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.

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Timber: The indispensable resource for pioneer prairie farmers

As settlers pushed west from Ohio into western Indiana, they encountered what geographers and geologists call the Prairie Peninsula.

The peninsula was a gigantic expanse of grassland that thrust eastward across the Mississippi into western Indiana, covering most of northern and central Illinois. The expanse notable for its scarcity of timber, at least compared with the densely wooded areas the pioneers had become used to as they moved west of the Appalachians.

Unlike the shortgrass prairies found west of the Mississippi, the Prairie Peninsula was a tallgrass prairie, abounding in wild grasses and forbs (non-woody, broadleaf plants) such as Big Bluestem and Compass Plant that towered as high as eight feet above the prairie sod.

Environmental scientists still argue about exactly how and why the Prairie Peninsula came to be. But however it was formed, in the thousands of years following the retreat of the last glacier that scoured northern Illinois, a diverse and complicated ecology grew up in the Prairie Peninsula. The landscape was dominated by prairie plants, particularly grasses and sedges (which have triangular-shaped, sharp-edged stems: “Sedges have edges,” which is a handy way to differentiate them from grasses).

You can still get an idea of what the Illinois tallgrass prairie looked like during the settlement era at the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie at Wilmington, Illinois.

Grasses such as Big Blue Stem and Little Blue Stem predominated in the tallgrass prairie, but in the spring and the fall, before and after the grasses’ and sedges’ growing season, forbs predominated, creating the brightly colored carpets of wildflowers so many of the early settlers commented on.

The settlers didn’t spend a lot of time pondering questions on how the landscape came to be, but mostly wondered how they were to survive in seemingly endless grassland with few patches of timber.

The problem was that early 19th Century settlement technology was timber-intensive, requiring lots of trees from which to manufacture split rail fences, log cabins and outbuildings, and the firewood needed to heat homes during Illinois’ fierce winters.

As the settlers pushed west out of the Ohio and Indiana timber into the prairie, they found that, in general, wooded areas followed along the banks of streams and were growing in groves in other areas of wet prairie. They quickly realized woods proved thickest on the east side of streams.

Scientists generally agree now that the prairie fires that swept across the Prairie Peninsula on a regular basis, driven by the prevailing westerly winds, were slowed or stopped by streams, which allowed more and thicker timber to thrive on streams’ east bank.

Many native prairie grasses and forbs require periodic fires to thrive, while non-native species tend to be killed by fire. In addition to high resistance to fire, most native plant species are also highly drought resistant. Prairie plants and native tree species tend to have deep root systems and leaf systems that maximize water retention. Each year, about 37 inches of rain falls here in Kendall County. Significantly, that’s almost exactly the amount of rainfall absorbed by an acre of native prairie or oak savanna.

Not only the quantity of timber was changed due to location, but the type was too. In general, fire-resistant trees such as white oak were more likely to be found along the west banks of streams, while less fire-resistant species, such as black walnut, basswood, and maples, found life easier along the streams’ west banks.

When U.S. Government surveyors arrived in northern Illinois in the late 1830s to complete the survey mandated by the Northwest Ordinance before land could be sold to pioneer settlers, they documented the types and extent of timber up and down the Fox Valley. Looking at those original survey maps and reading the surveyors’ notes, it becomes clear how important location was when it came to the kinds and amounts of the area’s timber resources.

This photograph taken by Malcom Rance at the 1911 Wheatland Plowing Match illustrates how timber-free that Will County township was even into the second decade of the 20th Century. (Little White School Museum collection)

In fact, timber-free land was settled last. Will County’s Wheatland Township, which neighbors Oswego Township to the east, was virtually treeless so when my Pennsylvania German ancestors arrived there in 1852, they were still able to buy unclaimed government land. It’s important to note that the land there, and elsewhere on treeless prairies where timber was far removed, wasn’t ignored at first because it wasn’t fertile, because it was. It was avoided for several years because vital timber was too far away.

When the earliest settlers reached the Fox Valley in the 1820s and early 1830s, they found timber edging both banks of the Fox River, although the belt along the east bank of the river was generally thicker with a more diverse species of hardwoods. In some areas, like in most of Aurora Township, just to the north of Oswego Township, there was scarcely any timber along the west bank of the river at all.

Some of these woods were, in part, densely timbered and had a hazel brush understory. But other parts of it were relatively open, what is called today an oak savanna that was fairly park-like.

In the spring and the fall, after native prairie grasses and other plants had dried out, thunderstorm lightning naturally started many swift-moving prairie fires. But in addition, in a practice that had been noted by the region’s first French explorers, the local Native American population also started fires, both intentionally and unintentionally. Unintentional fires happened when cooking fires escaped into the dry prairie. Intentional fires were much more common and were started to prepare fields for cultivation, combat insects, kill trees that were encroaching onto the prairies from the groves, and for hunting purposes. To hunt with fires, Native People would start a ring of fire sometimes a mile in diameter, and leave an unburned exit, through which game animals would be forced by the flames.

The fires also swept through the hardwood savanna areas, killing off brush and keeping the understory clear, while encouraging the growth of fire-tolerating trees and plants. Fires did a good job of creating lots of wooded edges that encouraged the deer and other animal populations.

The periodic burning, both natural and caused by man, largely created the prairie landscape found by the pioneers when they arrived. Over thousands of years, the plants and trees that grew on the prairies had come to not only tolerate, but to rely on fire. White oaks, for instance, are very fire resistant because of their thick bark and their high resistance to rotting after being scared by fire. In addition, they quickly grow after fires—fire actually helps some oak seedbeds sprout. On the other hand, many other species—maples, for instance—are very susceptible to fire damage.

While hardwood groves dotted the prairie, one extensive stretch of timber in particular caught the eye of many early mid-Fox Valley settlers.

From the location of today’s city of Batavia, all the way south to Waubonsie Creek in Oswego, a thick belt of maple, linden, oak, ash, and hickory provided an excellent source of timber, as well as protection from the prairie winds. In typical prosaic pioneer fashion, the settlers gave this huge stretch of woodland a simple and descriptive name. They called this big woods, the, well, “Big Woods.”

A detail from the 1838 U.S. Government survey map of Oswego Township shows the southernmost lobe of the Big Woods (highlighted in green) extending down the east bank of the Fox River from the Kane County line.

Not only did the settlers find welcome shelter among the hardwoods of the Big Woods, but so did the Native People who lived there before them. Chief Waubonsie, the principal war leader of the Prairie Potowatomi, located his permanent village in the western verge of the Big Woods, moving it often enough so that virtually every modern town up and down the Fox Valley from Oswego to Batavia can accurately claim to have been the site of the chief’s village at one time or another.

When the pioneers got here, they settled along the verge of the timber, locating their homes next to the woods and plowing fields in the nearby prairie. The Big Woods wasn’t regular in shape; it had many lobes that extended into the surrounding prairie, providing many protected areas where pioneers quickly established fields by plowing the native prairie with special “breaking plows,” designed to turn over the thick sod for the first time.

According to the original survey maps, the Big Woods stretched some miles east of the Fox River, almost to Naperville at the ford across the DuPage River. It then extended south all the way to Waubonsie Creek, where its southernmost lobe ended. As surveyor James Reed wrote in his notebook back on Aug. 8, 1838: “Mouth of Wabansia Creek 30 links [20 feet; a link was 7.92 inches] wide. North of creek land is timbered with white and Black oak. South of creek land is prairie and slopes gently to the river. The village of Oswego is located just below the mouth of the creek.”

The Big Woods covered almost half of Kane County’s Aurora Township, as this image of the 1838 U.S. Government survey map shows–with timbered areas highlighted in green. Note the near-total lack of timber on the west side of the river, with only a pencil-thin strip existing in the north half of the township.

The first thing the pioneers did when they arrived was start cutting down the Big Woods, along with most of the other stands of timber in the area. That initial wave of settlers was a timber-intensive bunch, requiring logs—and lots of them—to manufacture all those rail fences, build log homes and outbuildings, and supply firewood. According to James Sheldon Barber, an Oswego settler, writing back to his parents in New York State in 1843, a pioneer farm family needed 10 acres of timber to make a go of it on the Illinois frontier.

A large portion of AuSable Grove south of Oswego was subdivided into woodlots told to settlers where they could cut firewood and timber needed for building purposes. This cut is from the 1870 plat map of Kendall County.

For early arrivals, that was no problem, but they quickly claimed the timberland for their own use. Some, however, bought timber stands with the intention of dividing it into smaller parcels to sell to later arrivals. That’s why you see some wooded areas on early plat maps divided into many small chunks.

The settlers used didn’t always require cutting trees down, of course. Maple sugaring in the spring was a popular and profitable activity that even left its name behind in the name of one of our area towns—Sugar Grove. Further, the breeds of hogs the settlers brought along were hardy, ornery animals that got along just fine browsing in the oak savannas that were relatively common during those early years, especially eating all the acorns produced by native oaks.

Eventually, the only remaining woods were in wetlands and other areas not farmed for one reason or another. And, in fact, remnants still remain today, including a nice stand at Cook’s Savannah in Oswego’s Old Post Park and such areas such as Briarcliff Woods Park and the Arbor Ridge Subdivision in Montgomery and in several other areas up and down the Fox Valley. Each of those oak savanna remnants is a reminder of the landscape the pioneers encountered when they decided to settle along the banks of the Fox River.