The Civil War ended in April of 1865. Within a week the nation, and particularly the people of Illinois, were shocked by the death of Abraham Lincoln at the hands of an assassin in Ford’s Theater at Washington.
The Lincoln funeral train stopped in Chicago en route to Springfield long enough for the body of the fallen president to be carried down Michigan Avenue to the Court House for special memorial services. More than thirty-five thousand persons followed the casket. A man prominent in DuPage County, Roselle Hough, whose first name would soon become the name of the town, Roselle, at the county’s northern edge, was grand marshal of the Lincoln funeral parade.
As soon
as the shock of the Lincoln tragedy dropped away and the soldiers were back from the war,
DuPage citizens again turned their attention to moving the county seat from Naperville to
Wheaton in the center of the county. The proposition had been beaten two to one in the
1857 referendum.
County seat changes took place frequently in the period of rapidly changing county boundaries before the Civil War. Whiteside County in northwestern Illinois changed its county seat five times between 1839, the year DuPage County was established, and 1858. Alexander and Bond Counties in the southern part of the state had changed county seats four times. The rash of changes had caused the Illinois General Assembly to pass a law that there could be held a referendum to change the county seat but once every ten years. The year, 1867, would be the next time that a referendum could be held in DuPage County for a change of county seat.
The first step was to get the General Assembly to approve a call for a referendum. Again it was Warren L. Wheaton, one of the founders of Wheaton, and H. C. Childs, Wheaton newspaper publisher and at the time a member of the General Assembly representing DuPage County, who were instrumental in securing the permission of the legislature to hold a referendum in 1867.
The holding of the referendum resulted in violence that claimed at least one life. In all of the changes of county seats in Illinois, this one in DuPage in 1867 was the only one that resulted in rioting and violence. Curiously the disturbances took place in Wheaton. In 1937 Edward E. Vallette of Wheaton, who as a boy was a witness to the rioting in Wheaton, recorded his first-hand recollections of what took place.
The violence occurred at the Wheaton railroad station. Vallette reported that he saw the man who throw a rock which killed Marriot Mott.
The rioting had begun near the Wheaton railroad station and Stark’s Saloon where Vallette reported that a group of men from Naperville, armed with assorted weapons, had gathered. Vallette and Valentine Kuhn Sr., were in a position to see the events. When one man began swinging a club, Kuhn knocked him out. Another rioter hid behind a railroad boxcar. He would move out just long enough to shoot his gun and then duck back. One man had his hand shot in the attack.
Vallette reported that Wheaton men had weapons stashed away in the Wheaton Hotel and were prepared for trouble with the Naperville men. There had been some violence during the voting to change the county seat ten years before, and this time the Wheaton residents were determined that there would be no interference in the voting.
On June 8, 1867, the proposition to change the county seat to Wheaton carried by a narrow margin of 1686 to 1635.
The election won, Wheaton residents needed to construct the new courthouse in compliance with the state law. Warren Wheaton donated a square block of land from his farm as the site for the new complex. Wheaton residents, including the Wheaton brothers and Erastus Gary, donated funds to construct the brick building which stood in the center of the square, still the location for the DuPage County Courthouse today (Reber Street and Liberty Drive).
When the courthouse was completed and ready for occupancy, the Naperville residents and elected officials refused to give up the records until a suit had been settled in the courts of Cook County on the validity of the county seat switch. The case was still pending in the Chicago courts at the time of the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 when many of the county’s records burned. In a preliminary ruling, the courts had advised Naperville residents and the elected officials to move the records to Wheaton. Naperville ignored the court’s advice.
The older residents of Central DuPage County and their sons or nephews joined forces to plot to obtain the records from the Naperville courthouse since they had completed the new Wheaton courthouse. They had even planted rows of trees around the barren courthouse square.
Many of the young men had recently returned from the Civil War. They had learned the techniques of war as well as how to move through the countryside on patrol without being seen or heard.
The men met several times to discuss the best approach to take the records so the new courthouse could be opened. They decided to travel by night to avoid detection and strike while most of the town slept.
Men were posted to ride as guards, advance scouts and to drive their teams and wagons at breakneck speed through the countryside and back roads to avoid detection. Still others were alerted to their duties within the offices of the old courthouse. This required the inside assistance of at least one county employee who would leave a door or window unlocked.
Most of the elected officials were on guard for they knew the Wheaton area residents would find some means of taking the records. Naperville residents had their own signals and systems ready to alert the town in case of trouble.
There was one base which the Wheaton area men did not cover. It was that one of the church bells in town might be used as a signal to the town that something was happening at the courthouse. Men had been assigned to cover the homes of elected officials to prevent them from leaving their homes or giving the signal. However, Judge Hiram Cody reportedly was able to leave his home and sound the alarm.
The men who were loading the books and records from the desks and bookshelves of the courthouse had to rush with their task. With the wagons loaded and the hour of daylight drawing closer, the men driving the teams hurried as fast as they could to reach Milton Township. In the process of fleeing the courthouse site, several record books were dropped on the roadway but the raiders did not stop to pick them up. They were later recovered and, like the court records, deposited in Chicago for safekeeping where they burned.
The county records were delivered to the Wheaton courthouse and deposited in the respective offices. The jail was in the basement of the two-story courthouse. The first reported meeting of the DuPage County board of supervisors at Wheaton Courthouse took place July 22, 1868.
History does not record for posterity the names of the men who participated in the famous raid on the Naperville Courthouse in 1868. This has brought much speculation over the years. Those who were living at the time passed on only a few of the memories, bits and pieces of the night raid which was recalled by descendants of those who participated in the raid.
Among the persons who probably were among the raiders were Marcellus Jones, Jesse Wheaton, James Wheaton, Anning S. Ransom, Dr. Frederick Hagemann, Thomas Watkins, A. S. Janes and Amos Churchill.
The county seat has remained unchanged in the past one hundred thirteen years. The original Wheaton Courthouse was taken down in 1896 and the present impressive red stone structure erected the following year. A separate jail and sheriffs residence was constructed in 1897. As the county and its business began to grow in the years just prior to World War II, the county made plans for a new courthouse. It was to have been seven stories high and constructed on the same block of land which is the site for the first two Wheaton Courthouse. However, the financial problems and the war intervened to stop any progress on the new building.
The county constructed a gray stone building which for a number of years housed the offices for the county board. An addition to the 1897 courthouse and a new jail were completed in 1959. In addition, the county had constructed a recorder’s office building which now houses a part of the court system. It acquired two other buildings in the block to the south of the present courthouse.
In 1970, the new DuPage Center administration building on County Farm Road near Manchester Road was constructed. The county health department has a new facility on the same block of land. Construction work on a new county jail to house three hundred ten inmates also is underway.
To the east of the DuPage Center complex lies the large county fairgrounds and its buildings. On the west side of County Farm Road is located the DuPage Convalescent Center, a modem nursing home for the disabled and the elderly of the county. Also, the DuPage County Highway Department, DuPage County Youth Home and the DuPage County Emergency Center are located on the site next to the county home.