season a frame building was put up on the same lot with the store [64 Main Street in downtown Oswego]. The studdings were hewed out of rails. It was the first frame in Oswego, and is now a part of Albert Snook’s residence. It was made for a store, but school was held in it. Adaline Warner, sister of Mrs. George Parker, was the first teacher.”

A few years later, a purpose-built one-room school was built about where Madison Street crosses Bartlett Creek, and that served until the two-story Old Stone School was built about the time state law was passed permitting levying property taxes to support public schools.

And speaking of those one-room schools, they popped up all over Kendall County, the goal being to keep students from having to walk no farther than a mile and a half to two miles to get to class. Which sort of explodes our grandparents’ boasts that unlike us pampered younglings, they had to walk 10 miles to school, uphill both directions.

The teacher and student body of the Minkler School, NaAuSay Township, Kendall County, in 1893. (Little White School Museum collection)

By the middle of the 19th Century, the educational year had been somewhat standardized into two terms, usually called the summer and winter terms. The summer term was often taught by a woman because the bigger, usually rowdier, boys were hard at work with farm work instead of attending classes at that time of the year. Men were often sought to teach the winter term when the rowdies were in attendance, if somewhat unwillingly.

The differences in the pay scales of male and female teachers reflected those seasonal differences. At the Kendall School, built in 1855 at the corner of Ashley and Ament roads in Kendall Township, Margaret Leith received $15 a month for teaching the four-month summer term in 1858, while George Bishop was paid $30 a month to teach the succeeding winter term.

Starting with those first subscription schools, some 125 rural schools operated in Kendall County over the years. But early in the 20th Century, the State of Illinois began urging consolidating small rural schools with in-town schools to save money. Noted the Kendall County Record on April 11, 1923: “It costs more per capita to meet the running expenses of rural schools of Illinois than in the cities and incorporated villages, according to figures compiled by public school officials in the state. Five pupils in a country school cost not less than $1,000 per year or $200 for each pupil while in cities and large units the cost is about $40 each. Figures compiled show that 165 school districts of Illinois have fewer than five pupils attending school, while in 1,581 there is an average daily attendance of fewer than 9 pupils.”

Education quality also suffered when a school had few students, and the costs to supply a quality junior high education in a one-room school were out of reach for most of those districts.

The teacher (standing at left rear) and student body of the Grove School on Grove Road south of Oswego enjoyed an 1894 dress-up day with a Mother Goose theme. Integration was the rule here in northern Illinois from the time schools were established. The Black children are from the Lucas family, a local farming family. (Little White School Museum collection)

It’s not that Illinois didn’t continually try to upgrade the educational experience of rural school students. Such efforts as the Country Life movement were dedicated to trying to keep young rural people from moving on into towns, strongly supporting improvements in rural schools as a major method of achieving that. The movement advocated improving both rural schools’ curricula as well as the facilities themselves. And thus was born the Standard School movement.

At this same time, our familiar system of standardized grade levels, from kindergarten through high school, was almost universally adopted across the nation. While kindergarten was vanishingly rare outside of large cities, rural schools began offering a standard course of study for grades 1-8. Students who graduated from eighth grade were eligible to attend high school. Before high school districts were established throughout the state in the 1930s, students could attend whichever high school would accept them, with their home one-room districts paying the tuition.

Of course during that era, not a whole lot of eighth graders went on to high school. According to the May 25, 1938 Kendall County Record, only 115 rural school students graduated from eighth grade in the county that year.

Right around the turn of the 20th Century, Illinois State Superintendent of Public Instruction Alfred Bayliss decided to institute a series of standards to improve rural school education. State inspectors began visiting rural schools all over the state, no small task since by 1908 there were 10,638 rural schools in Illinois.

In 1909, the Standard School movement in Illinois set initial minimum standards in the general areas of grounds, schoolhouse, furnishings and supplies, organization, and the teacher.

Standards were gradually increased, clarified and tightened. According to Illinois’ 1910 requirements, a Standard School was required to have “a capable, well prepared and efficient teacher; good organization, discipline and teaching; a comfortable and sanitary [school]house; proper equipment, including a library suitable for the children, dictionaries, maps, and globes.” The earlier category of “grounds” was incorporated into the “comfortable and sanitary [school]house requirement. State School Superintendent Francis Blair warned, “Wanting any of these, no school can be as good as it ought to be.”

By 1913, it was the turn of rural schools here in Kendall County to be visited. As the Kendall County Record reported on Oct. 15 that year: “[County School] Superintendent A.D. Curran and U.J. Hoffman, state supervisor of rural schools, are making a tour of Kendall county. They will visit every rural school and Mr. Hoffman has the power to place these schools on what is known as the ‘standardized list’ if they come up to the requirements. There is no doubt but that the schools of Kendall county are up to the standard of any in the state and that Mr. Hoffman will be pleased with his visit.”

Harvey School, organized by the Scots farmers owning the surrounding land in 1854, was built at the northwest corner of the intersection of modern Harvey and Wolf’s Crossing roads in Oswego Township. The Harvey family owned the land on which the school was built. (Little White School Museum collection)

A well-lit classroom was deemed especially valuable for both students and teachers. Minimum square footage of window area based on the schoolroom’s area were set. If you’ve visited any restored one-room schools in Illinois or you’ve seen early 20th Century photos of them, you will notice that they have large windows, but on only one side of the building. That’s due to A.D.F. Hamlin’s 1910 manual, Modern School Houses; Being A Series of Authoritative Articles on Planning, Sanitation, Heating and Ventilation.

According to Hamlin, “Light should come over the left shoulder of each pupil,” suggesting all students should be writing right-handed to assure good light on what they were doing—whether they were naturally right-handed or not.

Further, the amount of window area and its placement in the building were also critical, Hamlin contended: “The total window area should equal from 40 to 50 percent of the total wall area of the long side of the room, and in general, one-quarter the floor area of the classroom. The windows should extend up to within 6 inches of the ceiling; the window stools should be from 3 to 3 1/2 feet from the floor. Light from below that level is useless; it is the height of the top of the window that determines its lighting efficiency. The sill should, however, not be higher than 3 1/2 feet from the floor, as it is desirable that the pupils should be able to rest their eyes at times by looking out at more or less distant objects, which is impossible for many with a sill 4 1/2 or even 4 feet high.”

In 1941, Kendall County had 54 rural school districts. Two decades later, almost all of them had consolidated with in-town districts with students riding those bright yellow buses to class instead of trudging the one to two miles down a country road to class.

School today would be almost unimaginable to those rural school students of the past in terms of size if nothing else. The enrollment of the Oswego School District this year is about equal to the entire 1960 population of Kendall County. Even so, students and teachers alike are engaged in learning just as they have since C.B. Alvord called that first class to order back in 1834.

Avoiding research rabbit holes sometimes a museum person’s most challenging challenge

Family historians are familiar with the problem. You have set aside a day for research and are eagerly looking forward to accomplishing great things. Then you get sidetracked on the family of an obscure spouse of your fourth cousin twice removed and hours later you finally come to and realize you’ve spent your valuable time and resources researching a family to which you’re not even related.

It’s the same, I’ve found, with museum work, at least at the local level.

I’ve been the volunteer director of the Little White School Museum here in Oswego since the Oswegoland Heritage Association Board of Directors appointed me to the position back in 1994. As part of the job, I help all sorts of people out with research, either directly using our collections at the museum or offering recommendations where they can hopefully find what they’re looking for elsewhere.

So when a local reporter called the other day wondering what the story was behind Wolf’s Crossing Road’s name, I was happy to help. The road, once a country byway, has become a busy suburban alternative route to even busier U.S. Route 34, which it roughly parallels a bit to the south.

The road name’s tie to the Wolf family (it wasn’t named for the animal) stretches back to the late 1800s with the construction of the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway. The rail line’s right-of-way looped from Indiana around Chicago to the south and west. Thus its nickname, the Outer Belt Line.

As built, the line ran from Indiana to Joliet here in Illinois and then west northwest to Plainfield where it took a more straight northerly to Normantown, named after one of the sons of an EJ&E executive. According to the lore of the King family who owned farmland there, Normantown was supposed to have been named King’s Crossing, but the railroad brass later decided otherwise. Even so, the Normantown Station’s code remained “K.”

At Normantown, a branch line switched off the mainline and ran to Aurora, crossing what had been once called the Old Naperville Road and also known in Oswego as the Wheatland Road because it ran from the village mostly straight east to the rich farming community in Will County’s Wheatland Township.

Wolf Crossing, 1903, on the Oswego Township side of the Kendall-Will County line

The rail line crossed the existing country road right at the border between Kendall County’s Oswego Township and Will County’s Wheatland Township at the adjoining farms of Leonard John Wolf and that of either his father, John Ulrich Wolf or his brother, John Wolf Jr. That was the first rabbit hole I went down.

The Wolfs were one of the many German farming families that had immigrated to the fertile Oswego Prairie between Oswego and Naperville from Bavaria, Germany in the 1840s and 1850s. The family patriarch was John Leonard Wolf, who was accompanied by his son, John Ulrich Wolf when they came to Illinois. But John Ulrich Wolf also had a son, known as John Wolf Jr., plus the other son, Leonard John Wolf. By the time the railroad was built the Wolfs owned four farms, one of abut 74 acres in Oswego Township on the line with Wheatland Township owned by just plain John Wolf; and three adjoining it right across the Wheatland Township line, stacked one above the other. The first one of 130 acres was owned by Leonard Wolf, the second adjoining it to the south of 115 acres owned by John Wolf Sr. and the third adjoining it owned by John Wolf Jr. The question then became which John Wolf was which, something I’m still not entirely sure about.

The EJ&E built grain elevators and stations at both the Normantown switch and where the road between Oswego and Naperville crossed the right-of-way of the branch line to Aurora. While towns didn’t grow up around either grain elevator, each did eventually get its own rural post office, important in the years before Rural Free Delivery was introduced by the U.S. Postal service in 1893 and finally standardized across the country in 1902. The post office was located in John Wolf’s home at the crossing. Which John Wolf, you ask? Good question, say I.

The elevator where the Wheatland Road crossed the tracks was named Wolf’s and the road itself quickly became known as Wolf’s Crossing Road. When a post office was granted to serve the neighborhood on Oct. 9, 1890, the post office was also named Wolf’s Crossing. That post office served the community for about 10 years before it was closed in August 1900.

Wolf’s Crossing, 1903, on the Wheatland Township side of the Kendall-Will County line.

So anyway, back to the call from the Ledger reporter. He noted that Oswego is coordinating the widening of Wolf’s Crossing Road plus other improvements including a traffic circle at the Harvey Road intersection and another at the Douglas Road intersections. As part of the improvements, Oswego is planning to change the name of the road to Wolfs Crossing Road—no apostrophe. He was wondering if the road had ever been called Wolfs Crossing Road, and I said I’d look into it.

So down I went into rabbit hole number two.

The thing is, of course, most rural roads in the county were not officially named for many years. Most were numbered but no formal names were given them until relatively late in the 20th Century. Locals all identified them by the names of the farm families that lived along them. So my quest was to find out what Wolf’s Crossing itself was named over the years.

I went first to the museum’s county atlas collection, which includes large format hardcovered atlases that would include that information from 1903, 1922, and 1941. I found that in the 1903 Kendall County atlas, the name was given as Wolf Crossing Station. The 1922 atlas listed it as simply Wolf Crossing, while the 1940 atlas had it as simply Wolfs—no apostrophe, no “Crossing.”

So nothing definitive. Next, I thought I’d try our collection of plat books, booklets with cardboard covers that were issued by the Kendall County Farm Bureau over the years, and see how the name was listed.

In the 1935 plat book, it’s listed as simply Wolfs, no apostrophe. In the 1947 and 1951 plat books it’s listed as Wolf’s Crossing, apostrophe and “Crossing” firmly in place. But in 1959, it was back to just Wolfs, no apostrophe and no “Crossing.” In 1965, it was Wolf’s, getting its apostrophe back although the “Crossing” remained absent, and the 1970 plat book was the same. But after that, the 1974 through the 1987 plat books all listed it as simply Wolfs, no apostrophe and no “Crossing.”

The plat books I was looking at were all duplicates we keep available for researchers. The others in the collection are all safely stored where they’re only accessed at need. When I reached the last plat book in the file folder, I noticed a piece of folded paper loose in the folder. And so down rabbit hole number three I went.

When unfolded, the paper proved to be a 22×15.5” highway map of Kendall County dated 1947. It had no accession number on it and no apparent reason to be loose in the plat book file. I turned it over and noted it looked as if it had been glued to something green—the same color as the 1947 Kendall County plat book I’d examined. I looked at both covers of the 1947 plat book I’d just looked through, and inside the back cover was an exact match for the glue remains on the folded map. So the map belonged to the plat book.

There were two other copies of that year’s plat book in the file I hadn’t bothered with—a person can only read one book at a time after all—so I looked through them and found both had accession numbers. One also still had its large fold-out map attached inside the back cover as well, while the map was missing from the other, just leaving a bit of glue behind.

Which got me to wondering how many copies of the 1947 plat book we had, so I looked it up in the museum database and found we’d catalogued five copies. Three of them—two with intact maps and one with the map missing—were in secure plat book storage, while two were in the duplicates-for-research folder. The one that had held the map that got my attention had apparently never been catalogued.

The 1947 Kendall County highway map snug in its acid-free folder in the Little White School Museum’s Maps, Plats & Surveys flat file cabinet.

So I decided to catalog it, and since its fold-out map was already loose, I further decided to separately catalog the both of them. I put the newly catalogued plat book back in the research folder and then went to store the map flat—not folded—in our Maps, Plats & Surveys Collection, housed in one of our flat file drawers. Which is where I entered rabbit hole number four.

When I opened the drawer, I found two booklets there, one a copy of the Village of Oswego’s comprehensive plan for 1988 and the other titled Mapping the Metropolis: A Community History Using Old Maps and Aerial Photographs: Elk Grove Village & Township, a booklet published by Chicago’s Newberry Library and the Elk Grove Historical Society. Clearly they didn’t belong in the Maps, Plats & Surveys drawer, so I removed them and got the 1947 county highway map safely put in a nice acid-free folder.

I checked inside the covers of both the comp plan and the Elk Grove booklets and found only one, the Elk Grove booklet, had been catalogued. There was no accession number in the comp plan booklet anywhere I looked. So I checked the museum database and found no copies of the 1988 plan there, which seemed odd. The database reported all of our copies of Oswego’s comprehensive plans were handily stored all in one place, in our “Village of Oswego Collection, Box 3.” So, I thought, I’ll just check and make sure we haven’t missed something along the line.

Village of Oswego Box 3 in its place, now safely added to the museum’s Location Map so it can always be found again.

I checked our Location Inventory Map—actually a separate database that lists the location of every box and folder in the museum’s collections—and there was no “Village of Oswego Collection, Box 3.” listed. Boxes 1 and 2 where there right where they should have been. But no Box 3.

Now, the Little White School Museum is a small institution, an extremely local history museum, but even so, we have more than 36,000 items in our collections database, all stored…somewhere. When I give tours of our museum work areas I tell visitors that the trick isn’t cataloging artifacts and archival materials or safely storing them in the correct folders or boxes. That’s simple. There are hundreds of books about how to do that stuff. No, the REAL trick is finding something once you’ve catalogued it and put it on a shelf or in a cabinet or a file drawer somewhere. Lose something and it’s a problem you can’t solve by reading a book about it.

So I got out the only tool that works in a situation like I faced, the old Mark I Eyeball and started visually scanning all the shelves in our main archives storage room. I was going over the shelves for the second time when I remembered we had started storing a few file boxes in Artifacts Room II.

Back in 2010 when the Oswego Prairie Church congregation dissolved, we inherited their records collection spanning 1848 to 2010. We had purchased wire rack shelf units to store the record boxes on, but the shelves were just a bit wider than two standard Hollinger acid-free records cartons, leaving about a 9” or so space on each shelf. Always looking to maximize our extremely tight storage ability, we’d started putting flip-top acid-free storage boxes in those spaces.

So leaving off my second (and increasingly boring) visual scan in the Archives Room, I went back to good old Artifacts Room II, and there was Box 3, Oswego, Village of staring me right in the face. So I pulled it out went to the research area and pulled its contents and found a copy of Oswego’s comprehensive plan identical to the un-numbered and catalogued one I’d found in the Maps, Plats & Survey drawer. Why didn’t it show up in our database? Because there was a typo: the date in the database said it was from 1983, not 1988. And I couldn’t even yell at anybody because I was the moron who’d catalogued it back in 2009.

So I catalogued the 1988 comp plan I’d found in the flat file drawer, put it in Box 3 with all the others, put Box 3 back in its place, and added “Village of Oswego Collection, Box 3” to the Location Map.

Then I had to decide what to do with the Elk Grove Village booklet, and so went down the fifth and final rabbit hole of the day. Normally, we wouldn’t keep something concerning a town so far away (close to 40 miles) from us. But I have a super soft spot for northern Illinois transportation history during the 1830s. It’s really one of my favorite topics and this 9×12 booklet is just plain fascinating. And with the Newberry involved you know absolutely its information will be very accurate.

When I was looking for the booklet’s accession number, some papers fell out. One of them was a letter to me from the booklet’s donor who had read and enjoyed my By Trace and Trail monograph on stagecoach routes west of Chicago back in 2003 and who was a co-author of the Elk Grove booklet. The other nine stapled pages were an unpublished manuscript, Early Trails of Carroll County and Northwestern Illinois by John Faivre.

I scanned Mr. Faivre’s manuscript and created a searchable PDF for our Transportation History file, and also separately catalogued it so that it will show up in the database when researching early area trails. Then I went to put the two pieces in our Booklets collection.

We, like most museums, use Hollinger record storage boxes in our archives and artifacts storage areas. We mostly use full Hollingers (right), but also use half-Hollingers (left) to save shelf space.

We have two boxes of booklets. Box 1 proved to be not just filled but over-filled. Box 2, a half-Hollinger, was on its way to being full but could handle the Elk Grove booklet and accompanying Carroll County trails piece just fine. Even so, I found two Folder 11s, one of which was empty. In addition, there were a number of loose booklets in the box, most of which were the kind of tourist promotional literature you find at tourism bureaus. None of them were numbered, so I removed those, creating more space in the box. And then I went to the database to figure out what was going on with two folders numbered the same. Turned out, the empty one should have been numbered 10, and was supposed to contain a couple other loose booklets about military burials in the Oswego Township Cemetery I found in the box. There was still plenty of room so the Elk Grove booklet also found a home there.

I filed the tourism booklets in the appropriate folders in our vertical file on area towns. Then I checked out the over-full Box 1, which had way too many duplicate copies of the Lions Club’s old Oswegoland: Where the living is better! booklets. I culled, leaving only two of each year in the box, but that meant I had to update the collections database to reflect their new locations, which turned out to be on the local history research materials shelf. I printed out the accession forms with their new locations (we do hard copies because you never know if these snappy computer things will suddenly decide to go rogue), and decided to—finally—call it a day.

It hadn’t been an entirely unproductive day, but I didn’t get done a lot of the things I’d hoped to do. Nevertheless, our database now not only knows that we have a “Village of Oswego Box 3,” but also where it’s at. Our booklets collection can breathe a bit, and we’ve got a really nice 1947 highway map of Kendall County ready for some future researcher.

Oh yes, and as for the name of Wolf’s Crossing Road, as a former newspaper editor, I’d favor keeping the apostrophe in the name, but if, as I’ve heard, the state doesn’t like possessive names for streets and roads, I’d leave it at Wolf Crossing Road, no “s” and no apostrophe. Kendall County’s highway maps have shown the road’s name as simply Wolf Road for years, which has the advantage of being concise, I suppose. But it is—or was—the road to Wolf’s Crossing. It wasn’t their road, but it WAS their crossing since they owned the land before the railroad barged through without so much as a howdy-do. And finally, “Wolfs” isn’t even a decent word. Make it a single Wolf or no Wolf at all, please.