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    Glen Ellyn
    Glen Ellyn
    Glen Ellyn
    Ebook189 pages1 hour

    Glen Ellyn

    By Russ Ward and Glen Ellyn Historical Society

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    About this ebook

    Take a fascinating journey through the history of Glen Ellyn, Illinois with more than 200 vintage photographs and anecdotes from the locals who experienced it.


    Glen Ellyn took its name from a Victorian real estate development whose massive promotional campaigns brought this unusually beautiful village to the attention of city dwellers eager to move their families away from the grimy, coal-fired environs of Chicago.

    The story begins with hardy New Englanders who felled trees to build log cabins, broke the virgin prairie sod, and trapped wild game in the marshlands that would become greater Chicago, continuing through the radical changes that came with the railroad and the Civil War.

    From Potawatomi Indians and pioneers to an important Underground Railroad station; from a luxurious lakeside health resort with a fabulous grand hotel to one of Chicago's premier suburban communities, Glen Ellyn presents the village's rich history with evocative photographs from the collection of the Glen Ellyn Historical Society.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateJun 7, 2006
    ISBN9781439616758
    Glen Ellyn
    Author

    Russ Ward

    Russ Ward, a freelance writer and fourth-generation Glen Ellyn native, grew up in the heart of the village. Ward's mother served as village historian, his grandfather as postmaster, and his great-grandfather as an agent for the Metropolitan West Side Railway that connected to Glen Ellyn via the old Aurora and Elgin line.

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      Book preview

      Glen Ellyn - Russ Ward

      reserved.

      INTRODUCTION

      When Illinois joined the Union in 1818, Chicago was little more than a frontier fort and trading post. The rolling glacial moraines, fertile prairies, and old-growth forests that became DuPage County remained largely uncharted Native American country until 1832, when the capture of the great warrior Chief Black Hawk opened the way for settlement.

      The Erie Canal and the Great Lakes soon brought droves of hardy New Englanders to settle the lands secured by the 1833 Treaty of Chicago. The United States government gave the Native Americans about 36¢ an acre for this real estate and offered it for $1.25 to settlers like Ralph and Morgan Babcock from Onondaga County, New York, who laid claim to a large wooded area some 20 miles directly west of Fort Dearborn.

      Babcock’s Grove lay on an ancient buffalo trail that led westward from the Des Plaines River in present-day Maywood to a shallow bend on the East Branch of the DuPage River where 500 Potawatomi still remained in a riverbank village. Here the Babcock brothers set aside a claim for their New York neighbor, Deacon Winslow Churchill.

      Arriving with his large family in 1834, Churchill was the first white settler within the future borders of Glen Ellyn, and his crude log cabin was the first building. When Churchill’s sons Seth and Isaac made the long journey back to Chicago to purchase necessary supplies, the tracks made by their heavy ox-drawn wagon turned the old buffalo trail into a direct westward extension of Lake Street in Chicago, a name that it bore until the mid-1920s.

      When this new road was extended into the highlands west of the DuPage River and then on to St. Charles, it became a frontier highway for westward bound pioneers. The Potawatomi moved on, more settlers moved in, and a little New England–style community began to grow on a crossroad just up the hill from the Churchill settlement.

      Within a year of the good deacon’s arrival, William Dodge, brother-in-law to both Ralph Babcock and the deacon, settled to the south, Daniel Fish established a claim to the west, and a Massachusetts native by the name of Moses Stacy built a log cabin on a large parcel to the southwest. The families soon welcomed a circuit-riding Scotch-Irish preacher named Rev. James McChesney, and they built a log school that also served as a house of worship.

      At Fish’s cabin, the new road to St. Charles crossed an old trail known as Indian Creek Road (now Main Street), and yet another trail forked off toward Geneva, forming a five-cornered intersection. By the early 1840s, a village had formed around Fish’s Corners, with several blacksmiths, wagon and harness shops, Milo Meacham’s general store, and a little Baptist church.

      Here Moses Stacy built a tavern to serve the now heavy commerce between Chicago and the Fox River valley. According to Amos Churchill, the traffic was so dense that it was difficult to cross the road. The community became known as Stacy’s Corners, and the little triangular green between the church and the tavern (Stacy Park) began to serve as a town square.

      The great Galena and Chicago Union Railroad opened in 1848 with the first 10 miles of track laid from Chicago to Maywood, bound for the lead-mining boomtown of Galena. The following year, the first locomotive passed through a sleepy little valley just a mile south of Stacy’s Corners. The owner of the farm through which the tracks were laid believed that a passenger station might form the nucleus of a new town. Connecticut-born Dr. Lewey Quitterfield Newton, who owned most of what is now downtown Glen Ellyn, built a station complete with a freight platform and a water tank. The trains stopped and the people came.

      New communities blossomed along the railroad tracks, including one that formed around Newton’s Station, renamed Danby in 1852 by the first station agent, David Kelley. While the railroads brought great wealth and development to Chicago, they extinguished Galena’s river-based economy, and as the heart of Danby’s downtown shopping district grew, Stacy’s Corners suffered the same fate.

      Across from the new station, Kelley built a three-story hotel called Mansion House in which he also opened the first post office. Milo Meacham of Stacy’s Corners built the nearby Danby House, which hosted the Reverend McChesney’s Sunday school. A general store, a shoemaker, and a tin shop opened on Main Street, and on Pennsylvania Avenue, a blacksmith and harness shop appeared, along with an old-fashioned Dutch windmill.

      The trains brought scores of new residents to the growing town, including L. C. Cooper, who ably chronicled the formative years of the village, but they also brought news of storm clouds gathering on the horizon.

      Glen Ellyn’s political roots date back to the days when the Republican Party was founded to oppose the expansion of slavery into the new western territories, an issue that was hotly debated in political meetings held in the Danby House. Cooper recalled one meeting in which a visiting black orator castigated the Buchanan administration for its condescension to Southern demands. When he asked if anyone in the room would vote to reelect James Buchanan, only one farmer, an active Democrat, said that he would.

      Cooper illustrated the local attitude toward slavery with this story:

      I was sitting on the veranda of the Mansion House, talking with Deac Whitman [who] walked with great difficulty and with the aid of crutches. While his legs were of little use, he was very strong in the upper part of his body, especially in his arms and shoulders.

      While we sat there, a colored man came along and asked for a drink. He was told to help himself and as he was doing so, two men drove up. As soon as the black man saw them he left the pump and came to where we were sitting. It became apparent that he was an escaping slave and that the two men were in pursuit of him.

      Deac rose from his chair, grabbed the black, jerked him into the doorway, braced himself against the side of the door and began such a cursing and denunciation of the two men as I never heard before or since. He dared them to come near enough to enable him

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