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It was 1834 – exactly 190 years ago this summer – and what would become Kendall County seven years in the future was undergoing an almost manic period of town-building.
The area, most of its land area not even surveyed by the U.S. Government to enable it to be legally sold, would eventually include nine surveyed townships, each consisting of 36 sections of (nominally) 360 acres each. With no county government of its own for the next few years, the area would be variously governed from as far away as Peoria and as nearby as Ottawa and Geneva.
And according to the exact language of the solemn treaties signed with the resident Native People, only a sliver of the future county’s land was available for legal settlement. Which, of course, didn’t stop or even slow illegal settlement, at which federal officials barely winked.
The first settlers in what would become Kendall County were, however, legal. In 1826, John Beresford came up the Fox River from its mouth near Ottawa and settled at the southernmost point of what was later named Holderman’s Grove. That land had been legally sold by the tribes as part of a land cession on which a canal was proposed to link Lake Michigan with the Illinois River near Ottawa. Beresford’s claim lay south of the old Indian Boundary Line that marked the limits of that canal land cession.
But other settlers soon arrived who didn’t pay much attention to treaties or land cessions. They began claiming land all over what would become Kendall County, a process that was temporarily halted in 1832 by the Black Hawk War, Illinois’ last Indian war.
But the war was short – if not tragic for the Native People involved – and settlement resumed with a vengeance in 1833. Known as “The Year of the Early Spring,” dozens of pioneer families arrived and claimed land for farms. The next year, farm families continued to arrive, but so did millwrights, blacksmiths, and storekeepers all looking for economic opportunities other than working the land themselves.
The flood of settlers was just beginning, of course, and it was helped by one important factor. In 1833, the U.S. Army built a channel through the sandbar at the mouth of the Chicago River. That allowed ships to directly enter the river for the first time, creating a safe harbor at the south end of Lake Michigan.
In 1833, only four sailing ships called at Chicago. In 1834, with a safe harbor guaranteed, 176 ships called at Chicago, and the number virtually exploded from there on. That meant, combined with the easy travel on the Erie Canal linking the Hudson River with Lake Erie, settlers from the northeast – New York, Vermont, Massachusetts – had a much easier route to Illinois.
In 1834, while settlers from New York and the rest of the Northeast were indeed arriving, there were still many pushing up from southern Illinois who were natives of Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky. That year, the R.W. Carns, J.S. Murray and E. Dyal families came in a company from Camden, South Carolina, and brought two female slaves, Dinah and Silvie, with them.
But the opening of Chicago’s port, coupled with chain migration by wagon train of ever more Northeasterners, soon overwhelmed the Southerners. According to contemporary accounts (a good one’s in “A Woman’s Story of Pioneer Illinois” by Christiana Holmes Tillson) Southern attitudes, especially suspicious of Northern attitudes towards education and business, prompted many Southerners to either move back south or push on farther west.
One of the Massachusetts natives who arrived in Kendall County in 1834 was Lewis B. Judson. Judson had moved west to Michigan where he served in the militia that participated in the Black Hawk War. In 1833, he’d sent a relative, T.B. Mudgett (possibly his brother-in-law), on ahead to claim land for him. In 1834, Judson partnered with Levi Arnold, a New Yorker who’d already helped establish Plainfield, to lay out a new town on the east bank of the Fox River the pair called Hudson. A few years later, it would be renamed Oswego, the name it’s carried ever since.
Settlers had also arrived elsewhere up and down the Fox River in 1834, some also interested in becoming town builders. The Hollenbacks were finally ready to plat their new town, that they named Georgetown after George Hollenback, 1835. The name was changed to Newark in 1843.
The village of Pavilion was starting to form by 1834, but became a more established hamlet in 1835 as well, boasting the first school in what became Kendall County, along with facilities to serve the stagecoach traffic that passed through on the route from Chicago to Ottawa. Plattville, too, was already growing around Daniel Platt’s stagecoach inn on another branch of the Chicago to Ottawa Trail, although it wouldn’t be formally mapped until 1862.
Then the town-builders took a brief break before platting Yorkville in 1836, Bristol – now the north side of Yorkville – about 1837, and Lisbon and Millington in 1838.
The hamlet of Little Rock had been growing along both sides of the Chicago to Galena Trail in the far northwest corner of Kendall County since stagecoach traffic started in the late 1830s, but not until 1848 was it officially platted.
Two of the county’s towns had to wait to be established until the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad extended its tracks west of the Fox River. Both Plano and Bristol – created as Bristol Station – popped up along the railroad’s mainline in 1853. Millbrook was platted in 1873 and, finally, Helmar became the county’s newest town in 1897.
But it was that town-building spurt that began with the arrivals of the town-builders themselves in 1834 and continued throughout the decade of the 1830s that really set the stage for Kendall County’s municipal history. It’s a history that has continued to grow as municipalities adjacent to Kendall County have, during the few decades, annexed county land so that now we also have residents of Aurora, Montgomery, Minooka, Joliet and Plainfield living here as well. If we’ve learned anything at all from history, especially our local history, it’s that the only constant is change.
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