DuPage County exists today largely because of the statesmanship and political ability of Captain Joseph Naper.
Captain Naper had founded Naperville in 1831 after a career in shipping on the Great Lakes that included being a captain of ships plying the Great Lakes and even building and owning ships. As a boy at Ashtabula, Ohio, a port town on Lake Erie east of Cleveland, Naper helped his father who was a builder of lake-going ships.
The creation of DuPage County was accomplished in a two year period that began early in 1837 and ended February 9, 1839 when with an assist from young Abraham Lincoln, age thirty, the Illinois General Assembly, meeting in Vandalia then the state capital, approved Captain Naper’s bill establishing the new county. The new county was formed from the nine southwestern townships of Cook County. It was one of 15 established in 1839.
The compelling reason for Captain Naper’s drive to create a new county was simple enough. County government was very important to the early settlers. Ownership of the land for their farms and their homes was not official until the legal description of the property was filed at the courthouse in the county seat.
The Cook County courthouse, then as now, was located in Chicago. There were no railroads, and by stagecoach three days were required to travel the nearly thirty miles from Naperville to Chicago, one day to transact business at the county seat ... and one day to return to Naperville. Even on horseback two days were needed to go to the courthouse in Chicago. Naper had been elected a Cook County commissioner who helped lay out official roads in 1834.
The establishment of DuPage County was brought about amid great political controversy and confusion. Cook County officials recognized the merit of creating a new county from western Cook County townships. A number of plans were advanced, but the one which seemed to have the most support was for the creation of a new county in northwest Cook County, a county that would include Wayne, Bloomingdale and Addison Townships, now the northern townships of DuPage County, and the present six northwest townships in Cook County ... Elk Grove, Schaumburg, Hanover, Wheeling, Palatine and Barrington. This would have been a nine-township county just as DuPage County came to be.
Captain Naper’s challenge was to head off this plan in the Illinois General Assembly and instead get approval for the creation of a new nine-township county in southwestern Cook County. Without the help of Cook County officials, it was not an easy task.
That the Naper achievement was historic is home out by what has happened since DuPage County was established in the six northwest townships that were forced to remain in Cook County. There have been efforts from time to time to place these townships in a new county.
A determined move was organized in 1976 to form a new county from the six northwest Cook County Townships. With the backing of the region’s representatives in the General Assembly, an effort was made to secure a large number of citizen signatures to petitions authorizing a referendum on the question of forming a new county. The task proved to be too great to be accomplished. The basic reason for seeking to form a new county was the same in 1976 as it had been in 1839. Even with the fast rail and highway transportation that now exists, the distance to the courthouse in Chicago remains a burden.
One of the interesting developments in the General Assembly consideration of the new county in 1839 was that the name for the new unit of government was never in question. The DuPage name was already so well accepted for the area that there was no other suggestion. This came about because of the extensive fur trade in the area before 1800.
A French fur trader, whose name has not come down as a matter of written record but who was remembered as DuPazhe, was an agent for the American Fur Company whose offices were in St. Louis. His territory was the area drained by what is today known as the DuPage River and its East DuPage and West DuPage branches. He had a corps of hunters from whom he bought furs. His camp and headquarters were located between the point where the two branches come together and the mouth of the DuPage River where it flows into the Des Plaines River south of Joliet.
The historian, Rufus Blanchard, whose history of DuPage County was published in 1882, reports on conversations he had with persons who had known of the French agent for the St. Louis fur company. He reported in his book published only forty years after DuPage County was established:
"The DuPage River had, from time immemorial been a stream well known. It took its name from a French trader who settled on the stream below the fork previous to 1800. Hon. H. W. Blodgett of Waukegan informs the writer (Blanchard) that J. B. Beaubien had often spoken to him of the old Frenchman, DuPage, whose station was on the bank of the river down toward its mouth and stated that the river took its name from him ...
"Col. Gurdon S. Hubbard, who came into the country in 1818, informs the writer that the name DuPage, as applied to the river then, was universally known, but the trader for whom it was named lived there before he came.
"Mr. Beaubien says it is pronounced DuPazhe (‘a" having the sound of ah, and that the P should be a capital)".
The guidelines for organizing DuPage County were established in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. This document, approved by the Congress of the Confederation, set down the methods to implement the Land Ordinance of 1785.
These are the historic documents that mandated the way in which territories, states and local governments would be organized in what we now know as Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin ... the Northwest Territory. The land in this rich area had been turned over to the federal government in 1781 by the states who had originally held charters entitling them to land from "sea to sea" and later modified so the claims ended at the Mississippi River on the west.
There were many remarkable provisions written into the ordinance. The Northwest Territory would be divided into townships, each six miles square. The townships would be divided into thirty-six sections of one-square mile each and containing six hundred forty acres. This method of land measurement is still used today in Illinois, DuPage County and most of the old Northwest Territory.
Another stipulation of great importance provided that the sixteenth section of every township be donated for the benefit of public school education. References today to "school lands" which some school districts own trace their origin to the sixteenth section provision in the Northwest Ordinance.
Set down were the steps to be taken in forming of new territories and new states. When a territory achieved a population of sixty thousand persons, it would apply for statehood and be admitted to the Union on the state basis as the original thirteen colonies.
The most sweeping provision of the Northwest Ordinance declared that in the territories and states to be formed in the Northwest Territory there would be no owning of slaves. This explains why the Northwest Territory states, and the Midwest generally, were not slave-holding states.
In 1800, Illinois was a part of the Indian Territory and still primarily a land inhabited in the northern section by Indians. In 1809 the Illinois Territory was formed. By 1818, adventurers, hunters and settlers largely in southern Illinois numbered sixty thousand and the state was admitted to the Union.
During the next few years, growth continued in the southern section of the state. A few people resided in northern Illinois near Fort Dearborn, a small Army post, which protected the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan.
Then in 1825 an entirely new system of transportation became available when New York State opened the Erie Canal, making the farm lands of northern Illinois available to the New Englanders, residents of New York and Pennsylvania and overseas immigrants.
As the state began to grow rapidly in its northern sections, as a result of the opening of the Erie Canal and the building of the railroads, it quickly became evident that new boundaries for the counties would be needed. Crawford County for example, extended from east central Illinois two hundred miles north to Fort Dearborn on Lake Michigan. Cook County was a large area that included the entire eastern section of Northern Illinois.
The principal factor that made it necessary to form new and smaller counties was the need to provide settlers with easy access to the county seat and county government. Soon it became accepted that even the most distant residents from the county seat should be able to ride horseback from home to the courthouse and back in one day.
One of the first acts of the State of Illinois, when it was admitted to statehood in 1818 as the twenty-first state in the Union, was to pass legislation to provide guidelines for the creation of new counties.
The enabling act provided that, once the General Assembly had approved the creation of a new county, there should be the appointment of three commissioners to conduct an election to choose a site for a place for court to be held. Originally, the two buildings required at a county seat were a place to hold court (the courthouse) and a hotel or boarding house where those doing business with the court might stay.
Since the county seat was to be centrally located, it often was located in an area where there was little development, sometimes on an open prairie. In addition, the General Assembly required that the land for the courthouse be donated.
As a result of the state having provided the guidelines, the forming of new counties began with a rush. The year following statehood there were four new and smaller counties created. In 1821 there were seven, four in 1823, three in 1824, ten in 1825, two in 1826, four in 1827, two in 1829, two in 1830 and five in 1831, including Cook County.
In the next eight years, to 1839, Cook County with the county seat in Chicago was divided and re-divided into four counties. In 1836, the portion of Will County which was in Cook County combined with a portion of Iroquois County to form a new county government. The county seat was located at Juliet, a name that was later changed to Joliet.
The other county to be formed in 1836 was McHenry County which drew a portion of land from Cook County and the balance from LaSalle County. The county seat was Centerville which today is Woodstock and still the county seat.
In 1839, Lake County was formed from a portion of McHenry County with its first county seat being Libertyville. Later, the county seat was moved to Little Fort now Waukegan, still the seat of Lake County government.
It was also in the year of 1839 that DuPage County was formed from Cook County. Within a span of eight years, Cook County had been divided into portions of two counties (Will and McHenry) and two other counties had been formed within the 1831 boundaries (DuPage and Lake).
From the time Naperville was founded, the town in what is now DuPage County, the settlers were concerned about the lack of government services that for the most part were centered at the county seat in Chicago, a community of only a few hundred residents. Each year the handicap of being so far removed from the county seat was more apparent, and by 1835 the increasing number of settlers on the West DuPage River were talking about finding a solution.
In 1836 the West DuPage River settlers established a cooperative, the Big Woods Claim Protecting Society to check on the land claims. This was the earliest form of local government in what is now DuPage County. Among the prominent early settlers and founders were: John Warne, Julius Warren, Frederick Stolp, Joseph Fish, William Strong, Alfred Churchill, Levi Ward, A. E. Carpenter, James Hatch, Russell Whipple, Jesse B. Ketchum and Taylor Warne.
Captain Naper and Col. Julius M. Warren of the Warrenville community, located further north on the West DuPage River, had established important business connections in Chicago. Warren had a hotel which became the early business and social center of the entire area. Prominent citizens of Chicago were often guests at the hotel. The business and social relations between leaders in Chicago and on the DuPage River proved to be fortunate.
There were immediate benefits from these business acquaintances and friendships between people in Chicago and Naperville and Warrenville. Captain Naper decided to run for the General Assembly from Cook County in 1836. There was no formidable opposition. The legislature held but one regular session in its two-year term. In February, 1837, Captain Naper took the stagecoach to Vandalia in the southern part of the state which at that time was the state capital.
This was a remarkable General Assembly session. This was the first trip to the legislature for two young men who would twenty years later be nationally important. They were Abraham Lincoln, 27, and Stephen A. Douglas, 23. They were seated side by side in that first Assembly in which Captain Naper took part.
Naper devoted most of his time in Vandalia that winter getting acquainted with the leaders in the state legislature. Naper who was thirty-nine impressed the other members of the Assembly as being friendly, intelligent and statesmanlike in his judgments. He began building friendships with three of the most important members. One was John Harker of Union County, a long-time leader in southern Illinois politics. Another representative was Peter Cartwright, the storied circuit riding Methodist evangelist who was undoubtedly the best known man in Illinois.
Another was the newcomer, Lincoln, who like Naper came to the legislature with something definite in mind. He and a number of tall members of the legislature who became known as the "Long Nine" wanted the state capital moved north to Springfield, Sangamon County, then the most populous county in the state. They would get the legislature to authorize the clearing of the way for this decisive change during this same period that Captain Naper was laying the groundwork for the creation of DuPage County.
Meanwhile Cook County officials and others were seeking to canvass public opinion on the matter of creating another county in the distant parts of Cook County. Some had already been incorporated into McHenry and Will Counties that year. On December 3, 1836, a meeting was called in Chicago for the purpose of endorsing a plan for the formation of a new county from remote Cook Townships.
J. Filkins, a large landowner in Wheeling in the northern part of Cook County, was advocating the formation of a new county in northwest Cook that has already been described. There were other plans being advanced too.
There was appointed a steering committee of three to consider the various plans and make recommendations at the December 3 meeting. One of the members represented Naperville and the West DuPage River settlers; a second represented the settlers in the southeastern section of the county and the third would be from Chicago. A date was set for the steering group to meet. Naperville sent its representative but for reasons never explained, the others did not come.
As a result there was no committee recommendation to present at the December 3 meeting. There were speeches for a number of plans, but most of the speakers granted the floor urged that there be no more new counties formed from townships in Cook County. The resolution sent to the General Assembly urged that there be no further creation of new counties involving Cook County Townships.
At the meeting of the legislature that began soon after the start of the new year, Naper who represented Cook County in the General Assembly was able to turn the Chicago meeting resolution aside and quietly advocate the creation of a new county from townships in southwest Cook County.
Captain Naper was elected again in 1838, and the legislative session began soon after the first of the year in 1839. By this time he had cemented his relations with the legislative leaders. Abraham Lincoln had been placed on the Assembly’s committee to consider the formation of new counties. This committee shelved the efforts to create a new county in other areas of Cook and recommended Naper’s bill which was passed with little opposition early in the session.
There were two phases to the plan for the new DuPage County. One provided, if the residents approved, for the northern half of DuPage and Wheatland Townships in Will County and the six southwestern townships in Cook to be fused into the new county. If the Will County residents declined, which they did by one vote in a referendum held the following August, then the nine southwestern townships in Cook could constitute the new county. In either case Naperville would be the county seat once it met the requirements in the enabling act.
The defeat of the issue removed the confluence of the East and West branches of the DuPage River and relatives of early pioneers from the new DuPage County. The voter rejection also accounts for the irregular lines of southwest DuPage County which contains a fraction more than nine full townships.
The three commissioners who were named to oversee the election of county officers were Ralph Woodruff of LaSalle County, Seth Reed of Kane County and H. G. Loomis of Cook County. Bailey Hobson of Naperville was appointed land commissioner to obtain a preemption for the quarter section of land on which the county’s first courthouse was built. Naperville citizens donated five thousand dollars for a new brick courthouse. The enabling legislation required three acres of land and at least three thousand dollars.
The first county officials, most of them from Naperville, were elected the first Monday in May, 1839. They were Daniel M. Green, sheriff; S. M. Skinner, recorder; Clark A. Lewis, Warrenville and J. W. Walker, probate judges; M. Sleight, treasurer; L. Meacham, surveyor; H. L. Peaslee, coroner; and Josiah Strong, H. L. Cobb and T. P. Whipple, commissioners.
Judges for the first county election were S. M. Skinner, Stephen J. Scott and L. G. Butler.
Captain Naper had been to the Assembly for two terms. He had achieved his primary goal, the formation of DuPage County. He did not go back to the legislature in 1840. He would return for another term in 1852.