The Great Chicago Fire had a stimulating impact on DuPage County. Thousands of families were homeless. Many times all trace of their former homes had disappeared in the holocaust. Making matters even worse, the dry weather continued and smoke hung low over the city for weeks as many small fires continued to bum.
As a result many of these Chicago families, faced with having to start over, decided to establish a new home in the suburbs. DuPage County with two railroads and good passenger service into and from the city was an especially attractive area in which these displaced families could locate. The newcomers found the people of DuPage generally friendly and interested in their homes, church and schools.
The fire gave the first major thrust to the practice of living in the suburbs and going daily to work in the city. Before the Chicago fire a few professional people maintained offices in the city, but after the fire an increasing number of office workers lived in DuPage County and daily took the trains to their jobs in the rebuilt city.
Although the migration from Chicago after the fire stimulated the growth of communities along both railroads, it was along the recently opened Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroad that the greatest development took place. Two new towns were established along this railroad within months after the Chicago fire. They were chartered in 1873. One was Downers Grove and the other Hinsdale. Downers Grove had been one of the early communities in the county, but had not advanced to the point of establishing a municipal government. The situation was somewhat the same with Hinsdale which absorbed the older community of Fullersburg.
The national panic of 1873 was felt in DuPage County. Banking services were swept away and new banking houses had to be established. Wheaton provided an example. Wheaton’s banking service, linked to a Chicago bank that became a casualty of the 1873 panic, was disrupted. In 1874 young Elbert H. Gary, son of Erastus and Susan Gary, and his uncle, Jesse Wheaton, organized a new bank known as the Banking House of Gary and Wheaton. The bank has operated continuously since, now known as the Gary-Wheaton Bank, and is the oldest continuous banking service in DuPage County.
Despite the Panic of 1873 DuPage County acquired its third major railroad in that year. The Chicago Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad built an extension across northern DuPage from Chicago to Elgin. Soon there developed along the rail line a number of new towns ... Bensenville, Lester (now Wood Dale), Itasca, Roselle (for years a part of Bloomingdale), Ontarioville and Bartlett.
Twelve years later, in 1885, the Chicago and Great Western Railroad was built along the general route of the old wagon and stagecoach road from the Fox River to Chicago connecting West Chicago, Gretna (now Carol Stream), Glen Ellyn and other communities. The Illinois Central Railroad’s western line also passes through a portion of northern DuPage County. In 1900 the last railroad in DuPage County, a passenger service provided by the Chicago Aurora and Elgin Railroad, was built. An electric line, the C A & E connected communities in Kane, Kendall, McHenry, DuPage and western Cook County with Chicago.
From the first years of settlement in DuPage County, elementary education was made available, but even before the Civil War schools of higher education, especially for the training of teachers and ministers, began to develop. By 1871 DuPage County had developed into an important center for higher education. There were four colleges, three of them still operating within the county today.
Today DuPage County has five privately supported colleges offering a four-year liberal arts education and one tax supported junior college that serves the entire county. Two of the colleges trace their beginnings back to the Civil War years or before. The junior college, The College of DuPage of Glen Ellyn, was established by referendum in 1965. The junior college serves up to twenty thousand students a year and grants two-year degrees in a number of fields in both liberal arts and vocational subjects.
Best known, with a student body drawn from most of the states of the Union and from many foreign countries, is Wheaton College. The college had its beginning before the Civil War. The Illinois Institute opened for classes in 1853, its goal largely to train ministers. In 1860 the institute, its campus and principal building (now the center section of Blanchard Hall) was absorbed when Wheaton College was founded in 1860 by Jonathan Blanchard, one of the nation’s best known educators.
Despite extreme hardship during the Civil War years when its student body declined and was made up almost entirely of young women, the service of the new college remained continuous. The college is now in its one hundred and twenty-first year and is the oldest institution of higher learning in DuPage County and one of the oldest in Illinois.
Also in the Civil War years, the Teachers Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana, was moved to Addison in DuPage County. Teachers Seminary in Addison had sixty students, two professors and their families. This seminary became the center for a large complex of Lutheran welfare units which still claim Addison as their headquarters.
In 1914, the seminary was moved to River Forest where it became a part of Concordia Teachers College in the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church. In 1925 the old seminary buildings were taken down to make way for a new facility capable of housing two hundred and forty orphans.
The old orphanage building and the property at Lake Street and Army Trail Road was acquired in 1960 by the Village of Addison for use as today’s municipal government center.
Another of the outstanding liberal arts colleges in DuPage County, Elmhurst College of Elmhurst, had its beginning in the post-Civil War years. In 1871, the Melancthon Seminary was founded in Elmhurst. The seminary’s principal objective was to prepare high school students for theological study and also to train teachers for the schools operated in DuPage County and elsewhere by the German Evangelical churches.
In 1919 Melancthon became a junior college. Fifteen years later the institution was given the name, Elmhurst College, and was a four-year liberal arts college. The college is still affiliated with the United Church of Christ although only a small number of its students study in the theological school. A major new department has developed in recent years for the training of nurses.
The George Williams College in Downers Grove, widely known as a training school for workers in the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations, also offers a four year liberal arts degree. The college was founded at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in 1890. Later it moved to Chicago, and in 1966 opened on a new campus at Downers Grove.
The Illinois Benedictine College at Lisle was established in Chicago in 1885 as the Saint Procopius Abbey. The institution was moved to Lisle in DuPage County in 1901. In 1970 the name was changed to Illinois Benedictine College, recognized as a four-year liberal arts college as well as a Catholic religious training center.
North Central College of Naperville is another DuPage County liberal arts college with a distinguished record of more than a century of continuous service. Opened in 1861 as Plainfield College at nearby Plainfield in Will County, the college was founded by the Evangelical Association of Churches. In 1864 the name was changed to North Western College.
Concerned that Plainfield was not on a railroad, the trustees considered a number of sites, including South Bend, Indiana, and Hinsdale, Illinois, before deciding to relocate the college in Naperville. The decision to move was made in the spring of 1870 and classes were first held in Naperville that fall. In 1926 the name of the college was changed to North Central College to avoid confusion with the larger and better known Methodist school, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
The college is in 1981 celebrating its one hundred and twentieth year of continuous service, one hundred and eleven years in Naperville and nine years in Plainfield.