A new name, alluring, tantalizing, was in his ears. He could not forget it—Illinois. Wonderful tales were told all through the East of that vigorous young state—tales of cleared land, the prairie—great stretches of it, without a rock or a tree—nothing to do but put in your plow ... Ida M. Tarbell
So far as the record states, Erastus Gary of Pomfret, Connecticut, was the first settler to cross what is now central DuPage County, the first to see the sites where Elmhurst, Lombard, Glen Ellyn, Wheaton and Winfield would eventually spring up along the first railroad to run west from Chicago. The few sentences by Ida M. Tarbell, America’s great biographer in the early years of this century, tell how it happened that in 1831 the twenty-five year old Gary came to Illinois and what would eight years later become DuPage County.
The first settlers in DuPage County were New Englanders in search of new land where they might establish new farms and homes for their families. Two recent historic developments largely accounted for Erastus Gary’s trip west and those of thousands of other New Englanders that would take place in the next fifteen years.
The first of these developments, one of the great events in the early history of the United States, came in 1825 when the Erie Canal, still memorialized in song and still operating, was opened. The remarkable canal extended three hundred sixty-three miles across the State of New York from Troy on the Hudson River, located a few miles upstream from Albany, to Buffalo on Lake Erie.
The Erie Canal completed a water transportation route between the still unsettled Midwest and not only New York City and New England but with ocean-going ships that could dock at Albany coming from Europe and around the world. This meant that passengers and goods could move safely and on schedule from New England and eastern towns and beyond directly to the village of Chicago and Lake Michigan. From there settlers could go to find farms and new homes in still largely unsettled northern Illinois and Indiana and southern Wisconsin. The canal traffic to Chicago became so great that the Illinois town came to be called the "western terminus of the Erie Canal."
Shortly after the Erie Canal was opened, there was built the Albany to Schenectady Railroad, the first railroad to operate in the northern United States and only the second railroad to operate in the nation. The first railroad, put in service only a few months earlier, had been operated in the Charlestown, South Carolina area.
The twenty-five-mile railroad was in a way an extension of the Erie Canal. Extending from Albany on the Hudson, where ocean-going ships could unload and take on cargo, northwest to Schenectady that was located on the Erie Canal, the railroad provided an important shortcut to the canal and was heavily used. No longer was it necessary to go on up the Hudson River to Troy to get to the canal barges, and using the railroad could save two or three days.
There was another important impact from this first northern railroad. Most of the settlers coming west over the Erie Canal had their first opportunity to see a railroad. Many of them, like Erastus Gary, were so impressed and so sure that the new railroad transport would in time become universal that when they picked their own land in DuPage County, they attempted to anticipate where the future railroads would be built. Erastus Gary actually acquired two farms in different locations in DuPage County in an effort to be sure that one of them would be close to a future railroad. The first railroad west from Chicago came through Erastus Gary’s farm property located near Wheaton.
Not every family from New England and the East came over the Erie Canal route. Travelling the canal required more money than many families were able to pay. Too, some families wanted to travel with wagons so that they could bring furniture and even their livestock. They traveled in covered wagons pulled by horses or oxen, following the Indian trails across western New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana to reach DuPage.
A new transportation facility such as the North American continent had not had before was one of the new developments that quickly brought a remarkable group of settlers to DuPage County. The other development was equally important and took place in 1828, three years before Erastus Gary made the trip to the West DuPage River and established Gary’s Mill.
This was a treaty between the United States government and the Indian tribes that provided for the Indians ceding their lands east of the Mississippi River to the U. S. government, clearing the way for settlers. The government made cash settlements with the Indians and opened up lands west of the Mississippi River, largely in Iowa and Missouri, that would be the new homes for the tribes. The Sauk and Fox Indians whose permanent camping grounds were at Rock Island in Illinois were relocated at Tama, Iowa, near present-day Iowa City. The reservation still exists.
Although most of the early settlers in DuPage were from the northeastern section of the United States, and most of them from a rather small area in New England, there were a few families that came from the South. Ironically, the first family to settle, establish a farm and erect permanent buildings in what is now DuPage County came from the South.
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| Bailey Hobson |
This was Bailey Hobson and his wife, Clarissa. He had been reared in Tennessee and his wife in Georgia. The Hobsons had come north by wagon and had settled for a time in southern Indiana. When they learned about the rich land available, they moved to a homestead east of Naperville ... became the first settlers in what is now DuPage County. There is in the DuPage County Historical Museum in Wheaton an excellent re-creation of the interior of the Bailey Hobsons’ original log cabin ... the first erected in DuPage.
There were important reasons why so few Southerners came to DuPage. At this time most of the families interested in relocating in the Midwest lived in Virginia and the Carolinas. There was but one means of crossing through the wilderness of the Blue Ridge Mountains. That was the Cumberland Gap, in the mountains of extreme eastern Tennessee, first designated and cleared by the legendary Daniel Boone in 1750 and in regular and increasing use in the decade from 1765 to 1775, more than half a century before the Erie Canal was available.
Most of the settlers who came through the Gap moved into Tennessee and Kentucky and southern Indiana and Illinois. They used the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to get to southern Illinois. This explains why the southern sections of the state (up to a point north of Springfield) was settled first and why they were mostly Southerners from the Carolinas, Virginia and Kentucky.
The families from the south did not move much north
of what is today Springfield. There was no good means of travel, but there were other
important reasons. The climate was one. These people from the South found the northern
Illinois winters too severe. An even more important reason was to be found in the Illinois
Constitution. Illinois was admitted to the Union December 3, 1818, under a state
constitution which did not permit the holding of slaves.
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| Gary's Mill School, now a part of the
DuPage County Forest Preserve System, is located near the site of the community founded by Erastus and the Rev. Charles Wesley Gary in the early 1830s. |
The next year, in 1819, an attempt was made by those who wished to use slaves to get the Illinois Constitution amended to permit the owning of slaves. The effort failed. There was occasional use of slave labor in southern Illinois, but the state soon became strongly committed to abolition of slavery. This discouraged southern families of means from settling in Illinois at all and certainly not as far north as DuPage. There is no record of slave labor having been used at any time in DuPage County history.
For all of these reasons, most of the people who settled in DuPage County from 1830 and until the Civil War (1861 to 1865) were from the northeastern section of the United States, largely from New England. The harsh winters were not alarming to them. Many of them were used to even more severe winters in states like Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire. They came mostly as an educated people with similar goals, religious outlook and moral attitudes. They also felt a strong need for local government, and this played a large role in the creation of DuPage as a county in 1839.
Many of these settlers left the comforts of spacious New England homes. They were also craftsmen. Often they were persons of some means. In this first twenty-five years of the settlement period they built many houses similar to the fine homes they had known in New England. Some of those New England houses, still standing today, were built as much as two hundred and fifty years ago.
Perhaps the best example of the DuPage settlers having built houses of the type they had admired in New England is the one built by Jesse Wheaton who with his brother, Warren, founded the Wheaton community. Jesse was the outstanding builder in Wheaton during the settlement years. He had a number of homes, but the one built in 1853, in which he lived for the remainder of his life, is an exact replica of a house he regularly saw and admired in Pomfret, Connecticut. The Jesse Wheaton house is on Evergreen Street in Wheaton. The house after which it was modeled in Pomfret is still standing beautifully preserved. In its kitchen the Pomfret boys registered for service during the Civil War.
Except as temporary dwellings, there were few of the log cabins, lean-to or dugout types of homes which often marked the trail of the pioneers of the last century. Among the skilled craftsmen who came with the farmers to DuPage were the carpenter-joiners who built the substantial, permanent homes for a group of people planning to carve communities and a new life on the Northern Illinois prairies.
Precious cargoes of furniture, fine china, silver and other items which marked the difference between a house and a home on the prairie were moved over the waterways and trailways from the East long before professional moving companies were established. One of the most valuable of all items to be shipped to Illinois was glass which provided window panes for the new homes.
The woodlands in DuPage County provided an excellent grade of lumber for construction ... houses, churches, barns and schools for the first settlers. Later there was more use of brick made from clay in the county. The limestone quarries found along Salt Creek, both branches of the DuPage River and along the Fox River in Kane County to the west were also extensively used.
Blanchard Hall, the landmark building on the Wheaton College campus, was constructed from limestone blocks secured at the Batavia quarry in Kane County. The first of this stone was hauled by wagon and sled from Batavia with such settlers as Jesse Wheaton and Erastus Gary moving the material. Later when the railroad was built through to Kane County, the stone came into Wheaton on flatcar, and it was not unusual to excuse young men from their Wheaton College classes so they might go to the railroad at the edge of the campus and help move the stone blocks off the railroad car. Repairs on Blanchard Hall even now are made with stone secured from the original quarry.
Since most of the settlers were people of education, they found space in their covered wagons and trunks over the canal for books ... Bibles, textbooks, reference books, histories and other reading material. In New England they depended upon local newspapers. By 1849 the first newspaper was being published at Naperville. Newspapers have had a vital role in the communication chain which linked the various communities of the DuPage County.
These early settlers also understood the vital role that the political process can have in securing improvements in the way of life especially for new communities. Within five years after Captain Joseph Naper came to see the prairies and woodlands of what is now the Naperville community, he was a member of the Illinois General Assembly meeting in Vandalia in the southern part of the state. DuPage County resulted from his efforts in the legislature. The county was for the next two decades constantly represented in the General Assembly by such outstanding settlers as Naper, Warren Wheaton and Col. Julius Warren.
Among the families who arrived in DuPage in the first few years are several whose names are still prominent today. By township, they include:
Addison: Ebenezer and Hezekiah Duncklee, Mason Smith, H. Smith, George Rouse, the Lesters (4), and B. F. Fillmore. Also a large number of families who had arrived from Germany: the Fischers, C. and H. D.; the Smiths (H. Sr., H. Jr., Lewis and F); D. and F. Gray; T. Thomson, H. Rotennund, F. Kragie, F. Stainkle, J. Bertman and W. Boske.
Bloomingdale: Silas, Lyman and Harvey Meacham; H. Woodworth, N. Stevens, D. Bangs, Elias Maynard, Ebenezer Peck, Milton Kent and George W. Green.
Downers Grove: Pierce Downer, Israel Blodgett, Asa Carpenter, Dexter Stanley, Levi C. Aldrich, Garry Smith, Samuel Curtis, J. R. Adams, David Page, Henry Carpenter, Walter Blanchard, J. W. Walker and Horace Aldrich.
Lisle: J. C. Hatch, Pomeroy Goodrich, Lewis Ellsworth, Bailey Hobson, Isaac Clark, John Thompson, John Sargent, Henry Puffer, Mark Beaubien, Martin Asher, A. B. Chatfield, R. M. Sweet, Daniel M. Green and A. S. Barnard.
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| Joseph Naper |
Milton: Harry T. Wilson, Lyman Butterfield, Thomas Brown, Warren and Jesse Wheaton, Ralph and Morgan Babcock, Joseph Chadwick, Abiel and George Hadley, Moses Stacy, Jabez Dodge, A. S. Janes, Horace Barnes, Royal Walker and F. D. Abbott.
Naperville: Joseph and John Naper, Ira Carpenter, John Stevens, John Murray, Willard Scott, Stephen Scott, Frederick Stolp, A. S. Jones, L. Ellsworth, R. N. Murray, S. M. Skinner, Hiram and Harry Fowler, the Kimball brothers (4) and E. G. Wright.
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| John Warne |
Wayne: John Laughlin, Solomon Dunham, Captain W. Hammond, Israel Guild, Robert Benjamin, Ezra Gilbert, J. V. King, W. Farnsworth, James Davis, Joseph McMillen, Isaac Nash, Daniel Dunham and Ira Albro.
Winfield: The Garys (Erastus, Jude P., Charles Wesley and Orinda), the Daniel Warren family including Colonel J. M. Warren, M. Griswold, J. S. P. Lord, A. Churchill, John Warne, Alvah Fowler, Ira Herrick and Ezra Galusha.
York: Elisha Fish, Henry Reader, Luther Morton,
Benjamin Fuller, Nicholas Torode, John Talmadge, Jesse Atwater, Edward Eldridge, David
Talmadge, Jacob Fuller, David Thurston, Sheldon Peck, Winslow Churchill, Zerais Cobb, John
Glos, and John Bohlander.