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.

Advertisement

The effects of weather have been, and continue to be, historic…

Humorist Charles Dudley Warner once quipped “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” And during Warner’s lifetime (1829-1900), that was mostly true—though not entirely.

For instance, the amount of coal smoke from tens of thousands of stoves and fireplaces created sometimes deadly weather conditions in London, England. But the feeling at the time was that humans really couldn’t affect nature, especially the weather.

Nevertheless, in 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius proposed the hypothesis that massive amounts of human instigated fossil-fuel burning and other combustion that produced carbon dioxide was enough to cause global warming. His suggestion was met with general derision. But then in 1938, Guy Stewart Callendar, a British steam engineer, mathematician, and amateur climatologist gathered actual temperature records from the late 19th Century onward. When analyzed, his data showed that during the preceding 50 years, global land temperatures had increased. In other words, he proved global climate change was happening. In 1938. Something some still refuse to believe.

The heavy smogs in London during the 19th Century not only required carriages and wagons be guided by torch-bearers during daylight hours, but also killed people. That continued into the 20th Century with the notorious London Fog of 1952 that lasted for days and killed several people. (Illustrated London News)

But back to Charles Dudley Warner and his quip about the weather. There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that the weather has had a relatively huge effect on world history. From the 16th Century Kamikaze “Divine Wind” that supposedly disrupted a Mongol invasion of Japan to the 1588 storm that scattered the Spanish Armada, to Napoleon’s disastrous winter retreat from Moscow in 1812, weather’s effects keep turning up in the historical record.

Here in North America—the New World to Europeans but the same old place to the Native People who had been living here for thousands of years—weather began playing an important role as soon as those Europeans mentioned above arrived.

For instance, in 1620, a group of disgruntled British religious separatists left the Netherlands bound for what they hoped would be their very own New World utopia across the Atlantic. Earlier, they’d left England for the Netherlands because their brand of Protestantism was actively suppressed. But they found the religious tolerance of the Dutch intolerable and so decided to make a truly clean break and a new start in the New World, where they hoped to have the religious freedom to oppress other faiths.

They aimed to land in Virginia when they sailed from Plymouth, England on Sept. 16, 1620, but the iffy navigation of their ship’s captain instead landed them on the coast of modern Massachusetts, hundreds of miles north of where they planned to take up their new homes. During their first winter in North America, the unplanned-for cold weather nearly killed the lot of them, but they managed to survive, and then eventually prosper.

Meanwhile even farther to the north, the French were settling Canada, eventually creating a string of settlements along the St. Lawrence River from its mouth upstream to the La Chine rapids, so named because the first explorers hoped China was just beyond them. Although they kept expecting to run across Chinese officials as they continued ever farther west, they were, disappointed when they found the Pacific Ocean in the way of extending their travels.

The weather in Canada was even more brutal than that experienced by the English Separatists settled in Massachusetts. But intrepid French explorers and rapacious businessmen—usually one in the same—kept pushing farther and farther into the interior in their search for China and the East Indies. Among them was René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who managed to obtain the royal trade cession for what is now most of the upper Midwest. LaSalle pushed as far west as the thundering falls on the Niagara River between Lakes Erie and Ontario and in 1679, built the first large sailing ship on the western Great Lakes, the Griffin.

LaSalle’s expedition on its way south on the upper Illinois River looking for open water. They didn’t find any until they got down to modern Peoria.

There, weather again came into play when the Griffin, loaded with valuable furs collected from tribes from the western lakes, disappeared, likely sinking during one of the Great Lakes’ frequent and violent storms. The loss threatened to bankrupt LaSalle, but he managed to talk his way out of the problem and mounted yet another expedition in the spring of 1682.

Setting off from Fort St. Joseph on the St. Joseph River, a Lake Michigan tributary, the LaSalle expedition had to haul their canoes downstream on improvised sledges because the St. Joseph was frozen solid, as was the Kankakee when they portaged into it, as was the Illinois River as they traveled downstream from the Kankakee’s mouth on the Des Plaines. Not until they reached Peoria did they find open water. That allowed them to paddle down the Illinois to the Mississippi, and then down to the Mississippi’s mouth on the Gulf of Mexico. There, in an elaborate ceremony (he’d brought along his royal court clothes in case he met some of those long-sought Chinese officials) LaSalle claimed the entire Mississippi watershed for France, something that must have, at the least, bemused the tens of thousands of Native People who’d been living there for the past several centuries.

Weather continued to have its affects on history as the thin line of European colonies that stretched along the Atlantic seaboard grew and prospered. The frontier moved ever farther west as White settlement pushed the resident Native People ever farther west. By 1830, settlement had begun in what geographers eventually called the Prairie Peninsula, a generally open, huge, roughly triangular-shaped tallgrass prairie with its apex in northwestern Indiana and extending northwest all the way to the eastern Dakotas and southwest into eastern Kansas. It must have been quite a sight for those early pioneers when they emerged from the familiar dense timber that stretched behind them east all the way to the Appalachian Mountains and saw a seemingly endless sea of 6-foot tall Big Bluestem grass extending all the way to the horizon.

Pioneer farmers had to change their techniques when they reached the tallgrass prairie. Instead of clearing timber to plant their fields they had to “break,” or plow, the prairie, an expensive, time-consuming task.

All that open grassland was a great boon for those frontier farmers because they didn’t have to laboriously cut down towering old-growth hardwoods before they could farm the land. But the lack of timber also threw a wrench into traditional frontier farming techniques. While groves of hardwoods spotted the prairie and timber did grow on the east side of prairie water courses, the old ways of depending on logs for cabins and farm buildings, as well as to split into fence rails had to be modified.

The earliest prairie settlers here in northern Illinois staked their claims on the east side of groves and streamside woods in order to assure enough timber for building as well as for firewood. Because prairie pioneering required a LOT of timber for both. For instance, the rule of thumb for firewood was that it took about 30 cords to make it through a northern Illinois winter, a cord being a stack of wood 4 feet wide, 4 feet high, and 8 feet long.

The 1870 plat map of Big Grove in Kendall County’s Big Grove Township illustrates how the county’s groves were subdivided into smaller timber plots for sale by earlier arrivals to later arrivals who needed timber to build farmsteads and put up rail fences.

The earliest settlers who had vision and business sense quickly snapped up those isolated groves and other patches of timber out on the prairie, subdivided them into 10-acre plots, and sold them to later arrivals.

One of the other reasons early settlers preferred to locate their farmsteads on the east side of timber patches was to shelter against the prairie winds that came howling out of the west. In winter, especially, those winds could be brutal, as the early pioneers found out during the fierce winter of 1830-31. Forever after known as the Winter of the Deep Snow, the series of storms led to the deaths of countless settlers as well as many of the Native People who lived here. The weather that winter may even have created conditions that led to the Black Hawk War of 1832, Illinois’ last Indian war.

The 1838 U.S. Survey map of Oswego Township nicely illustrates how the earliest pioneer farmers staked claims hugging the sheltered east side of the region’s patches of timber. The area shaded in green shows the southern-most lobe of the Big Woods, a huge patch of timber that stretched from Oswego north to Batavia and east to Naperville.

But while the Winter of the Deep Snow put a damper on things, and 1832 saw war across northern Illinois, just a year later, the Year of the Early Spring led, at least in percentage terms, to the biggest population explosion in northern Illinois history. As described by Kendall County’s first historian in his 1877 history: “The year 1833 opened out splendidly, as if to make amends for the hardships of the year before. The snow went away in February, and early in March the sheltered valleys and nooks by the groves were beautifully green, and by the end of the month, stock could live on the prairies anywhere. It was an exceedingly favoring Providence for the few pioneers who remained on their claims; for had the spring been cold and backward, much more suffering must have followed. The tide of emigration set in early, and in one summer more than trebled the population of the county. This was partly because the emigration of the summer preceding had been held back by the [Black Hawk] war.”

And weather has continued to have more or less serious effects on our little corner of the world ever since. Annual spring floods—called “freshets” back in the day—regularly washed out the numerous dams and bridges on the Fox River, costing the dam owners and taxpayers substantial amounts of money to repair and replace. And weather’s effect on farming is well-known, from drought conditions to years that proved too wet. Townsfolk were also affected, from winters so cold they froze preserved food in area residents’ basements to summers so hot and dry the mills that depended on the Fox River’s waterpower had to temporarily close.

The old Parker Gristmill on the west bank of the Fox River just above Oswego during a spring freshet (flood) around 1910. The flood waters have completely covered the mill dam. (Little White School Museum collection)

The drought and destructive dust storms of the Great Depression years didn’t just affect the Great Plains—they had severe economic effects here, in Kendall County too, with dust storms carrying away tons of topsoil and dry conditions encouraging insect infestations that destroyed thousands of acres of crops.

The blizzards that swept down across the Great Plains east across the Mississippi didn’t stop with the Winter of the Deep Snow, but created both economic and political problems right up to modern times. The winter of 1978-1979 brought parts of northern Illinois to a halt. And when two January storms dropped heavy snow on Chicago, voters showed their displeasure with how the city handled snow removal by kicking Mayor Michael Bilandic out of office and electing Jane Byrne, the city’s first female mayor.

Unfortunately, the snow from the brutal winter of 1978-1979 didn’t only fall on Chicago. A good bit of it fell out here in the Fox River Valley, too. We were able to keep a walking path to the garage clear, though.

Most recently, on-going global climate change has created a confused weather situation not only here in the Fox Valley but across the nation. Far western states have lately been toggling between extreme drought and record floods and snowfall. The fragile electrical grid in Texas gets regular stress tests that it partially fails due to colder than expected winters and hotter than anticipated summers.

Meanwhile here in northern Illinois, winters have become increasingly mild, creating year round open water on the Fox River and the numerous water detention ponds created to control stormwater runoff that has attracted tens of thousands of once extremely rare Canada geese and various duck species.

And from what we see on the news these days, warmer weather is not only encouraging the northward march of such pests as fire ants, but the climate change causing it seems to be pushing the old Tornado Alley of the Great Plains eastward across the Mississippi River into more densely populated areas.

Even with climate change driven weather causing so many problems, though, we’re still only taking baby steps to try to do something about it. While weather has always had major effects on history, and while we do have the technical ability to do something about it these days, it looks as if Charles Dudley Warner’s quip is likely to continue to describe the situation for the foreseeable future.

After 153 years, two local rail crossings are finally getting warning signals

I read a news story on the Oswego Ledger website a week or so ago and that got me to thinking about the history of safety in general and safety at rail crossings and crossing accidents in Kendall County in particular.

The story reported that the unprotected rail crossings at Jackson and North streets in Oswego will be signalized. Most of the funding will come from the Illinois Grade Crossing Protection Fund, with the rest coming from Illinois Railway, which is said to currently own the rail line.

Railroad accidents began happening almost as soon as the first rail line extended through the county in the early 1850s. That was the CB&Q’s main line that bent slightly to the southwest after crossing the Fox River at Aurora to run through northern Kendall County—Lewis Steward had offered to build a town if the line ran through his land. The railroad did, and the city of Plano was the result.

Original route of the Ottawa, Oswego & Fox River Valley Railroad from the Vermillion Coal Fields to Streator and then north to Ottawa and up the Fox River Valley to Geneva.

Next, the Fox River Branch Line opened in 1870 as the independent Oswego, Ottawa & Fox River Valley Rail Road. But the line was immediately—and not a little fraudulently—snapped up by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad.

As laid out, the OO&FRVRR ran from what was then called the Vermillion Coal Fields to Streator and then to Ottawa before turning due north along the Fox River all the way to Geneva. Its route took it through Oswego and its suburban neighbor to the north, the old Village of Troy, cutting slightly diagonally through the two long-established communities. That put the roadbed perilously close to some existing homes and businesses, including my great-great-grandparents’ house where my wife and I lived for about 10 years and not quite as close to my great-grandparents’ house next door, where my parents and I moved when they left and farm in 1954 and where my wife and I subsequently moved to spend 42 years of our marriage.

The house where my great-great grandparents lived–my great-great-grandmother’s rug loom sat in the small wing to the left–and where my wife and I lived for about 11 years. The Fox River Branch Line’s tracks ran parallel to the back of the house about 40 feet from our back door.

We were lucky, I guess, during the 72 years my family and I lived adjacent to the railroad there were no serious derailments on our branch line like the one that’s recently been in the news out in Ohio. About the most serious semi-recent local accident on our section of the line was in December 1972 when a youngster found a key for one of the switches on a siding in downtown Oswego, threw the switch, and derailed the three diesel engines on an 80-car CB&Q freight. Fortunately, neither the cars nor the engines overturned.

Almost immediately after the rail line opened in 1870, its trains were involved in a variety of accidents, from killing livestock that wandered on the tracks—locomotive cowcatchers actually caught cows back in those days—to hitting the unwary horse-drawn wagon or buggy at crossings.

In January 1870, just weeks after the stretch of line between Yorkville and Oswego opened to traffic, young Theodore Minkler was struck and killed by a southbound train when the lumber wagon he was driving was hit while crossing the tracks south of Oswego, thus becoming the first county fatality on our stretch of the new line.

All the accidents on the Fox River Branch didn’t happen at crossings, of course. On May Day, 1877, for instance, Oswego teacher Anna Brown took her elementary students on a nature walk down the tracks south of Oswego to collect wildflowers. According to the Kendall County Record: “As the five o’clock train came along a little boy, named Carpenter, about nine years old, was on a railroad bridge over a ravine and became frightened. Miss Brown ran on the bridge to help him off. She saved the boy, but the engine struck her, ran over her left foot and threw her from the bridge to the creek, ten feet below.” But Miss Brown, obviously a tough cookie, was helped back up out of the ravine and was taken to a doctor. She recovered, but walked with a limp and used a cane the rest of her long, eventful, and colorful life.

Oswego Fox River Creamery located on Ill. Route 25 just north of North Street and east of North Adams Street. Aurora Historical Society photo.

On the other hand, many accidents did indeed happen at rail crossings. In September 1883, according to the Record’s Oswego correspondent, cufflinks caused a near-fatality: “When Henry Johnston, a young fellow from Specie Grove, was returning from the Fox River Creamery [located north of downtown Oswego between modern Rt. 25 and the Fox River Branch right-of-way], and Charles Lehman the superintendent was riding down to town with him; Charley was engaged in readjusting his gold cuff buttons and the driver failed to look up the track, so they drove on the crossing just as the 10:14 passenger came along. The engine struck the hind wheel. Charley however had jumped, but being that he was run over by the horses and the wrecked wagon piled on top of him, he received a few scratches; Henry, who was thrown off with the wagon, wasn’t hurt a bit.”

Not that the Fox River Branch was the only local rail line where serious accidents happened, of course. The CB&Q’s main line on the west side of the Fox River crossed the West River Road—now Ill. Route 31—near the Wormley family farms. Called the Wormley Crossing, it was the site of a number of accidents some of which involved Wormley family members themselves. As the Record reported from Oswego on Dec. 19, 1872: “John H. Wormley was considerably hurt one day last week at the railroad crossing this side of Montgomery.”

A fast CB&Q passenger and mail train like this one hit Fannie Roberts as she drove her horse and buggy across the double tracks at Montgomery, Illinois in June 1889. She was lucky to escape with her life after being thrown 50 feet by the force of the collision. Neither the horse nor the buggy survived.

And on the morning of June 3, 1889, Fannie, wife of prominent Oswegoan Charles Roberts of Oswego, drove her horse and buggy into the path of a westbound passenger train while driving across the CB&Q’s main line tracks at Montgomery. She was seriously injured after her horse and buggy were thrown about 50 feet by the collision. Miraculously, she survived and was finally able to return home after spending a little over two months in the “new” Aurora hospital (the building adjacent to the old Copley Memorial Hospital that formerly housed the Copley School of Nursing and then the Aurora Blood Bank).

In 1918, Illinois voters approved a $60 million bond issue to build paved roads linking every county seat in the state to a new hard road system. In Yorkville, the Kendall County seat, that meant more traffic on already busy Bridge Street—now U.S. Route 47 through its downtown—and across the street’s Fox River Branch Line crossing. By early 1928, in light of the eminent paving of Route 47 through town, Yorkville had prevailed on the CB&Q to put up one of the new warning lights with bells at the busy crossing.

As the Record reported on Feb. 15: “After several years of faithful endeavor the village fathers have had the Burlington railroad interested sufficiently to put up a crossing light at Bridge street and the tracks. The new danger light is under construction and will be in the middle of the street, plainly visible to drivers and a wonderful relief to locomotive engineers.”

As might be imagined, however, state highway engineers had some serious safety concerns about a warning light atop a raised concrete base in the middle of a busy north-south state highway located at the bottom of steep grades in both directions.

So the state ordered the light-and-bell warning device moved to the side of the road But Yorkville officials, who liked it where it had been originally, finally prevailed in getting it moved back to the center of the highway. As the Record explained on Feb. 29, 1929: “There is not a better way in which to guard the crossing at Yorkville than this light and bell equipment. The fact that it is in the center of the street is more of a benefit than a menace. People will not be able to drive so fast through the main street and the traffic will be slowed up for those who wish to back out from the curb.”

And there the signal remained for a few decades before common sense—and frequent collisions—dictated the warning signal be moved to the sides of the street.

The all stainless steel Denver Zephyr set numerous speed records on its runs from Chicago to Denver and back again. In late June 1936 it maintained its on-time westbound record in spite of hitting the auto driven by Harley Shoger in Kendall County’s Bristol Township, killing both Shoger and his wife. (Everett L. DeGolyer Jr. collection of United States railroad photographs)

The increasing speed of trains as the years rolled by didn’t have much impact on the Fox River Branch Line, where the grades and curves it followed tended to keep speed down. But the speed on the CB&Q’s main line was a different thing. First improved steam locomotives began breaking speed records and then the Burlington introduced the streamlined diesel-powered Zephyrs, which were even faster. So fast, and so much quieter than their steam locomotive ancestors that they created new rail crossing danger.

On June 28, 1936, Mr. and Mrs. Harley Shoger were driving across the Burlington Main Line in rural Bristol Township when their car was struck by the racing Denver Zephyr, which was making a speed run west from Chicago. Mrs. Shoger was killed in the collision and her husband died shortly thereafter at Aurora’s St. Joseph Hospital.

But a couple of incidental crossing deaths couldn’t dampen the Burlington’s Zephyr spirit. As a CB&Q press release enthusiastically explained: “Capping the climax of their sensational performance since inauguration of the service May 31, the original Zephyr on June 28 gave a startling demonstration of its reserve stamina and speed. Delayed by striking an automobile near Bristol, the Zephyr made up an hour and twenty minutes in 700 miles from Galesburg, Ill. to Wray, Colo. and coasted into Denver exactly on the dot June 29 for the 29th consecutive day to maintain its perfect record.” So, yes, sorry about the two crossing deaths, the railroad seemed to say, but, hey, we managed to keep to the schedule in spite of them!

The Jackson Street crossing of the Fox River Branch Line at Oswego is one of two that will receive warning signals soon, according to news reports. The crossing is seen here with a diesel freight passing the CB&Q’s Oswego Depot in September 1965. (Little White School Museum collection)

There have been a few accidents over the years at the two Oswego crossings approved for signalization. But traffic across the stretch of rail line at the North Street and Jackson Street crossings has increased significantly during past years as more and more motorists use the Adams Street cutoff to avoid crowded Route 34 through Oswego. And it’s likely to increase even further with the construction of the new multi-story apartment building at Adams and Washington streets and plans for a second adjacent building.

But after those signals are installed, at least we shouldn’t have to worry about a young man getting his milk wagon smashed to smithereens at one of those crossings while admiring his gold cufflinks.

Celebrating the 190th anniversary of “The Year of the Early Spring”

It’s really no longer realistic to deny that climate change and the weather it’s causing are having major geopolitical effects.

Back in the early 2000’s, Syrian drought may have contributed to the start of the Syrian civil war that further destabilized the Middle East. And now, much warmer than usual winter temperatures in Europe are blunting Vladimir Putin’s attempt to blackmail NATO into stopping their support of Ukraine by cutting off natural gas supplies. Thanks to those warmer temperatures, Europe’s natural gas usage is so much lower than usual that its price is actually declining.

Meanwhile here in the U.S., climate change is creating extreme weather events that are happening far more often and that are far more destructive than in the past. And those of us old enough are watching the actual change in climate. Those snowy, sub-zero northern Illinois winters of our past have gradually given way to winters that feature some early low temperatures and snowfalls followed by generally milder late winters than in the past.

As you might think, then, climate also had some major effects on northern Illinois during the settlement era when the warming of the globe had started but wasn’t really noticeable, not to mention the lack of our modern cold weather gear, from Thinsulate gloves to comfy coats and insulated boots.

The 1830-1831 Winter of the Deep Snow plagued everyone in the Old Northwest, from the region’s Native People to the newly arrived White settlers then starting to move into the area. The aftermath of the privations the winter caused the region’s Native People may have even been one of the causes of 1832’s Black Hawk War. And while the following winter of 1832-1833 was not as hard, it was also a difficult one for the new arrivals out here on the northern Illinois prairies.

The grueling Winter of the Deep Snow led to privation and death for White settlers and Native People alike. Fireplaces consumed between 11 and 17 cords of firewood during a regular winter, each cord a stack of logs measuring 4 feet wide, 4 feet high, and 8 feet long, all of which had to be cut, stacked, and split by hand.

But Mother Nature wasn’t always trying to thrust misery on us humans. Sometimes the weather offered an unexpected boost. And that was the case in the new year of 1833.

As the county’s first historian, the Rev. E.W. Hicks, reported in his 1877 history of Kendall County: “The year 1833 opened out splendidly, as if to make amends for the hardships of the year before. The snow went away in February, and early in March the sheltered valleys and nooks by the groves were beautifully green, and by the end of the month, stock could live on the prairies anywhere. It was an exceedingly favoring Providence for the few pioneers who remained on their claims; for had the spring been cold and backward, much more suffering must have followed. The tide of emigration set in early, and in one summer more than trebled the population of the county.”

The extended Pearce family was among the first to arrive, rolling up on June 1 to the claims they’d staked the year before. The party consisted of Daniel, John, Walter, and Elijah Pearce and their brother-in-law, William Smith Wilson. Elijah and wife settled north a bit, on the east side of the Fox at what’s now Montgomery and so did their son-in-law, Jacob Carpenter. Daniel and his wife and children chose land along Waubonsie Creek where Fox Bend Golf Course and Windcrest Subdivision are now located in Oswego. Wilson, their brother-in-law built his cabin at what is now the busy “Five Corners” intersection in downtown Oswego where modern Ill. Route 25 and U.S. Route 34 meet. John and Walter, meanwhile, settled on the west side of the river.

Earl Adams and Ebenezer Morgan had staked their claims in what eventually became Kendall County in 1831, but were prevented from settling here in 1832 by the Black Hawk War. The two men and their families arrived in 1833, Adams at his claim on what is now Courthouse Hill in Yorkville and Morgan along the creek near Oswego bears his name.

Many of the earliest settlers who had been uprooted by the Black Hawk War also decided to return in 1833, setting back in their former homes, if they were still standing. George B. Hollenback moved from the site of his old store to a site not far away, thus becoming the first settler in what became Newark after being known for several years as Georgetown. John Doughtery and Walter Selvey came back to their claims, too.

In 1833, John Schneider chose a spot at the mouth of Blackberry Creek across the Fox River from Yorkville as the site of his new sawmill. Here’s what the area looked like when U.S. Government surveyors mapped it in 1837.

Millwright John Schneider had helped Joseph Naper build his mill on the DuPage River at what eventually became Naperville. In 1833 he came farther west to the Fox Valley looking for a likely mill site. He found it at Blackberry Creek’s mouth on the Fox, and staked his claim with the intention of building a mill the next year.

New Yorkers John and William Wormley walked west from the Empire State and made their claims on the west side of the Fox River just above where Oswego would one day be located.

In May, a wagon train with Joel Alvard, William and Joseph Groom, Madison Goisline and Goisline’s brother-in-law, Peter Minkler, and their, families, along with Polly Alvard, a widow with two children, and two unmarried men, Edward Alvard and Jacob Bare, headed west from Albany County, N. Y., with the goal of settling in Tazewell County here in Illinois. It was an arduous journey as they battled through the infamous Black Swamp bordering Lake Erie to the south and then making the numerous river and wetland crossings here in Illinois. In the end, Peter Minkler decided to settle not far from what would become the Village of Oswego along the trail that today is a busy road carrying his family’s name.

Thanks to Peter Specie, Smith Minkler, Peter Minkler’s son, obtained seedlings that he used to breed the famed Minkler Apple, a commercial favorite during the era when cider and cider vinegar were big business.

Shortly after arriving, two of the Minkler party—Peter Minkler’s mother and his brother-in-law—both died. Old Mrs. Minkler’s death was blamed on the rigors of the trip west from New York, while his brother-in-law Madison Goisline accidentally shot himself in the shoulder while pulling his rifle out of his wagon, and soon died of infection.

Out in North Carolina, David Evans heard about the richness of northern Illinois from a friend who served with the U.S. Army during the Black Hawk War. Evans apparently came by river, down the Ohio and then up the Mississippi to the Illinois where he followed his friend’s directions up to Ottawa. From there, he followed the Fox River up to Big Rock Creek, and walked up the creek for a couple miles where he staked his claim, becoming the first settler in Little Rock Township. He built his cabin there and the next year brought his family west.

John Darnell, another North Carolinian, had settled with his parents and brothers in Marshall County, located about midway between LaSalle-Peru and Peoria in 1829. In 1833, hearing good things about the Fox River Valley, he came north and staked a claim in the timber along Little Rock Creek. The word he sent back to Marshall County was so enthusiastic that in 1834, his parents and five brothers all decided to settle here as well.

Meanwhile down in modern Seward Township, Hugh Walker had staked a claim, broke 10 acres of prairie sod and planted wheat in the spring of 1832, only to be run off by the Black Hawk War. He sold his claim to Chester House in 1833. The grove on the claim was soon named for the House family—the location of today’s House’s Grove Forest Preserve. Mrs. House was well-known for keeping a candle burning at night in their cabin’s west window as a guidepost for prairie travelers. “So level was the prairie, and so clear from underbrush and trees, that the feeble ‘light in the window’ could be seen for six or eight miles,” Hicks reported in 1877.

Former French-Canadian fur trader Peter Specie earned money by renting his yokes of oxen and prairie breaking plow to newly arrived Kendall County settlers. It cost nearly as much to break the tough prairie sod as it did to buy the land.

Vermonter John Shurtliff had arrived at Plainfield in 1831. In 1833, he moved west out onto the prairie about a mile from House’s claim, settling along AuSable Creek. Shurtliff hired early entrepreneur Peter Specie to break seven acres of prairie as a start, repaying Specie by driving his breaking team for a month.

Arriving around the same time was Daniel Platt, another New Yorker. In 1785, his family had established Plattsburgh in that state. He, however, decided to try his luck in the west, arriving in 1833. For $80, he bought “The Springs” from the Rev. William See—today’s Plattville—and thereby the Platts became the first settlers in Lisbon Township.

Meanwhile in today’s Big Grove Township, more New Yorkers arrived, this time from the hotbed of anti-slavery agitation, Oneida County. Brothers Eben and Levi Hills along with William Perkins and their families all arrived in 1833, Eben coming by wagon with the families and Levi and William came west via the lakes. It was still rare for lakes shipping traffic to arrive at Chicago in 1833 because the harbor wouldn’t be completed for another year. In 1833, in fact, only four ships arrived at Chicago. In 1834, however, the Federal Government financed digging a channel through the sandbar at the mouth of the Chicago River to create a safe harbor for ships. That led to an explosion of ship arrivals at Chicago, 250 in 1835, 456 in 1836 and the number continued to grow every year.

The year 1833 wasn’t memorable simply for all the families who arrived to settle out here on the prairies near the Fox River, however. The final treaty with the region’s Native People was signed in Chicago in 1833 that ceded their land east of the Mississippi River—and some west of the river, too—to the U.S. Government. Three years later, government officials backed by the U.S. Army moved the region’s Native Americans west and away from their ancestral lands.

And as the year came to a close, Mother Nature put on an astonishing light display for all the new settlers to look on with awe. On the Nov. 10, 1833, a huge meteor storm lit up the night sky in spectacular fashion the settlers named “The Night of the Falling Stars.”

“Those who saw it never forgot it to their dying day,” historian Hicks reported.

This year, we’re celebrating the 190th anniversary of that momentous “Year of the Early Spring” that brought so many of the Fox Valley’s first settlers west to Illinois. And interestingly enough, there are still plenty of descendants around these parts of some of the enterprising, intrepid folks who ventured out of the Eastern forests onto the tallgrass prairies of northern Illinois to make a better life for their families.

It was great being a kid at Christmastime in the 1950s

‘Tis the time of year when a young person’s attention turns to what they might find under the tree come Christmas morning.

We all know that before Santa comes to town, he makes a list and checks it twice to affirm exactly who’s naughty and who’s nice. When I was a youngster, misbehavior might well have been rewarded with a lump of coal in one’s stocking come the big morning. Back in the day, of course, all you had to do was go down to the coal bin in the basement to find a likely looking lump. These days, I don’t even know where you’d go shopping for coal.

Taken back during the winter of 2021 out of my office window, ducks and geese congregate on the Fox River. Totally absent in the 1950s, the birds are common sights these days.

The Midwest of the 1950s was a very different place from the one I live in today, even though I live right across the street from the house I mostly grew up in. I can look out the window of my small home office at the Fox River, a scene—and stretch of river—I’ve been familiar with for going on 70 years. And yet, in many ways it’s not familiar at all.

Back in the 1950s, there was nary a duck nor goose nor, emphatically, a Bald Eagle to be seen. The river itself carried a load of heavy metals and other contaminants including raw sewage from towns up-river. Extensive fish kills were fairly common. Black bullheads and bluegills deformed by lesions caused by cancerous chemicals in the water predominated.

But this morning as I sat down to write this, a Bald Eagle landed high in a tree on the main channel side of the long island that parallels our riverbank, while flocks of ducks and Canada Geese flew up and down the river valley—giving the eagle a wide berth. Meanwhile our stretch of the once-badly polluted river is now frequented by serious anglers on the track of fat Smallmouth Bass and wily Walleyes.

These days, the river has also changed in other ways since those days now long ago. Its water is warmer, for one thing. These days, about 80 percent of the water in the Fox has already been used once by the time it flows past our house. The stream’s major tributaries are no longer wetlands and smaller streams that emptied into it, but rather the towns in its watershed upstream from us. The inflow from those towns sanitary treatment plants is warmer than natural tributaries would be. And at the same time, the climate has changed to the point it’s warmer now than in the ‘50s and ‘60s. So the river doesn’t freeze over like it used to when I was a youngster and when one of our major activities starting this time of the year was ice skating.

Snapped a shot of this guy last winter sitting in a tree on the far side of the island right off our stretch of riverbank.

After lacing our skates up tight while sitting on a log on the same riverbank I’m watching out of my office window, we could skate a couple miles north or a mile south to the U.S. Route 34 Bridge. I started out with used family skates, but one Christmas (1958?) a new pair of figure skates waited for me under our family Christmas tree. Santa thoughtfully sized them quite a bit bigger than my shoe size to handle expected (and realized) growth.

My family was far from wealthy, or even, as I found out as an adult, not even well-off. But my parents were excellent managers. They had to be. My father had become chronically ill with Ankylosing Spondylitis—spinal arthritis—as a young man and suffered with many other related illnesses through the years. My mother, with congenital heart problems so not the picture of health herself, worked outside the home—not all that uncommon during that era, no matter what you might hear in certain quarters these days.

And somehow, those gifts I found under the tree every Christmas were just right. From a cast aluminum semi-truck car transporter loaded with colorful Hudsons to an excellent model service station to my first Lionel train set, Santa always seemed to know exactly what I wanted, making up for the lack of quantity with an over-abundance of quality.

When we moved into town over Christmas vacation in 1954, the gifts were different, but still, I thought, stupendous. A Red Ryder Model 94 carbine BB gun one year (I managed NOT to shoot my eye out!), and a couple years later, a three-speed Schwinn Corvette bike with gleaming chrome fenders.

Only some of the grandeur of the Schwinn Corvette I got for Christmas in 1957 can be glimpsed in this cut from Schwinn’s 1956 catalog.

The new Corvette replaced my trusty blue Schwinn I bought from Bob Bower the spring we moved into town for $5. And for the crisp $5 bill I paid him off with, I thanked my grandparents. Because back in that day, our extended family spend every Christmas with my grandparents. My folks and sisters, my aunts and uncles and first cousins made a for lively group, especially when my grandparents were still farming.

The most memorable of those gatherings was in 1951 when a blizzard struck Christmas Eve into Christmas Day. Fortunately, one of my uncles was earning a little extra money driving a snowplow for the township and he arranged to swing by our farm to lead our car the two and a half miles to my grandparents’ farm. He stayed long enough for a quick lunch and to fill his Thermos with hot coffee before heading back out into the storm. That Christmas, I wanted nothing so much as to be a snowplow driver.

My grandparents’ small farmhouse. The three windows on the left were in the long, narrow dining room.

My grandparents’ farmhouse, which was small but which managed to hold all of us, featured a long, narrow dining room with a table that, with numerous leaves, could seat the lot of us. Those Christmas dinners featured everything from roast turkey to the pheasants my uncles shot. Exactly which uncle provided the bird that year was my dad’s cue on whether to have some or not. One uncle was a good shot like my dad, who almost always hit the bird in the head; the other not so good. Eating the birds he provided meant keeping a sharp lookout for shotgun pellets while you chewed.

After dinner is when the real fun happened: the family gift exchange. We’d drawn names at Thanksgiving (those dinners were shared around the family circle, a different location every year) so we had plenty of time to get thoughtful gifts within the $1.50 limit—remember this was in the 1950s when a dollar was a dollar. And as we opened our presents my grandfather circulated around the crowded living room handing out those crisp $5 bills that were my grandparents’ annual gifts to their grandchildren. Our parents got $20 bills, but us kids got those bills in the individual holders that showed Abraham Lincoln’s picture, something we looked forward to all year.

These days, $5 doesn’t seem like much, but back in the ‘50s, my handy on-line inflation calculator tells me, that $5 bill was worth 50 2022 dollars. So a not inconsiderable fortune in the days of 10-cent root beers and 20-cent hamburgers. Or $5 blue Schwinn bikes.

The author on the blue Schwinn he bought for $5, ready for a 1950s Oswego Memorial Day Parade. Flags were the main decorations that year. We all got coupons for a free root beer at the Kopper Kettle restaurant.

It was the perfect bike for where we lived, because in those days, while we said we lived in town, we actually lived just north of Oswego’s village limits in unincorporated Oswego Township. The township maintained the street on which we lived, North Adams Street, as a gravel road over which their road grader made a couple passes a year to level out the chuckholes. The Schwinn’s fat tires were just the thing for navigating a gravel road, as well as Oswego’s tar and chip streets and its cinder-surfaced alleys. I added a basket to the front so that on hot summer days I could make the trip downtown to Bohn’s Food Store to buy and carry back boxes of the newest Popsicle flavor after the neighborhood kids all chipped in to pay for it.

I rode it in a few Memorial Day Parades, decorated with flags or crepe paper woven through the spokes and wrapped around the frame, and baseball trading cards clothes-pinned to the fender supports to make a satisfying motorcycle sound before I found that shiny new Schwinn Corvette standing in the living room on Christmas morning in 1957.

These days, the era of big extended family dinners seems to be largely past, with families splintered by careers, and social fashion changes. But there are still some vestiges of it in nostalgic TV shows and movies, and even sometimes in our own families.

While my grandchildren’s days of asking Santa for cool toys that I and their grandmother could have so much fun shopping for is over, they still appreciate the gift cards and cash we give them just like I appreciated my grandparents’ gifts all those years ago.

Disappearance of wheat fields marked a major change in northern Illinois’ prairie farming

This year’s grain harvest has largely wrapped up here in the Fox River Valley, following roughly the same schedule it has been on for the last 1,200 years.

Illinois’ Native People began cultivating corn sometime between 900 and 1000 AD. It joined the beans and squash they’d been propagating to create the basis for their subsistence crops they called “The Three Sisters.”

Interestingly enough, modern farmers still grow versions of the Native People’s “Three Sisters,” although these days soybeans have taken the place of native edible beans and pumpkins have largely replaced other squash. But still, it’s sort of comforting that a 1,200 year-old harvest tradition continues into the 21st Century.

The member tribes of the Three Fires Confederacy had moved into the area west and south of Lake Michigan in the 1740s, displacing the member tribal groups of the Illinois Confederacy. The Three Fires relied on growing “The Three Sisters” (corn, beans, and squash) for a large proportion of their died. Like the region’s modern farmers, the Native People completed their harvest in late fall.

By the time the first permanent White settlers began arriving along the banks of the Fox River, the resident Native People were inter-related members of the Three Fires Confederacy comprised of Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi people. These people, too, relied on growing The Three Sisters for a large percentage of their diet. Over the centuries since its introduction, corn had been crossbred and otherwise genetically modified by its Native American growers.

European immigrants had quickly adopted growing what they called “Indian corn” to differentiate it from the “corn’ they called wheat back in that day. It grew okay in the thin, rocky soils of New England, but crops kept getting better the farther west White settlement moved because soils were better, too. When the frontier finally moved out of the Eastern woodlands onto the tallgrass Prairie Peninsula in the 1820s, corn found its ideal habitat.

But those White settlers did not live on corn alone. They needed wheat for bread and other foods, along with oats to feed their livestock, and rye and barley for foodstuffs as well as to manufacture the alcoholic beverages that seemed to power so much of frontier society.

So the crops grown on those first Fox Valley pioneer farms were quite diversified, right along with those of their neighbors all the way west to the Mississippi. Wheat was considered a vital crop, both for consumption on the farm, and after pioneer town developers arrived, for sale in town. Corn was fed to the farm’s livestock, which could then walk the 40 miles east to market in Chicago. Rye and barley were both used on the farm, but were also good sale crops and which could also be turned into extremely valuable—and easily transported—whiskey.

Grain, too, could be hauled to the Chicago market, although the 80 mile round trip in wagon-and-team days was time-consuming, keeping the farmer away from taking care of his other responsibilities such as feeding and otherwise caring for his livestock, not to mention taking care of his family on their often isolated farmsteads.

The Illinois & Michigan Canal linked the Illinois River with Lake Michigan at Chicago. Although its heyday was brief, it boosted Illinois’ economy starting in the late 1840s. (Wikipedia image)

So when the Illinois & Michigan Canal opened following the course of the Chicago-Des Plaines-Illinois River system from Lake Michigan to the head of navigation on the Illinois River at Peru, it created a nearby, easily reached incentive to begin growing more grain of all kinds than could be consumed on the farm.

For one thing, it meant the meat being produced from Chicago’s stockyards could move south to the St. Louis–New Orleans market as easily as east to the New York market.

Even more importantly, its existence meant that grain from the rich region west and south of Chicago could finally be shipped north as well as south. Previously grain taken to the Illinois River system went downstream to the St. Louis market. But with canal boats hauling it, grain moved north as easily as south. Chicago’s grain elevators were ready to handle the huge influx of grain, too, readying it for shipment east to the New York market.

Thus began cash grain farming in earnest. And within a year or so, the first railroad, whose right-of-way followed the course of the canal, opened. That offered a year round grain and livestock shipping opportunity for area farmers, something the canal, which had to close during the winter months, could not.

It was during this period of the late 1840s and early 1850s, that northern Illinois’ wheat crops experienced a number of failures. And since it was a major crop during those years, it led to severe financial problems. In response, farmers tried everything they could to try to make the area a viable wheat-producer, including introducing dozens of new wheat varieties and tinkering with planting schedules.

The preferred wheat for market was hard winter wheat, which was planted in the fall, germinated and greened up, went dormant over the winter, and then resumed growing in the spring to be harvested in late summer. But northern Illinois’ climate and its very soil warred against producing good winter wheat crops. The region’s numerous freeze-thaw cycles during an average winter tended to kill the vulnerable wheat seedlings. Then if it did begin growing it was often attacked by a variety of diseases including rust and blight along with insect pests such as the Hessian fly and chinch bugs. And, oddly enough, the soils on northern Illinois tallgrass prairies seemed to be too rich to support good wheat crops. Farmer Edmund Flagg decided in the mid-1830s from his own observations that the worst soils of the Prairie Peninsula were best-adapted to growing wheat.

Before the advent of mechanical reapers, harvesting “small grains” (wheat, oats, barley, rye) was both labor-intensive and subject to weather-related problems. Those problems were so severe and prevalent on the Illinois prairies that farmers, a group normally reluctant to adopt new methods, were eager early adopters of mechanical harvesting equipment. McCormick Reapers were manufactured under license south of Oswego at AuSable Grove in 1847.

And then there was the problem that growing and harvesting wheat is extremely labor-intensive and very dependent on just the right weather conditions during the harvest cycle. Wheat had to be cut, bound into bundles, stacked to dry, and then threshed. Excessive moisture in the form of rain at any time after the grain was cut could lead to it developing rust or other fungus, or even sprouting spoiling the crop.

This need for speed during the wheat harvest spurred by the upper Midwest’s damp climate during the peak harvest season led to early and intense interest in mechanical harvesters that allowed far more acreage to be cut, bundled, and shocked than the old manual methods. Area farmers not only imported early harvesters made by Cyrus McCormick and others, but they also licensed them for manufacture here. Out in AuSable Grove south of Oswego Daniel Townsend secured a McCormick license and produced harvesters in the 1840s. Eventually, of course, the folks in Plano here in Kendall County became one of the premiere harvester manufacturers in the nation.

Corn, in comparison, was pretty hardy stuff. It could even be left standing in the field all winter if necessary, to be successfully picked and husked in the early spring with no visible impact on its value as a human or animal food.

Northern Illinois farmers gradually switched to trying to grow spring wheat and met with more success. But the spring varieties were softer and less attractive for milling into bread flour than the hard winter varieties. So, wheat growing began to disappear from Fox Valley farms in favor of corn and oats, which found a ready market in area cities during the era when horses provided the main motive power.

Not so in central and southern Illinois, where wheat farming was part of the Southern farming culture that had arrived with those regions’ pioneers. The southern part of the state was largely settled by pioneers from Virginia and the Carolinas who came west through Kentucky and Tennessee, and then up the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys. They were also some of central Illinois’ first pioneers.

Southern farming culture was far more subsistence-based than that of the New Englanders, New Yorkers, and Pennsylvanians who settled northern Illinois. The soils and climate of the southern half of the state favored wheat farming, which fit in with the culture Southern farmers brought with them. That culture not only included the kinds of crops they grew, but also extended to their farmsteads.

Probably built around 1847, the barn south of Oswego on the Daniel Townsend farm was used both as a traditional barn, but also may have housed Townsend’s manufacturing operation to produce McCormick reapers. The barn was built on the traditional stone Pennsylvania plan with slit ventilating windows.

Barns, for instance, were common sights on the northern Illinois landscape but not so farther south. According to Richard Bardolph, writing in the December 1948 Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, the editor of Moore’s Rural New Yorker visited Illinois in the 1850s and reported to his readers, that “barns are scarcely to be seen on the prairies, and they seem to be considered more of a luxury than a necessity.”

In contrast, here in the Fox Valley barns were among the first structures pioneer farmers built. They were multi-purpose buildings farmers relied upon for everything from grain and hay storage to protecting livestock from the region’s bitter winters to storing farm equipment. Storing farm equipment under roof seems to have been another Southern farmer cultural trait they didn’t share with their Northern counterparts.

As late as the 1940s, one of my Kansas cousins came east to learn Midwestern farming practices from my father and uncles. One of the things he took back with him was the importance of storing farm equipment out of the weather to lengthen the equipment’s lifespan and to assure it worked when needed. That was a new concept for many Kansas farmers of the era whose roots extended east through Missouri into Tennessee and Kentucky.

During the Great Depression here in northern Illinois, wheat farming nearly disappeared. The 1935 Census of Agriculture for Kendall County reported only four farms grew wheat, amounting to a bit over 400 bushels. We now know that 1934 was probably the worst year for northern Illinois farmers during those awful years. Drought, chinch bug invasions, crop diseases, dust storms, and just about any other disaster you can think of afflicted the region’s farmers. The price of corn had collapsed in 1933, bringing only 14-cents a bushel, down sharply from $1.14 in 1925. That made it cheaper for many farmers to burn it as fuel in their stoves and furnaces than coal. Sears Roebuck, in fact, marketed special stove grates in those years designed for corn, which burned hotter than coal or wood.

In addition, corn could also be fed to animals on the farm, producing livestock the farm family itself could consume. Many a farm family of those years helped feed their city cousins. In general, it took about seven bushels of corn to produce a pound of beef and 6.5 pounds to produce a bushel of pork, Many farmers favored raising hogs because pork could be turned into a variety of meats from roasts and chops to sausage and with smoking, hams and bacon. And corn could also be used as human food as well, ground into corn flour to make cornbread, fried mush, and other dishes. This diversity of use apparently made growing corn a more sensible course for the region’s farmers.

Also in the 1930s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the University of Illinois Extension Service began promoting soybeans as a new cash crop for Illinois farmers struggling through the Great Depression. And so starting here in Kendall County in the dismal year of 1933 a variety of beans far different than those grown by the region’s Native American farmers began to sprout on the Illinois prairies, just as the need for so much oat acreage was disappearing as the horses who used so many bushels of oats for food were replaced by motor vehicles.

Today, Illinois still produces a fair amount of wheat, but the vast majority of it is grown in central and southern Illinois where the climate, growing seasons, and soils favor it. Here in northern Illinois, occasional fields of wheat can be spotted by the alert motorist, along with a few acres of oats here and there. But for a crop that was once a vital staple of pioneer farms, the disappearance of wheat fields marked one of the many profound changes in prairie farming.

Before the colors fade: Local heroes who hid in plain sight…

During my 1950s childhood, we all envied friends whose dads were World War II veterans because so many of them had such cool war souvenirs. From web belts and canteens to equipment pouches, first aid kits, and even U.S. Army leather holsters, that stuff enlivened our hours playing “War.”

But little did we know that several of those dads—and even a few moms—had done far more than their part during the war, only to be determined to come back home to our little corner of northern Illinois and get back into “real life.” In fact, about the only time we saw any evidence of those folks’ service was during the annual Memorial Day Parade when they marched with our local American Legion Post to the cemetery to honor the nation’s war dead.

But from the director of the local funeral home to the carpenter down the street, many of them had stories of pivotal events they’d participated in that they simply didn’t want to discuss with anyone who hadn’t also participated in the same kinds of things they’d seen and done. So they kept their peace in public, lived productive lives by contributing to their communities, and have now passed on leaving others to piece together tales of the sacrifices they made to save their country during the momentous events of the war years.

Two men who spent almost their entire lives in our then-little town are excellent examples of those who served. Their service took them to opposite sides of the globe from each other, but after the war and returning home, they became related by marriage.

When it came to winning World War II, the combat arms of the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Corps have justifiably gotten most of the attention. But there were hundreds of thousands of others who also fought and died to win the war, from the merchant mariners manning the Liberty Ships carrying vital Lend-Lease supplies across the oceans, to truckers who kept the supplies going to front line troops.

In September, Oswego’s Little White School Museum received two donations from long-time Oswegoland Heritage Association member and frequent donor Barbara Wolf Wood that added to our knowledge of how some of those unheralded participants in the war not only did their duty for their country, but helped win it.

The materials donated came from the estates of Oswegoans Ray Leifheit and Merrill Wolf. Leifheit served in Company C, 9th Armored Engineering Battalion in the European Theatre of operations while Wolf served in the Seabees in the Pacific Theatre.

Merrill Wolf

The Merrill Wolf donation included his Seabee footlocker, two complete uniforms—his blues and his whites—a 1940s hard hat, and a pair of khaki shorts of the kind Seabees wore during their hard work maintaining the pipeline of supplies to Marine and Navy fighters as well as building the ports and airfields on once unknown Pacific islands to allow the bombing raids on Japan that eventually led to its surrender.

The Seabees were the construction experts for the Navy and Marines. The name stems from the initials for Construction Battalion. The force was created by Rear Admiral Ben Moreell just weeks after the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor. The original authorization was for a naval construction regiment consisting of three naval construction battalions to be comprised of construction tradesmen. Adm. Moreell realized that using civilian construction crews for the ports and airfields the Navy would need as they leapfrogged across the Pacific simply wouldn’t work. As the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command put it: “Under international law civilians were not permitted to resist enemy military attack. Resistance meant summary execution as guerrillas.”

Wolf, an electrician, enlisted in the Seabees in June 1943 at the age of 32.

He subsequently served throughout the Pacific Theatre, aboard LST-244, working as an Electrical Mechanic First Class. LST-244, was a large ship designed to land tanks and other heavy equipment directly ashore. Ironically, LST-244 was built not far from Wolf’s home in Oswego at Evansville, Indiana. Launched on Aug. 13, 1943, the ship sailed down the Ohio River and then down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. From there it was down to Panama and through the canal to the Pacific. Reaching the Pacific Theatre of Operations, the ship and crew participated in the Gilbert Islands Campaign in November and December, 1943; the invasion of Kwajalein and Majuro atolls in February 1944; the capture and occupation of Guam, July and August 1944; and the bloody assault and occupation of Okinawa, April 1945.

Landing Ships, Tank (LSTs) under construction at the Evansville, Indiana shipyard on the Ohio River. The ships were launched sideways into the river. From there, they sailed to the Mississippi River, and down to New Orleans. The shipyard employed 19,000 workers at its height. Today, one of the LSTs like those built there is on exhibit as a fully-operational museum ship. (Courtesy of Evansville Museum/Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library)

After Japan’s surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, Wolf continued to serve on Okinawa for a few more months. When his discharge number came up, he was shipped directly from there back to the U.S. As the Kendall County Record reported on Nov. 13, 1945: “Merrill Wolf, who had the rank of Electrical Mechanic 1-C, received his honorable discharge at Great Lakes on Nov. 10 and came home to his wife and two little daughters. The younger, June Anne, 17 months, he had never seen. He had been in the Pacific for two years, coming home directly from Okinawa to Seattle and thence to Great Lakes.”

A future brother-in-law already in the Army Engineers

By the time Merrill Wolf enlisted, his future brother-in-law, Ray Leifheit, had been serving in the U.S. Army for almost two years. A carpenter by trade living in the Yorkville area, before the war Leifheit had volunteered for three years to serve in Company E, a unit of the Illinois National Guard’s 129th Infantry Regiment based here in Kendall County at tiny Plattville.

Raymond Leifheit

After induction into the U.S. Army, Leifheit was eventually assigned to Company C, 9th Armored Engineer Battalion, an engineering unit attached to the 9th Armored Division.

He was shipped overseas to England in August 1944, where the 9th Armored Division and the 9th Engineers underwent additional training before being sent to France in October 1944 to aid in the defeat of Germany. The engineers assisted the division in its move across France, first seeing action in northern Luxembourg. The battalion was in the Ardennes Forest area in December 1944 when the Germans launched their surprise offensive that became known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Leifheit and the rest of his Company C mates found themselves desperately fighting to slow down the German armored spearhead. As U.S. forces retreated, C Company engineering troops worked hard continually creating new defensive positions, blocking roads and destroying bridges, and even fighting as infantry as they withdrew, finally reaching the strategic crossroads of Bastogne on Dec. 19. The engineers then returned to their engineering skills and from Dec. 20-27 blocked six roads south and east of Bastogne to check German assaults from those directions.

It was during the furious fighting to block those roads on Dec. 26 that Leifheit was seriously wounded and captured by the German Army. He was initially listed as missing in action, but in April his parents in Yorkville finally got the good news that he was indeed alive.

A U.S. Army engineer prepares to drop a tree onto a road near Bastogne in December 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge. Oswego’s Ray Leifheit served in Company C, 9th Armored Engineer Battalion during the battle. (Courtesy To Those Who Served website)

As the Kendall County Record reported on April 11, 1945: “Mr. and Mrs. R.W. Leifheit received the glad tidings in the form of a telegram on April 7 from the War Department stating that their son, T-5 Raymond Leifheit, who was reported as missing in action Dec. 26, in Belgium, was a prisoner of war of the German government. Many friends and relatives rejoice with them at this word and hope he will soon be released to return home.”

He had been treated in German military hospitals for two months after being wounded before he was liberated by Allied forces, and then spent more time in U.S. Military Hospitals before being finally sent home.

It took some time before he was completely healed. But he eventually did, getting back to his old carpentry profession.

Then on Jan. 3, 1948, he married Mary Wolf, sister of former Seabee Merrill Wolf.

Thanks to those recent donations from Wolf family descendants, the stories of these two World War II veterans will be preserved in the collections of the Little White School Museum, along with so many other stories of the men and women who have gone off to serve their nation in both war and peace, and whose memories the museum is committed to preserving.

As part of their mission to preserve the achievements of the hundreds of men and women from Oswego who have served their country for the last 190 years, the Little White School Museum, 72 Polk Street, Oswego, will host their “Remembering Our Veterans” special exhibit starting Thursday, Nov. 10 and running through Sunday, Nov. 27. Regular museum hours are Thursday and Friday, 2 to 6:30 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.; and Monday, 4-9 p.m. The museum, located just two blocks east of Oswego’s historic downtown business district, is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Admission is free, but donations are always gratefully accepted. For more information, call the museum at 630-554-2999, check the museum web site, http://www.littlewhiteschoolmuseum.org, or email info@littlewhiteschoolmuseum.org.

Oswego’s historic downtown business district honored with National Register recognition

A roughly two-block section of Oswego’s historic downtown business district called the Downtown Oswego Historic District by village officials has been added to the National Register of Historic Places maintained by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The bounds of the new downtown Oswego historic district added to the National Register of Historic Places is outlined in red on this map. It includes some of the community’s most historic areas.

The area selected for recognition is that section of Main Street from the north side of Jackson to the south side of Washington Street, which is generally considered the heart of downtown. That stretch of Main Street includes the brick and limestone Union Block on the east side of the street built in 1867; the classic frame false-front Rank Building, built by Oswego Postmaster Lorenzo Rank in 1874; and the Burkhart Block on the south side of Washington Street. On the west side of Main at Washington Street, the Schickler and Knapp buildings erected by two of Oswego’s German immigrant businessmen in the late 1890s and early 1900s are included, as is the 1840s native limestone Parke Building at the northwest corner of Main and Jackson.

The first settlers on the site of what is considered the original village of Oswego were William and Rebecca (Pearce) Wilson, who arrived with the extended Pearce family in 1833. Rebecca’s brother, Daniel, settled on what’s now Fox Bend Golf Course, where the old Pearce farmhouse still stands just east of the Waubonsie Creek bridge on Route 34, while brothers John and Walter settled west of the river. The Smiths built their cabin at the busy modern “Five Corners” intersection of Routes 25 and 34, and Jefferson Street.

But the Pearces were farmers, not town builders. It took a couple enthusiastic entrepreneurs, Lewis B. Judson and Levi F. “Squire” Arnold, to see that the lay of the land on the bluff overlooking the Fox River’s narrowest point for miles in either direction would be a good spot to build a new town.

The 1838 survey plat of Oswego Township showed the small village of Oswego at the Fox River narrows. I’ve highlighted the roads that crossed at Oswego, making it an area transportation hub. Also important was the Fox River ford just upstream from Waubonsie Creek’s mouth on the river.

The site also happened to be the intersection of four well-used Native American trails. One came across the prairie from the west, crossed the river, and headed east and a bit north to the ford across the DuPage River and on to Chicago, while another branched off that trail at Oswego and headed southeast across the prairie to Walker’s Grove, also on the DuPage, and then on to Chicago as well. From Oswego where those two branches merged, another trail headed southwest to Ottawa. A fourth trail came up the west side of the Fox River from Ottawa crossed the river on the Oswego ford, and ran north to the new settlement of LaFox—later renamed Geneva.

Arnold and Judson realized that ford was another geographical plus for their potential town site. Located just above the mouth of Waubonsie Creek on the Fox River, the ford featured shallow, slow-moving water running over a smooth limestone floor that extended all the way across the river. Native Americans had used it for thousands of years and the White pioneers made immediate use of it as soon as they arrived. It would remain the only way to cross the river until the first timber-frame bridge spanned the river at Oswego in 1848.

Arnold, an ambitious emigrant from New York, had some experience with town building, having been involved, along with Chester Ingersoll, with turning the Walker’s Grove settlement on the DuPage River into the village of Plainfield in 1834 and then serving as that new town’s first postmaster.

The original 20-block village laid out by Lewis B. Judson and Levi F. Arnold is colored pink in this clip from Warner & Beers’ 1870 plat book and atlas of Kendall County. The plat illustrates how each block was laid out bisected by alleys running perpendicular to each other. (Little White School Museum collection)

Judson, a wealthy frontier businessman, like Arnold originally from New York but most recently from Michigan, partnered with Arnold to lay out their village on a square plan aligned with the east bank of the Fox River. As platted in 1835 by the two (and making, by a couple months, Oswego Kendall County’s oldest municipality), the new village contained 18 blocks, each 280.5 feet (17 rods in surveyor’s terms) square and containing eight lots, each 66 feet wide and 132 feet deep. Two 16.5-foot alleys running perpendicular to each other bisected each block.

They named all of the streets but two after U.S. Presidents, including Harrison, Adams, Madison, Monroe, Jefferson, Jackson, Washington, Van Buren, and Tyler. The two non-Presidential street names were Main and Benton, named after U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton, a political ally of President Andrew Jackson and strong supporter of westward expansion.

The two originally named their new town “Hudson,” after the river in New York with which they were both so familiar. Arnold opened the first store in the new village right in the middle of what would become the village’s business district. Both Judson and Arnold began pushing for Congress to grant their new town a post office, and those wishes were granted on Jan. 24, 1837, with Arnold named the first postmaster.

The only known photo of the east side of Main Street as it looked before the devastating February 1867 fire destroyed all the buildings pictured, including the stately National Hotel. Levi Arnold opened Oswego’s first store and post office in the building to the right of the National Hotel. (Little White School Museum collection)

But there was a fly in the town-builders’ ointment. For whatever reason, Congress named the new post office “Lodi.” Lodi wasn’t a bad name, of course, carrying the name of a town in New York’s Finger Lakes Region, but it apparently didn’t suit Arnold and Judson. Within some months, the few permanent male residents held a referendum to choose a new permanent name. When the few votes were counted, neither Hudson nor Lodi had more than one vote. Instead, “Oswego” won with two votes in its column.

Kendall County was established in February 1841. The General Assembly appointed a three-man commission to pick a site for a county seat and they chose the hamlet of Yorkville, six miles south of Oswego. But with all those roads leading to the new town, Oswego was growing faster than other areas of the new county. So Arnold, Judson and other Oswego boosters immediately began encouraging moving the county seat to Oswego. They engineered a referendum in 1845 that populous Oswego won over the more centrally located Yorkville.

This view, looking north from Washington Street and reminiscent of cow towns in the Old West, shows the west side of Oswego’s Main Street, around time time the 1867 fire destroyed the east side of the business district. The only building in this image still standing is the native limestone Parke Building on the right side of the photograph. The building now houses the American Male & Company’s clothing stores. (Little White School Museum collection)

A new courthouse was built just outside the downtown area on the block bounded by Madison, Jackson, Jefferson, and Monroe streets. With that, Oswego’s business community began to cater as much to the traveling trade of the circuit court’s judges and lawyers as to the surrounding agricultural area with three hotels and numerous blacksmith and wagonwright shops.

But Oswego’s location in the northeast corner of the county was proving inconvenient for residents needing to go to the county seat in those days of horse and buggy and horseback travel. So another referendum was held in 1859, and the voters approved moving the county seat back to Yorkville. With the Civil War intruding, it took a few years to get a new courthouse built, but in June 1864, the county’s records were hauled down to Yorkville, and Oswego returned to its status as a mercantile hub for the surrounding agricultural area.

From the time Judson and Arnold platted it 187 years ago, Oswego’s downtown catered to the residents of the community itself, as well as to the farmers working the land around it, as well as to those elected county officials and members of the legal community during its stint as the county seat. As such it boasted a wide variety of businesses from the aforementioned hotels, to retail merchants, to service providers like barbers, milliners, and others.

Postmaster Lorenzo Rank built this false-front Italianate commercial building to house the Oswego Post Office in 1874. He lived in the building’s second floor apartment. In 1912, the post office moved south to the brick Burkhart Block. Rank willed the building to the Village of Oswego and it was used for a variety of purposes, including the site of the private lending library operated by the village’s Nineteenth Century Women’s Club. When the tax-supported library was built in 1964, the building was sold. It has housed a number of businesses over the years, including hosting for many years the offices of the Oswego weekly Ledger-Sentinel. The building is still used for business purposes. (Little White School Museum collection)

When I looked at the way the district is drawn, it occurred to me that it includes the sites of five of Oswego’s earliest post offices. While the building that housed it is long gone, the village’s first post office opened by Arnold in conjunction with his store (the first in the village) in 1837 was located at what is now 68 Main Street. It moved across the street and north to the limestone Parke Building at Main and Jackson in the 1840s and then back across the street and south to Lorenzo Rank’s new building in 1874. When the brick Burkhart Block was finished at the southeast corner of Main and Washington in 1912, the post office moved there before moving for the last time back north at the northwest corner of Main and Washington into the Schickler Building. Its last move was out of downtown altogether to the northeast corner of Madison and Jackson in March 1969.

After all the storefronts on the east side of Main were destroyed by fire in February 1867, a consortium of businessmen built the brick and limestone Union Block. Druggist Levi Hall was the first to move into the new block, locating in the storefront at the left. (Little White School Museum collection)

As noted, the designated historic district includes a lot of Oswego’s business and economic history. The brick Union Block on the east side of Main at Washington opened late in 1867 following the devastating February 1867 fire that destroyed everything on that side of Main from Washington to Jackson except the limestone horse barn of the stately National Hotel. The first occupant of the new block was Levi Hall, who opened his new drug store on the site of Arnold’s first store in December 1867 with a special sale of Christmas toys and decorations, a tradition that would continue through several subsequent owners for the next century.

By 1885, the brick and limestone Union Block on east side of Oswego’s Main Street was joined by Lorenzo Rank’s post office building, W.J. Collins’ Star Roller Skating Rink (with flagpole), and at the far left of the photo, the Shoger Brothers livery stable at Main and Jackson, one day to become the home of Zentmyer Ford Sales. (Little White School Museum collection

Other buildings came and went downtown including the Star Roller Skating Rink that occupied the site of the old National Hotel on the east side of Main Street for several years.

The west side of the street didn’t experience the same urban renewal caused by a raging fire. Instead, the old frame buildings were gradually replaced by newer brick buildings, first the Oswego Saloon in 1897, the Knapp Building—site of today’s Masonic Hall and Oswego Family Restaurant—adjoining it to the south in 1898. Then in 1899, John Schickler built his block of brick stores next to the Knapp Building, filling the space from there all the way south to Washington Street.

Meanwhile north of all that brick construction, Henry Helle was maintaining his shoemaking establishment at the southwest corner of Main and Jackson.

Earl Zentmyer bought the Parke Building on Main at Jackson from Gus Shoger and opened a combination service station and Ford dealership in 1922. This snapshot was taken in 1927. (Little White School Museum collection)

Across Jackson Street to the south, O.A. Parke’s limestone former post office and general store had subsequently become home to a variety of stores and other businesses, including a bowling alley, jewelry store, farm implement business, tin smithing business, and blacksmith shop. In 1922, a young fellow from Aurora named Earl Zentmyer bought it from its owner, Gus Shoger, and turned it into a combination gas station and Ford dealership. Zentmyer eventually bought the old Shoger Brothers Livery Stable across Main Street from the stone building and operated it as a service station and Ford dealership until it burned in 1965.

The Burkhart Block at Main and Washington was built by Oliver and Clinton Burkhart to house the Oswego State Bank in the corner storefront, the Burkhart & Shoger auto dealership to the left, and the Oswego Post Office and the switchboard for the Chicago Telephone Company in the two storefronts to the right of the bank. This photo was taken about 1913 by Dwight Young. (Little White School Museum collection)

Also included in the historic district is the brick Burkhart Block, completed at the southeast corner of Main and Washington in 1911 to mainly as the home for the Oswego State Bank in the corner storefront. But also originally housed in the structure were the Burkhart and Shoger Studebaker dealership, the new Oswego Post Office, and the local switchboard of the Chicago (later Illinois Bell) Telephone Company.

Oswego’s streets were unpaved when this photo of an early auto northbound on Main Street through the heart of the business district about 1905. During that era, the hitching posts lining the street were not decorative; they were meant to be used. More than 100 years later, the downtown streetscape still looks familiar. (Little White School Museum collection)

Over the years the very transportation routes that allowed Oswego’s downtown to grow in the first place conspired to curb that growth. In 1870, the Ottawa, Oswego & Fox River Valley Rail Road linked the coalfields lying between Ottawa and Streator with Geneva, running through Oswego and giving it a direct link with nearby Aurora. Regular passenger service meant the shopping opportunities of that much larger town were just a short train ride away, putting a brake on downtown Oswego’s expansion much beyond its three block base. Then in 1900, downtown Oswego was directly linked to downtown Aurora when the interurban trolley tracks of the Aurora, Yorkville & Morris Railway were completed. For the next 22 years, shopping in downtown Aurora was a short, cheap trolley ride away, serving to keep the selection and size of downtown businesses small.

The final blow to any major expansion of the downtown was dealt by the advent of practical, economical automobiles, trucks, and buses coupled with the post-World War I state-financed drive to build all-weather hard roads. Initial concrete highways roughly followed some of those old 1830s routes through Oswego, again making it a transportation crossroads. In all, three state highways started in Oswego and one U.S. highway passed through following those old trails. And that made it even more convenient for residents to do much of their shopping elsewhere.

Oswego’s modern downtown, recently recognized by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has not only managed to preserve a number of historic structures, but is still home to a mix of successful small retail and service businesses. (Little White School Museum collection)

Even so, Oswego’s downtown and near-downtown maintained a mix of retail and service businesses that catered just fine to the surrounding agricultural area, from general merchandise and grocery stores to doctors and dentists to grain and livestock marketing firms.

The heart of any town is its downtown business district. Oswego’s village government and business community have been both lucky and skillful at keeping the downtown healthy, willing to spend both tax dollars and funds generated by the business community on public improvements over the years that have kept it an inviting place to visit, shop, and run a business.

And to top it all off, Oswego’s downtown is also one of the village’s—and Kendall County’s—most historic areas, anchoring the greater Oswego community since 1835.

Last agriculture census confirmed some trends, revealed some surprises

From the time it was settled in the late 1820s, Kendall County’s geographical location has had both its positives and its negatives.

Claiming land 40 miles west of Chicago that was located on the shoreline of Lake Michigan, the farmer-pioneers who settled the county’s rich prairie found the fast-growing city’s market for grain and livestock an economic boon. Chicago was close enough that cattle and other livestock could be driven there within a couple days. The county’s farmers were able, in fact, to create personal relationships with such prime movers of the meat industry as Phillip Armour. And in the 20 years before rail lines pushed west, the city was also within realistic grain hauling distance.

Kendall County not only borders on three of the Chicago metro region’s populous “Collar Counties,” but it is within convenient distance of the city itself.

But the county’s location also posed some negatives, especially for those more interested in business than farming. Oswego, in the northeast corner of the county, was never able to grow its small two-block business district because of its proximity to Aurora, just six miles away. Aurora, with its large downtown business district fueled by heavy industry and the shops of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, drew enough business north to keep the village’s retail district from growing. Those effects only worsened when the Ottawa, Oswego, and Fox River Valley Rail Road opened in 1870 linking the coal fields south of Ottawa with Fox Valley towns as far north as Geneva. The advent of the interurban trolley, and completion of the line running from downtown Aurora through downtown Oswego to downtown Yorkville made the situation worse.

The effects of the county’s location was to keep it almost entirely rural with the business of its scattered hamlets, villages, and towns aimed at supporting the farms that surrounded them. That 125-year era ended in the 1950s when Caterpillar Tractor Company built a sprawling plant in Oswego Township that eventually employed some 7,000 people and the manufacturing arm of AT&T expanded an old wallpaper factory, also in Oswego Township, to make electronic communications equipment. Those factories made an already-existing post World War II housing shortage in the area worse, prompting the area’s first sustained population growth since the Civil War. It didn’t take people elsewhere in the Chicago metro region long to decide Kendall County’s bucolic landscape was an inviting place to raise families. That first growth spurt of the late 1950s and 1960s, was joined by further growth eras culminating in the early 2000s when Kendall County, in percentage terms, was the fastest growing county in the United States.

Kendall’s farmers found, given the distance, it was practical to drive their cattle, hogs, sheep, and horses to the Chicago market, a definite plus in the pre-railroad era. After railroads and then interurban trolley lines and eventually all-season paved roads connected the county to Chicago it opened markets for everything from dairy products to honey and fruit.

For the 40 years from the 1970s through the first decade of the 2000s, the county grew housing and retail developments at a dizzying rate, as once productive farmland changed from growing crops to growing homes and businesses. The area’s explosive growth took a breather with the Great Recession of 2008 when the world’s economic system was nearly wrecked by the greed and illegal activities of the financial services industry.

The effect of all of that, along with profound changes in agriculture itself, had a not inconsiderable impact on farming in Kendall County, something I’ve been watching for decades now.

Threshing small grains—oats, wheat, rye, barley—was both labor and capital intensive, requiring farmers to create cooperatives to buy and use the complicated harvesting equipment of the era. Members of the Harvey Threshing Ring farmed on and around the Harvey Road east of Oswego. (Little White School Museum collection)

As a statistical measure of those changes, every five years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture conducts a farm census, with the last one completed in 2017. And with five years having passed since then, farmers and ranchers all over the U.S. got packets of surveys in June asking for information about their operations for the latest farm census.

That last ag census, taken back in 2017, reported a host of facts about Kendall County and that continuing change from an almost entirely rural area to a community that seems to be growing more and more homes and shopping centers than row crops every year.

A modern combine (short for “combined harvester”) does the work of several men and machines. Improved grain hybrids and high-tech equipment have combined for explosive growth in grain yields and much larger, although far fewer, farms—and farmers.

Some of the census information confirmed overall trends that have been continuing over the past several decades, while others suggested the farm scene itself is changing. Not all that change has been negative, either. For instance, the census reported that, as of 2017 at least, Kendall County farms were overwhelmingly still in the hands of families and not corporations. A total of 92 percent of the county’s ag land was in the hands of family farms, the census reported.

On the other hand, there were interesting changes to report along with some more predictable information. Two county farms, for instance, reported raising emus, not exactly the usual kind of poultry you’d perhaps expect to find out here on the northern Illinois prairie.

Emu wrangling? In Kendall County? In the 2017 Census of Agriculture, two county farms reported raising the big birds.

Other statistics in the report contained trends both continuing and interrupted. The number of Kendall County farms continued to decline, reaching a new all-time low of just 313. That’s nearly 100 fewer farms than the 412 the census reported in 2002 and 773 fewer farms than existed here in 1950.

But while the number of farms declined, the size of the remaining farms continued to increase as consolidation in the agriculture sector—even among family farms—continued. In 2017, the average Kendall County farm covered 419 acres. In 2012, Kendall County farms averaged 356 acres, and back in 1950 when modern farming was on the cusp of major changes in farm use philosophy, the average farm here was just 180 acres.

The trend of more and more ag land turning into housing and business developments, however, took a breather in 2017. The census numbers suggested the housing market crash of 2008 had an impact on the previously steady repurposing of farmland. For the first time since 1987—the result of another economic downturn—land was apparently returned to agriculture production instead of being used for development. According to census statistics, a little over 8,000 acres were put back into crop production between 2012 and 2017.

Even with that pause, the value of Kendall’s farmland continued to rise, going up 4.3 percent from 2012, reaching a record average of $9,059 an acre, the 2017 census reported.

As this 1939 aerial photo shows, at that time, a few years before the start of World War II, Oswego was a small village set among a surrounding agricultural area. Oswego’s population in 1940 was 978. (Little White School Museum collection)

Likewise, the value of farm homes and buildings continued to increase along with the land on which they sit. In 2017, the value of the average Kendall County farm’s land and buildings stood at nearly $4 million, a 29 percent increase over those same values in 2012.

The census counts farm producers these days—at one time called farm operators—and they found 548 of them in Kendall County. The department’s official definition of a producer is: “Persons or entities, including farmers, ranchers, loggers, agricultural harvesters and fishermen, that engage in the production or harvesting of an agricultural product.” Given that definition, it’s clear one farm can have more than one “operator,” and thus the change in nomenclature to producer.

Now with a population of more than 35,000 (more than three times the population of all of Kendall County in 1939), Oswego is no longer small, and instead of farmland is now set among the housing and commercial developments that surround it. On-going development in Kendall County is the main driver behind the substantial increases in the price of land since World War II. (Google Earth image)

The 2017 census reported 380 male farm producers, down almost 4 percent from 2012, while the number of female producers in 2017 was 168, up a hefty 15 percent over 2012.

Another trend that continued was the increasing number of Kendall County farm producers who work off the farm at least part of the time. Nearly 53 percent of the county’s farm producers reported working off the farm at least part of the time in 2017. That was the highest number in a quarter century.

While the county has lost a significant amount of farmland to development over the past several decades, there has been no corresponding decline in production. Modern hybrids and continually improving farming technology seem to be combining to offset the loss of Kendall County farmland to housing and commercial development. In 2002, 82 percent of the county was being farmed. By 2017, that number had decreased fairly sharply to 67 percent. But even with less land available to farm, crop yields had increased sharply. For instance, in 2002, county farmers produced 9,249,000 bushels of corn and 2,761,000 bushels of soybeans. But in 2017, with less land under cultivation, the county’s farmers produced a remarkable 13,780,000 bushels of corn, a 49 percent increase, and 3,122,000 bushels of soybeans, up 13 percent.

Kendall was also contributing to another interesting statewide agricultural trend: The increasing number of honeybee colonies on farms. In the 2012 ag census, 919 Illinois farms reported having honeybee colonies. The number nearly doubled in 2017, with 1,770 farms reporting colonies. In Kendall County, 14 farms reported having 296 honeybee colonies in 2017, with a bit over 10,000 pounds of honey collected during the previous year. The 2017 result was not an outlier, either. Between 2007 and 2012, the number of farms producing honey doubled statewide and here in Kendall County, the number of honeybee colonies increased by 65 percent.

The Oswego Depot, its sidings, livestock loading chute, and the trackside stockyards—along with the livestock producers that once made use of them—are all gone today, but once provided a substantial economic boost for the area. (Little White School Museum collection)

While grain production was booming in 2017, the county’s livestock production continued it’s long-term decline. In 1950, during the heyday of diversified farming where each farm raised livestock as well as a variety of crops, 861 Kendall County farms reported having some beef cattle, 694 farms reported having at least one milk cow, and 741 farms reported raising hogs. The switch to specialized livestock or grain farming accelerated in the 1960s. And by the time the 2017 farm census was taken, with the switch to specialized grain or livestock farming, only 39 county farms reported having any beef cattle, only 1 reported owning milk cows, and 11 reported having hogs.

The switch away from raising livestock was also clearly evident in the sharp reduction in Kendall County acreage devoted to corn raised for silage to feed livestock as well as acreage devoted to pastureland. In 1950, county farmers raised 2,236 acres of corn for silage and had almost 24,000 acres devoted to pastureland. By 2017, county farmers only grew corn for silage on about 300 acres and only devoted about 1,600 acres to pastureland.

In 2017, Kendall County was still recovering from that near-total collapse of the world financial system driven by illegal and unethical practices of giant financial corporations. Recovery was slow, but by the time the 2020 U.S. Census was taken, population growth was already recovering in Kendall County, to the point that it was the fastest growing county in Illinois.

That’s why it will be so interesting to see what new information about the county farm scene this summer’s agricultural census will uncover.

Spring and the start of the fur trade’s seasonal cycle likely didn’t include our Fox River

It would have been a grand sight, seeing voyageurs paddling their canoes down the Fox River here in what’s now northern Illinois as the winter fur-trapping season ended. The water sparkling as it dripped off their red-tipped paddles, the voyageur crews’ colorful costumes contrasting with the flowing water, and the French paddling songs drifting on the breeze would have been spectacular, wouldn’t it?

If it had actually happened, yes, it would have been pretty spectacular.

But the truth is, the Fox River has always been a shallow, although wide, stream whose water levels varied widely, making navigation iffy at best during most of the year and downright impossible the rest of the time.

Every spring for well over a century, brigades of huge 35 to 40-foot freight canoes—called canots du maître (master canoes) or Montreal canoes—set off from Montreal and Quebec, each canoe laden with some three tons of goods destined for fur trading posts all over the Great Lakes region—and beyond. The route started just above the Lachine Rapids at Montreal on the Ottawa River. Paddling upstream via a number of often dangerous and usually difficult portages on the Ottawa, the arduous route then ran up the small Mattawa River, where paddling upstream ended at its source on Trout Lake and crossed the height of land where streams began flowing into Lake Huron. From there it was down into Lake Nipissing and then into the French River for 70 miles of easy paddling downstream into Georgian Bay and Lake Huron for the sometimes stormy paddle to the fur trade depot of Michilimackinac at the straits between lakes Huron and Michigan.

Reenactors portray voyageurs paddling a 35-foot Montreal birch bark canoe as it would have appeared during the period the British dominated the fur trade following the French and Indian War beginning in the 1760s.

There, the goods were broken down into smaller cargoes for smaller 20 to 25-foot north canoes that were handier on the inland trade routes to the actual post of traders, such as the one at Chicago and posts on the Illinois River. The main route to get to the Illinois Country was via the Chicago portage—which, depending on how full or empty the Des Plaines River was could be up to 60 miles long—or the St. Joseph River east of Chicago.

To get to the Chicago portage, the brigades had to paddle right past the mouth of the Root River just south of today’s Milwaukee in modern Wisconsin, a short portage from which led to the headwaters of our Fox River—which is not to be confused with the Fox River that empties into Green Bay. So the Root-Fox route would have cut off some distance to reach the Illinois River, but the Fox usually wasn’t deep enough. Not that fur traders never used it, of course, but it seems as a regular route on the fur trade highway, it was a very, very minor player indeed.

In fact, the only account we have of a French party considering using the Fox as a  shortcut from Lake Michigan to the Illinois River post at Le Rocher—Starved Rock—ended with the French missionaries and the boatmen transporting them to their destination in central Illinois deciding to go on to Chicago instead of chancing finding deep enough water in the Fox.

Map probably drawn by Rene Paul of St. Louis in 1815 and subsequently copied by Lt. James Kearney, U.S. Army. Paul was St. Louis City Engineer and also worked as a surveyor. (Source: Plate XL, Indian Villages of the Illinois Country, Vol. 2, Part 1, Atlas, Sarah Jones Tucker, Illinois State Museum, 1942)

The route they investigated went up the Root River and then over a nine-mile portage to Muskego Lake in what is today southeastern Waukesha County, Wis., which empties into the upper reaches of our Fox River.

Traveling in 1699, Father Jean Francois Buisson de St. Cosme, a Seminary priest on his way to the Mississippi River, reported that “some savages had led us to hope we could ascend [the Root River in Wisconsin from Lake Michigan] and after a portage of about two leagues might descend by another river called Pesioui [our Fox River] which falls into the River of the Illinois about 25 or 30 leagues from Chikagou, and that we should thereby avoid all the portages that had to be made by the Chikagou route. We passed by this river which is about ten leagues in length to the portage and flows through agreeable prairies, but as there was no water in it we judged that there would not be any in the Peschoui either.”

Although apparently not a regular route for French and Indian fur traders, the Root–Muskego Lake–Fox route was apparently used by at least some hardy and adventuresome travelers because the portage is clearly marked on a variety of maps of northern Illinois drawn around the time of the War of 1812.

The frequent lack of sufficient water in the Fox was not the only problem, of course. Maps from the late 1700s until the 1820s suggest that the Fox Valley was fairly lightly populated by Native People. There were only a few permanent villages along the river during that era, including at what is today called Maramech Hill near Plano and in the Oswego area near the mouth of Waubonsie Creek. Those were considered “permanent” villages, but they undoubtedly moved frequently as the farmland around them played out. It’s also likely villages were established at one time or another at or near the mouth of Blackberry Creek and all the other creeks that empty into the Fox. The farming was generally pretty good in those spots with rich bottomland soils, as was the fishing, which meant good living conditions.

During the winter months, those permanent villages broke up into small family groups, which, in turn, moved to their favored winter hunting grounds so as to spread out the hunting pressure during the lean times of the cold and snowy months.

The Fox River is picked out in green on this map of Native American villages in the Fox and Illinois River valleys as of about 1830. (Source: Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, Helen Hornbeck Tanner, University of Oklahoma Press, 1987)

Along with hunting, the Native People did their trapping at those winter camps. For instance, Chief Waubonsee, whose permanent village was located along the Fox from Oswego north to Batavia depending on the year, reportedly spent his winters with his family along the Illinois River. A lot of other Potowatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa family groups from northern Illinois spent their winters there, too, and that made it profitable for fur traders to open depots along the river. In particular, the American Fur Company, which took over the trade in the Old Northwest Territory after the Revolutionary War had a series of fur trade posts along the river that were regularly serviced from the company’s western headquarters at Fort Mackinac.

Press for compressing cured hides into 90 pound pièces for the fur trade. Note the wrapped bundles of hides atop the press and to the right of the press mechanism. I took this photo many years ago at the Snake River Fur Post, a reconstruction operated by the Minnesota Historical Society at Pine City, MN.

The fur trade ran on a time-honored schedule that was established by French and, later, British traders starting in the early 18th Century. In the late spring, canoe brigades arrived from Montreal and Quebec to drop off trade goods for the coming season and to pick up the furs that had been accumulating at the posts during the previous winter. As the prime peltries were brought in during the winter and early spring months, they were stretched, dried, and packed into 90 lb. bundles, called pièces, in preparation for shipment. When the brigades arrived, they off-loaded trade goods for the coming season–which had been carefully packed in the same dimension 90 lb. pièces as the furs would be–and reloaded the big freight canoes with the bundles of pelts, which were then transported back to the trading headquarters on the Ottawa River.

By the 1820s, the fur trade brigades had given up using the traditional birch bark freight canoes and were using Mackinaw boats, sturdy double-ended craft that could be either rowed or sailed and could carry about the same amount of cargo without the maintenance problems and fragility inherent in bark canoes. By the 1830s, when settlement began in earnest here in the Fox Valley, the fur trade had almost entirely ended in northern Illinois. The furbearers had been trapped out, the Native People upon whom the companies relied on as major fur pelt suppliers were being forced west of the Mississippi by government removal policies, and northern Illinois was rapidly being turned into farmland by ever-increasing numbers of American settlers.

Even though the Fox River may not been much of a voyageur highway, it was a key part of the Old Northwest’s rich history and heritage during the fur trade era.