(Ed's Note: some extracts from the Chicago Online Encyclopedia and others on Will County, Joliet, Manhattan and New Lenox. This area southwest of Chicago is a great example of large city sprawl. After the initial settlement in the first half of the 19th century, the area experienced it's first rapid expansion starting with the city of Joliet. As the township slowly developed around Joliet, the need for labor to support the railroads, and build roads and bridges brought a great influx of people, many of them immigrants from Ireland and Germany. As this effort continued, many elected to settle down and became farmers. As for Manhattan, a railroad deal in 1879 kicked of another rapid expansion in settlement and surrounding rural development. That is the subject of another page. New Lenox followed a similar pattern, but it's history is laid out here just to present the current urban expansion into Will County. Some source documentation reflects the Kestels using New Lenox for postal service in the late 1800s, but our story develops around Manhattan as the village comes online starting in the 1880s)
Less than two hundred years ago, the land that is now Will County was covered by prairie. Potawatomi farmed, trapped, and traversed the area, which was at the crossroads of their land trails and river routes. In the late seventeenth century, European fur traders also began to take advantage of the abundance of muskrat, beaver, and other creatures. Trade slowed substantially by the 1820s, as hunting and the enclosure and tilling of the soil depleted the fur supply.
While the fur trade waned, the population expanded. In 1826, Jesse Walker established the area's first permanent white settlement, Walker's Grove, near the present town of Plainfield. While Walker worked as a missionary to Potawatomi, most newcomers relied on agriculture, milling, and trade for their subsistence.
Responding to their expanding population and to the inconvenience of day-long trips to and from Chicago for legal transactions, settlers soon demanded separation from Cook County. On January 12, 1836, the state of Illinois responded to the residents' petition and formed the County of Will, combining parts of Cook and Iroquois Counties. The Illinois legislature named the county for Conrad Will, a member of the first nine general assemblies, who apparently never resided in the Will County area.
Later that year, the three commissioners of the Will County board held their first meeting in the county seat of Juliet (later Joliet). The commissioners divided the county into electoral, road, and school districts, appointed surveyors for the first county road, discussed the possibilities of canal construction, and fixed the price of tavern charges at twenty-five cents for a meal, twelve-and-a-half cents for lodging, and six-and-a-quarter cents for a drink.
Despite their legal separation from Cook County, residents of Will County maintained economic and social ties with their neighbors in Chicago. Even before 1834, when Joliet served as a stopping post on the first coach route running west from Chicago, travel paths linked the two regions. On July 4, 1836, less than a year after county formation, workers broke ground for the 96-mile-long Illinois & Michigan Canal between the Illinois and Chicago Rivers, initiating the final link in a continuous water route from the East to the Gulf of Mexico.
Even before the canal was opened in April 1848, laborers and developers flowed into Will County, especially the canal towns of Joliet and Lockport, hoping to profit from commercial activity along the waterway. Some even predicted that the canal would turn Joliet into the nation's center for livestock and grain exchange. When commercial traffic along the canal ceased in 1915 owing to competition from railroads and the deeper Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal (opened in 1900), Joliet continued to serve as the county's hub of settlement, commerce, and industry.
In the mid-nineteenth century, mining augmented the county's economy. In 1864, while drilling for water, William Henneberry unintentionally hit a rich vein of coal. Soon thereafter speculators arrived, and by the early 1880s coal mining had reached its peak in Will County, with seven companies operating mines, employing 2,180 men and producing 700,000 tons of coal annually.
Although coal mining began to ebb in the 1890s, limestone quarrying boomed. By the 1880s, Joliet had adopted the nickname Stone City, shipping tons of limestone to Chicago for use in the construction of the Water Tower and residences and businesses throughout the city.
In the early twentieth century, the economic base of the region again began to shift. Motivated by diminishing space for industry around Chicago and by the opening of the Sanitary Canal, manufacturers turned to Will County for development sites. In 1911, a Texaco oil refinery opened north of Lockport, followed by other refineries in Lemont and south of Joliet in the 1920s. During World War II, military production contributed to the further industrialization of areas within Will County. As the demand for labor increased, the number of residents soared. Between 1920 and 1930, the African American population in Will County more than doubled, and nearly doubled again by 1950 to reach 5,886.
Like many other industrial areas in the Rust Belt, Joliet suffered from changing economic conditions in the 1970s and 1980s. While the population of Joliet fell during these decades, areas like Lockport, Romeoville, and Joliet's suburbs expanded rapidly. As the county's population grew, the unincorporated area between Joliet and Chicago's southern contiguous suburbs continued to shrink. The transportation ties that had linked the town of Chicago with the communities of Will County—walking paths, wagon roads, canals, rail lines, and highways—now ran within a single, expanding metropolitan region.
Joliet is in Will County, 35 miles SW of the Loop. In 1673 Louis Joliet and Father Jacques Marquette paddled up the Des Plaines River and camped on a huge mound a few miles south of present-day Joliet. In 1833 following the Black Hawk War, Charles Reed built a cabin along the west side of the Des Plaines River. Across the river in 1834 James B. Campbell, treasurer of the canal commissioners, laid out the village of “Juliet,” a name local settlers had been using before his arrival.
The Juliet region was part of Cook County until 1836, when it became the county seat of the new Will County. Just before the depression of 1837, Juliet incorporated as a village, but to cut tax expenses, Juliet residents soon petitioned the state to rescind that incorporation.
In 1845 local residents changed the community's name from “Juliet” to “Joliet.” Joliet was reincorporated as a city in 1852. Soon, Joliet's transportation arteries included the Des Plaines River, a road that followed the Sauk Trail, the Illinois & Michigan Canal (1848), and the Rock Island Railroad (1852), which ran through the business district. Today Joliet is served by several railroads, as well as Interstate Highways 55 and 80, which intersect a few miles southwest of the city.
The quarrying of limestone, with a bluish-white tinge, earned Joliet the nickname “City of Stone.” The Illinois & Michigan Canal was both a consumer of stone in the building of locks, bridges, and aqueducts and, after its completion in 1848, an artery for shipping stone to regional customers.
In 1858 the state of Illinois located a new penitentiary in Joliet, in part because of the abundance of stone for prison walls and cell houses. The Chicago Fire of 1871 spurred demand for stone and by 1890, Joliet quarries were shipping over three thousand railroad carloads of stone per month to Chicago and other cities.
The “City of Steel” emerged with the construction of the Joliet mill in 1869. The Bessemer converters installed at the mill in the 1870s were among the earliest used in the United States. While canal construction drew Irish immigrants, the steel mill attracted thousands of southeastern Europeans. These new immigrants also found jobs on the railroad that serviced the steel mill, the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway.
The city's large labor force and its steel mill attracted other industries. Wire mills, coke plants, stove companies, horseshoe factories, brick companies, foundries, boiler and tank companies, machine manufacturers, can companies, bridge builders, plating factories, steel car shops, and many others established businesses in the Joliet area. Other Joliet industries have ranged from the production of greeting cards and calendars to the bottling of Seven-Up, from the manufacture of Hart, Schaffner & Marx clothing to the brewing of beer. Pianos, windmills, wallpaper and barrels have been manufactured in Joliet, as have building materials, oil and chemical products, and Caterpillar scrapers. Joliet also became home of Joliet Junior College, the nation's oldest public community college. Joliet's economy entered a period of decline in the late 1970s and by 1983 its unemployment rate stood at 26 percent.
During the 1990s, Joliet's economy rebounded. Millions of people visit Joliet's riverboat casinos and its new drag-racing and NASCAR tracks. The millions of dollars in new tax receipts have been used to revitalize the downtown City Center. Population leapt from 76,836 in 1990 to 106,221 in 2000.
this is an extract from the 1859 Will County Directory
This city now contains about eight thousand inhabitants. It is situated about forty miles south of Chicago, and due west of the extreme southern end of Lake Michigan. It is divided by the Des Plaines River and Illinois and Michigan Canal, the latter connecting the navigable waters of the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers with Lake Michigan, and is navigable for canal boats of one hundred and fifty tons burthen. Major James B. Campbell, Dr. Albert W. Bowen and Martin H. Demmond, were the owners and proprietors of different parts of the then new town, in the summer and fall of 1834. Major Campbell laid out that part of the city known as the original town of Joliet, lying between Chicago street and the river. Dr. Bowen laid out that part of the town known as East Joliet, lying between Chicago and Michigan streets, and in the spring of 1835, that part of the town lying east of Michigan Street, known as Bowen’s addition to Joliet. Mr. Demmond laid out that part of the town lying on the west side of the river, known as West Joliet, formerly Juliet. The town was originally designed to be called Joliet, but by an error in recording the plot it was changed to Juliet, by which name it was known and called for several years, until it was changed by an act of the Legislature. The town was named after M. Joliet, one of the original French pioneers that discovered and explored the country in the seventeenth century having passed from Lake Michigan down the Des Plaines River to the Illinois, and afterwards to the Mississippi River by way of the Illinois, in boats, establishing an Indian trading post where the present city of Peoria is located. Before the city of Joliet had been laid out, and during the war with the Sack and Fox Indians, a fort had been built on the west side of the river, as a protection to the inhabitants of the county from the fury of the savages. This fort was built upon the ground now occupied by the German Lutheran Church and the residence of H. N. Marsh, Esquire. Mount Joliet, a natural mound containing about thirty acres of land, three miles below the city, was named after the same person from whom the town received its name. The first settlers in the vicinity of Joliet were Captain Robert Stevens, who settled on his present farm one mile east of the town, in the year 1832; David Maggard, who lived about one mile north of Joliet on the west side of the river, before the Sack war, and Charles Reed, who built a house on the farm known as the "Campbell Place" before the town was laid out. James McKee built the first house in the town. It was a log house, and stood on the ground adjoining the National Hotel, in 1834.
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City of Joliet - 1862 |
James McKee, Richard Hobbs, Martin H. Demmond, George H. Woodruff, Dr. A. W. Bowen, James Bone, 0. W. Stillman, Richard L. Wilson, Charles L. Wilson, present proprietor of the "Chicago Journal", Abel Gilbert, Abijah Cagwin, Benjamin F. Barker, A. W. Borland, Charles Sayre, Edward Perkins, N. H. Cutler, Wm. C. Wilson, S. W. Bowen, Charles Clement, Daniel Clement, Archibald Crowl and Elisha Fellows, were among tire first residents of the village, and were all settlers in the rear 1833.
During the session of the Legislature held at Vandalia, in the winter of 1835-36, an act was passed erecting the county of Will from a portion of the county of Cook, and making Joliet the county seat. At the same session an act was passed providing for the construction of the Illinois and Michigan Carnal; an act of Congress having previously been passed granting to the State of Illinois each alternate section of land lying within six miles of the canal to aid in its construction. That portion of the canal lying within the limits of Joliet was afterwards located in the Des Flames River, and the work was commenced a year or two after; but owing to the financial embarrassments of the State, it was not completed until the year l846. The Chicago and Rock Island Railroad was commenced and completed through Joliet a year or two later. The entire population of Joliet in 1843 amounted to 1400, in 1850 to 2700, in 1855 to about 6,000, in 1857 to over 7,000, and in 1859 to between 8000 and 9,000.
CHURCHES
| There are ten Churches in the city, viz: |
Organized |
cost about |
| One Congregational |
1844 |
$6,000 |
| Two Catholic |
1842,1852 |
$12,000 |
| One Baptist, (old) |
1853 |
$600 |
| New one now building |
?? |
$8,000 |
| One German Lutheran |
1850 |
$4,100 |
| One Evangelical |
?? |
unknown |
| One Methodist, (brick) |
1834 |
$7,100 |
| One Universalist, (stone) |
1836 |
$25,000 |
| One Episcopal |
1838 |
$6,000 |
SCHOOLS
The free schools of Joliet afford facilities for giving all
classes a good English and classical education; two school houses having
been built by the city at a cost of about $25,000.
RAILROADS
STONE QUARRIES
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Joliet Township - 1862 - The 1860 census details George Kestel residing near Jones Laraway in section 36. He has no property value, so he may have been renting land. Along the northern section line numerous house symbols are present. Michael and Hanna Fuch live about three miles south in the town of Jackson, probably near the sight of present day Elwood on Route 53. |
Manhattan is in Will County, 37 miles SW of the Loop. Construction of the Illinois & Michigan Canal after 1836, the Illinois Central Railroad in 1851, and a railroad stop in 1879 drew laborers to Manhattan (especially Irish immigrants). In 1886, the village incorporated so that it could license saloons. The population of 1,117 in 1960 grew steadily to 3,330 in 2000.
New Lenox is located in Will County, 31 miles SW of the Loop. The village of New Lenox, like many of its neighboring communities, originated as a small agricultural settlement along the shores of Hickory Creek, a winding tributary of the Des Plaines River southwest of Chicago. For more than a century, Potawatomi and European traders and settlers had taken advantage of the waterway, and its surrounding groves and fertile lands, for food, transportation, and shelter. Farmers arrived in the 1830s after the federal government's forced expulsion of Potawatomi from the area.
In the 1850s, the Chicago & Rock Island Railroad (later the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific) began offering service from Chicago through New Lenox to La Salle. George Gaylord, a merchant and grain dealer from Lockport, laid out plans for a village at the site of the existing settlement along the rail line. Recognizing the importance of the railroad to the future of the community, residents named the village after the current superintendent of the Rock Island Railroad. Soon thereafter, however, the village adopted the name of the township—New Lenox—which in turn had been named after Lenox, New York, the native home of the first township supervisor, J. Van Dusen. With the railroad as a commercial conduit, residents of New Lenox developed a strong economy based upon agricultural production, a grain elevator owned by the railroad, wagon shops, mills, blacksmiths, a hotel, and a butter factory.
As late as the 1930s, New Lenox retained its identity as an agricultural settlement. Authors of the Federal Writers' Project Guide to 1930's Illinois (1939) described New Lenox as a “community of small farms, poultry yards, and kitchen gardens.” The guide also noted, however, the existence of small lots, owned by former urbanites who had moved out of the city and “back to the land.”
Despite this suburban development and the official incorporation of the village in 1946, New Lenox remained a small community, with a population in 1950 of 1,235 people, 17 of whom were classified by the census as “rural/farm” residents. Twenty years later, Interstate 80 had been completed with an interchange near New Lenox, easing transport between the village and the surrounding metropolitan area; the population had increased to nearly 3,000, with 16 residents classified as farmers or farm laborers.
During the last decades of the twentieth century, the village's population boomed, doubling during the 1980s to 9,627, and reaching 17,771 in 2000. Although unincorporated acres of farmland surrounded New Lenox, the community thrived not as an isolated village, but as a suburb within the Chicago metropolitan region that incorporated much of Will County.