Northwest Tour
Traveling northwest out from downtown Chicago today, most traverse the Kennedy Expressway and Northwest Tollway. In the mid-nineteenth century, roads such as Irving Park, Talcott, and Northwest Highway and the northwest line of the Chicago and North Western Railway connected communities to each other and downtown. The historical dominance of agriculture is seen through the preservation of farmsteads and one-room schoolhouses, now through the prism of heavy suburbanization. But even in the nineteenth century, factories, commuters, and recreational users vied with farmers for space in this metropolitan corridor.
One of the oldest extant houses in the region (and the oldest structure in the City of Chicago), is located off Talcott Road just east of Harlem (and just north of the Kennedy Expressway). Located on a small rise, the southern wing of the Noble-Seymour-Crippen House (NW1) was built in 1833 with long windows opening onto a veranda. The Noble family were emigrants from England and early supporters of Methodism in this region. Methodists from across the region came to worship at the Noble House, as it was an early stop on the region’s first Methodist circuit.
After the railroad opened a station about a half mile north of the homestead in the 1860s, a group of speculators platted a curvilinear commuter suburb, and the Seymour family put an Italianate addition onto the original Noble homestead. The homestead had become a suburban residence (which became a part of Chicago after annexation in 1893), showing how farmsteads even in the nineteenth century fell to more intensive uses as the railroad encouraged commuter settlement.
Following Talcott northwest to W. Algonquin Road, the Des Plaines Methodist Camp Ground (NW2) is located between a former flag stop on the northwest line of the North Western Railway and the Des Plaines River. Beginning in the 1860s, the camp, modeled on a Chautauqua experience, drew Methodist congregations and families from across the region for a day, a week, or a summer season to escape the city, take classes, and participate in special lecture series and musical events. By the beginning of the twentieth century, they had built cottages, which they returned to season after season. At the center of the camp ground today is the Waldorf Tabernacle, built in 1903 and still used for lectures and musical events. The camp ground is no longer a railroad stop; today’s visitors come by car or bus.
Suburban towns like Norwood Park, Park Ridge, Des Plaines, Mount Prospect, Arlington Heights, and Barrington all grew dramatically after 1945, but they trace their histories back to small settlements around rail stops in the nineteenth century. Near the downtown core in each of these towns are found houses which date back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that were residences for early commuters, local businessmen, and retired farmers. North on River Road into Des Plaines is Northwest Highway (U.S. 14). Traveling northwest on U.S. 14 to Mount Prospect Road brings us to downtown Mount Prospect. On Maple Street, the Dietrich Friedrichs House (NW3), built in 1906, serves as another clear example of historical single-family residences near the train station. It is home to the Mount Prospect Historical Society.
Farmsteads were located across the northwest corridor out from downtown Chicago by 1900. These farms were located between the rail lines, where land values would not skyrocket until the arrival of improved highways in the mid-twentieth century. Traveling south on SR 83 to Biesterfield Road, we come to Elk Grove. A post-1945 suburb which grew with O’Hare Airport just to the east, Elk Grove nevertheless maintains a farmstead from the 1860s, the Schuette-Bierman Farmhouse (NW4). The site preserves evidence of the German farmers who lived in this area long before Elk Grove Village came to be. A few miles north and west on Schaumburg Road, we come to a similar site, the Volkening Heritage Farm (NW5). This farmstead, a part of Spring Valley Nature Preserve, is an 1880s German farmstead, including a house and outbuildings. Schaumburg, a small farm crossroads until the 1950s, is now better known for Woodfield Mall than its agricultural past. But the German farmers of the preceding century, raising crops for themselves and for the market, also saw themselves as part of a commercial region.
To the south of these farms, the Itasca Historical Depot (NW6) is maintained by the Itasca Historical Society as it would have been used by area farmers. The depot was built in 1873 soon after the Chicago and Pacific Railroad (later the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul) established a line through the area. Farmers quickly turned to dairying, taking advantage of the regular rail service.
The agricultural heritage of the region continues to be celebrated moving northwest along Irving Park Road (SR 19) into Streamwood, another post-1945 suburb. Hoosier Grove Park is located on the north side of Irving Park Road. There stands the Hoosier Grove School (NW7), a modest white frame structure constructed in 1904 by German American farmers. Area children attended the school until 1954, when suburbanization transformed their educational needs. The building operates as a museum, like dozens of other one-room schoolhouses across Chicagoland. Farmhouses, farmsteads, schools, churches, and depots now punctuate the suburban subdivisions which came to dominate this area in the closing decades of the twentieth century.
While farming predominated in this part of the region in the nineteenth century, as we move west toward the Fox River, factories and other industrial sites were more common. Many were small enterprises in close proximity to farm fields. Continuing west on SR 19 and north on Route 25 takes the tour to the outskirts of Elgin, where a small factory typical of many which once dotted this landscape still stands on Shoe Factory Road. The Selz Shoe Factory (NW8) employed men and women into the twentieth century. The three-story brick building has many large windows designed to capture as much natural light as possible. Today the building has been rehabbed into residential space.
Larger factory sites often have not survived long beyond their closure. Returning south on SR 25, the Elgin National Watch Company began operation along the Fox River, south of downtown Elgin, in the mid-nineteenth century. Employing thousands of workers into the mid-twentieth century, the plant encompassed whole blocks along the river. Within a year of its 1965 shuttering, the plant was leveled. All that remains today is a corner of the fence which once circled the operation which now stands just south of the Lady Elgin Casino. However, just to the east of the former plant site, the Elgin Watch Company Observatory (NW9) still stands and is used by local school groups.
Crossing the Fox River, take State Road 31 northward to U.S. 14 west into Woodstock for the final stop on the northwest tour: Woodstock, a town which has served farmers, small factories, and government workers from its founding in the 1840s. The Woodstock town square includes the Old McHenry County Courthouse (NW10), designed by John M. Van Osdel in local limestone in 1857. For generations, this building served county farmers and businessmen. It is one of the few surviving public buildings in the region dating back before the Civil War. The Woodstock Opera House also stands on this square, built in the 1890s and restored a century later.
On this northwest tour, there is considerable evidence of the heavy suburbanization of the second half of the twentieth century. New developments have grown on former farm fields. Still, farmers were not alone in the nineteenth century, just as suburbanites in the twenty-first century share this landscape with varied uses which have developed over time.