available in the state in that year.
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| An 1854 map of the Galena and Chicago
Union Railway indicates the service available in the state in that year. |
The first twenty-five years were exciting times in DuPage County, the years when much of the shape of today’s DuPage County emerged. This was the period from the county’s establishment until the end of the Civil War in 1865.
The first excitement came in the spring and summer of 1839 and was the time when Naperville was officially made the county seat. The first officers of the new county were elected; the first judges seated. Gradually the settlers became aware that they no longer needed to make the long trip to Chicago to handle their county business.
This was the period when the first important change in transportation in two thousand years came to DuPage County ... the building of the first railroad. Two other railroads would be built across DuPage County soon after the close of the Civil War.
At the time DuPage County was organized in the
spring and summer of 1839, the transporting of news and humans could be no faster than a
horse could run. This has been the case since the Romans adapted the horse to the needs of
faster transportation. Before that news traveled only as fast as a man could run. The news
of the decisive Battle of Marathon was brought to Athens (approximately twenty-five miles)
by the Runner Pheidippides who dropped dead after giving his report, the Greeks having not
yet learned to use the horse for transport.
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| Stacy's Tavern. Built as an inn for
travelers along the St. Charles Road route to and from Chicago in 1846, the building has been restored. It is on the National Register of Historic Places. |
However, the people of DuPage did not wait for the railroad to come. There was built a plank road across DuPage County from Aurora to Chicago along approximately the same route followed by the C. B. & Q. Railroad. There is today a highway from Naperville east along the railroad with the name, "Plank Road," evidence of the lengths gone to in the 1840s, before the railroad, to secure a more dependable means of transport.
Better transport was but one of the many developments which made the county’s first twenty-five years so important. The good open land in the county was largely taken by the end of the Civil War.
During this period DuPage County citizens first realized that it was to be their lot, and a fact of life for all those who followed them, that they would live in the shadow of one of the great cities of the world ... Chicago.
By the time it had been settled fifteen years, DuPage County was involved in its second war. It was the Mexican American War (1846-48) which was fought over territorial disputes, properties taken by the Mexicans from 1820-25 and boundaries between the two countries. Mexico had refused to recognize the independence of the Texas territory in 1836 and had disputed its boundary with Mexico.
The United States claimed the border with Mexico was at the Rio Grande River which today is the general western and southern boundary between the two countries.
Among the men from DuPage County who served in the Mexican War were Joseph Naper, a captain in the Blackhawk War of 1832, and Captain E. B. Bill, commander of the DuPage County contingent of soldiers. Naper served in the Quartermaster Corps as an aide to General Zachary Taylor. In 1848, people of the United States elected General Taylor as president of our country. He died in office in 1850.
Captain Bill had been promoted to the rank of general before the war concluded. He died of yellow fever while on his way home to Naperville at the end of the war in 1848. Captain Naper returned to continue serving his county and community until his death in 1862.
Dwarfing all other developments between 1839 and 1865 was the rising tide of sentiment in DuPage against the institution of slavery in the United States. Opposition to slavery was a factor in DuPage County taking a leading role in the formation of the new Republican Party. The Underground Railroad flourished in DuPage County as it had few other places in the entire nation.
As was the case with the rest of the nation, this citizen fervor came to a climax in the Civil War in which two Illinois citizens, Abraham Lincoln of Springfield and Ulysses S. Grant of Galena, emerged as the two most prominent leaders in the preservation of the Union. The chilling lists of dead and wounded posted at telegraph stations were scanned with as much fear in DuPage County as elsewhere.
Excitement over the coming of the railroad was especially high in DuPage County since many of the settlers, those who traveled the Erie Canal, had seen and perhaps used the short railroad linking Albany on the Hudson with Schenectady on the canal. Many settlers, sure that there would be in the future a railroad across DuPage, attempted to guess the route and locate their farms near it.
The State of Illinois chartered the proposed Galena and Chicago Union Railway in 1836 but due to the severe financial problems of the Panic of 1837 little was done about the great new transportation system. In 1845, Elisha Townsend of New York and Thomas Mather of Springfield bought out the franchise and began new plans for the railroad.
The group met in Rockford where one of the prominent Chicago area residents and its mayor, William B. Ogden, met with several others including Thomas Drummond, then of Galena and later a resident of Winfield and Wheaton, to sell capital stock so construction might begin.
Ogden was named president in 1846 and construction on the road began. By 1848 the Galena and Chicago Union extended west from downtown Chicago to Maywood and the Des Plaines River. A sign of great things to come, a train car load of wheat, produced on farms in central Cook County, was hauled into Chicago that fall.
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| John B. Turner |
Ogden and his staff, by now including John B. Turner of New York, negotiated with area farmers and property owners for railroad right-of-way. The road was extended into DuPage County and intended to follow the well established wagon and stage road directly west past Stacy’s Tavern in what is now Glen Ellyn and on through Gretna to the Fox River. At this point a number of large land owners in Milton Township met with Ogden and offered him land for the railroad right-of way if he would bend the route south so that it would pass through their land. Among the men who gave land for the right-of-way in the central portion of the county were Warren and Jesse Wheaton and Erastus Gary and Dr. L. Q. Newton. This gave the railroad a path which took it farther south than the small communities which dotted the wagon trail which quickly became virtual ghost towns, among these were Stacy’s Tavern and Gretna.
John Turner and his partner purchased a considerable amount of land for the railroad, its station and yards at Junction, a small community on the West DuPage River at a point where West Chicago is today. When the Aurora Branch Railroad, a twelve-mile stretch of road, connected with the Galena and Chicago Union at Junction, it began the largest rail switching yards in Illinois west of Chicago. Mergers and acquisitions around the Aurora Branch eventually resulted in the formation of the Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroad serving Illinois and points west.
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| One of the early locomotives on the
Galena and Chicago Union Railway was named for John B. Turner. |
The Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroad began serving communities along the southern tier of the county in the 1860s while the Chicago Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad began operations through the northern sector of the county in 1873. It would be 1885 before the Chicago and Great Western Railway would put a rail line through the north central DuPage area. By this time, however, the basic pattern of community life in DuPage County had been established.
Wheaton and Danby (now Glen Ellyn), the center geographically of the nine townships in DuPage County, drew many prominent professional leaders to their new communities. They were attracted by the facilities which were being constructed there as well as by the railroad system which made them easily accessible to the City of Chicago.
Among these people were men who had been politically involved in their homes in the east or who had gained their political skills and thoughts from life overseas, particularly the Germans. Abolitionists, disgruntled members of other political parties and a number of their German-born neighbors gathered in Wheaton on August 1, 1854, and declared their desires to establish the new Republican Party in this county.
Among the men who were actively involved in this formation was Francis Hoffman of Elmhurst. Within two years, he would be elected to the post of lieutenant governor of the State of Illinois. However, since he had been born in Germany and had not had sufficient time to file his papers for naturalization, he could not serve the term.
A new Illinois constitution adopted in 1848 permitted the use of the township government in the state. This was a form of government with which the New Englanders in the county were familiar. The new system gave them a form of local government since municipalities could only be incorporated by action of the Illinois General Assembly.
These township meetings usually began at 9 a.m. Business included oversight of the township schools, roads, weeds, aid to the poor, taxing and tax collections as well as laws regulating public safety and public welfare.
With the formation of the new political party in the county, the new township governments and the railroad which made the central portion of the county readily accessible, the cries for relocating the county seat to the Wheaton-Danby area grew louder.
Each time an effort was made to switch a county seat, legislation was required from the Illinois General Assembly. A referendum was approved for DuPage County in 1857. When the vote was tallied, it was 1,542-762 against switching the county seat from Naperville to Wheaton.
There had been a new development in the county, arising from the strong anti-slavery feeling, in the latter half of the 1850s. This was the aid which was provided to runaway slaves from the South who had been promised they would be free men and free women if they reached Canadian soil. Queen Victoria had agreed to grant them asylum.
With the many abolitionists who made their homes in DuPage County, there were numerous stops on the Underground Railway. (Not really a railroad but rather a system by which the runaway slaves could find refuge as they slowly made their way north from the southern states to Chicago where they boarded boats headed for Canada.) Among those nationally who assisted the runaway slaves were John Jones, John Brown, Frederick Douglass and Alan Pinkerton, later to become head of the U. S. Secret Service.
It was a criminal offense for the abolitionists to help the slaves to escape with severe penalties provided if they were apprehended offering assistance or harboring the runaways. Most of the movement was at night. If they traveled by day, the runaway slaves were always well hidden in the bottom of a wagon filled with hay, grain or some other product.
The runaways would be hidden in secret or small rooms in the basements usually in private homes. In Blanchard Hall on the Wheaton College campus slaves were said to be hidden on the upper floors.
Among some of the homes where the runaway slaves were known to have found assistance and food as well as accommodations for a brief period of time where those of Israel Blodgett, Joshua French, Elias C. Guild’s home in Wayne, Thomas Filer in Danby, Pierce Downer in Downers Grove, Lucius Matlack in Wheaton, and the Lombard residence of Sheldon Peck. Graue Mill at Fullersburg was another stop on the Underground Railway.
Thomas Bryan of Elmhurst had a special role in the Civil War with one of the units of the Illinois troops being named Bryan’s Blues. Bryan served as the U. S. sanitary commissioner in the war. Another DuPage resident who was a prominent member of the Union Army in this war (1861-65) was General Benjamin Sweet of Lombard who was the commandant of Camp Douglas in Chicago. Named for the former United States senator from Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas, the camp housed Confederate prisoners of war.
Units were formed throughout the county with the sons of the original settlers serving on battlefields with honor. Among those who served was Wells Blodgett, son of Israel Blodgett who had been a blacksmith in the regular Army before moving to Illinois. Wells Blodgett was the only DuPage veteran in the Civil War to be honored with the Congressional Medal of Honor. Still later, he would serve as the president of the Wabash Railroad in St. Louis, Missouri while his brother, Henry, served as a federal judge.
A man who would gain worldwide acclaim sometime after the war for his exploration of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River was John Wesley Powell of Wheaton. He had come to this area in the mid-1850s when his father became a member of the board of Illinois Institute.
Powell lost his right arm in combat in the war. A college professor, member of the original National Geographic Society and a member of the President’s cabinet in Washington, D.C., Powell left few writings because of his disablement.
The Civil War had united the residents of the county. The men returned from their military assignments with renewed determination to make their county a better place to live. The sons began assuming some of the major responsibilities from their fathers who had carved a county from the wilderness prairies of Northern Illinois.