Had the founders of Lawrence been blessed with vision rather than cursed with greed, this once-bustling McHenry County town might today have been home to a sprawling new Motorola complex.
Instead, Lawrence all but disappeared from the map, just another Illinois ghost town whose turn-of-the-century demise turned on the capricious course of rail lines. From its ashes was born a hub called Harvard, a city now poised to prosper again with the fortunes of a high-tech manufacturer.
The founders of Lawrence “had grand plans, but they got greedy and lost out,” said Nancy Fike, administrator at the McHenry County Historical Society Museum in Union. “By the turn of the century, Harvard was the biggest city in McHenry County, and Lawrence faded from time.”
Throughout the far-flung reaches of suburban Chicago, and especially in the undeveloped places of McHenry and Kane Counties, there are examples of these forgotten towns. Some burned brightly for a few decades, carving out a colorful niche in Illinois history before disappearing.
Others laid their groundwork carefully at growth’s crossroads, only to find their prosperity wither when progress took a detour. But whether the city was known for its riotous drinking or the solidity of its citizenry, a town’s success mainly relied on a link to the railroad. “These towns lived and died for those railroad stops,” Fike said.
In the ghostly spirit of Halloween, we revisit some northwest suburban and McHenry County towns that have faded from view:
Lawrence: Perhaps few towns had such a hand in their undoing as did Lawrence, which was located at Lawrence and Oak Grove Roads, near what is now Harvard. Its founder, Lawrence Bigsby, knew a town’s fortunes were linked to the rails. With an 1847 land grant, he built the first home and developed his village around a train stop along the Chicago & North Western line.
A post office made Lawrence official in 1856, and the town along Piscasaw Creek soon became home to a general store, blacksmith shop, hotel, tavern, grist mill and other businesses. Dozens of families settled in the area, which gave rise to the Lawrence Academy, one of the only brick schools during its time and considered one of the county’s best.
The railroad also saw promise in this bustling town, where carpenters stayed busy night and day constructing homes and businesses. They talked about making Lawrence the end of the line and building a roundhouse and maintenance shop around which railroad employees would live and work. Speculators started to gobble up land, hoping to cash in on the railroad’s plans.
But the speculation made Lawrence too pricey for the railroad owners, and they veered south 2 miles to an undeveloped hamlet where a visionary landowner named Elbridge Ayer told the railroad to take all the land they needed. Harvard, the town Ayer named for his hometown in Massachusetts, flourished almost as fast as Lawrence withered. On May 18, 1883, a cyclone swept through Lawrence and destroyed most of the buildings and homes. The post office pulled out on Valentine’s Day in 1903.
Today, Lawrence is little more than a memory and a shadow of its promise. At Lawrence and Oak Grove Roads, a tavern still bears the village name, The House of Lawrence. And some–the owner of a meat packing plant and a few residents scattered across this rural land–still call their hometown Lawrence. But the postmark stamps another truth: Harvard.
Henpeck: It’s not clear whether hungry chickens or a nagging wife gave this Kane County town its name. But whatever its origins, its history is steeped in corn whiskey.
In the 1830s, an enterprising man named Bill Seymour decided to capitalize on the stagecoach traffic that flowed past the junction of Route 20 and Big Timber Road, a crossroads for travelers heading from Chicago to Galena and Marengo to St. Charles.
The shady grove of trees was a natural resting place, coming at the crest of a hill that left travelers and horses alike weary. Seymour nailed a board across two posts and set up shop, offering fiery swigs from a jug of whiskey. He also sold oats and other grains for the horses, filling each bag to the brim so his hens could peck at the spilled feed. (Local legend also tells the story of a postmaster in the village who was driven away by a nagging wife, but most historians give more credence to this story of Seymour and his chickens for the town name.)
Seymour knew his market, and his humble enterprise soon sprouted into a freewheeling town with three saloons, a hotel, blacksmith shop, general store, grist mill and a few dozen homes.
“It was quite a town, a wide-open town known for fun, for gambling, for drinking and carousing,” said Bill Schmidt, a local historian and mayor of Henpeck’s successor, nearby Hampshire. “It was more of a tourist stop. Hundreds of wagons went through there every day from all directions.”
During the Civil War, Henpeck was home to more than 100 residents. For a spell, a gang of thieves called the Roughnecks roamed the town, Schmidt says. But this feisty frontier town lost its hold in the 1870s when the new Chicago & Pacific line veered southwest 3 miles.
Samuel Rowell, Henpeck’s resident sage and the owner of the general store, had seen the writing on the wall. When the railroad went south, Rowell followed–and took his store with him. Legend has it that he propped the building on logs and rolled it downhill with a team of oxen, Schmidt said.
There was talk of naming the new village Rinnville in honor of a Chicago land speculator and railroad investor named Jacob Rinn, but Rowell did a quick end run and petitioned to name the village after his home state of New Hampshire. The village of Hampshire was born in 1876, and Rowell became its first mayor.
Today, Hampshire carries on Henpeck’s tradition as a transportation crossroads, with a truck stop off Interstate Highway 90 that serves thousands of cars and trucks every day. Henpeck, in one way, has come full circle. The juncture is now a stand of trees, a cornfield and a country road with a fresh coat of asphalt.
Barreville: This burg owed its start to a criminal. And history would show it was built on a shaky foundation and quickly developed with little planning.
The “1885 McHenry County History” said Barreville was “never honored with a plat but was simply a collection of houses promiscuously built.” It was nestled along a stream in the southeast corner of the county, at Nish and Barreville Roads, between what is now Crystal Lake and McHenry. It was named in honor of Lord Barre of England.
Its first settler was merchant Thomas Combs, whose general store was open only a short time before he was arrested for torching his neighbor’s house. While Combs was in custody, he escaped to seek “more genial climes,” according to the McHenry County book. But his victim, Thomas Ferguson, would find prosperity and prominence in Barreville, building a grist mill in 1857 for the then princely sum of $6,000.
Homes and industry quickly followed, including two cheese factories, a pickle factory, a flour mill and a busy row of stores along the main intersection of Barreville and Nish Roads. The town also boasted a school, church and social hall. The spring-fed Stickney Run stream was dammed, creating a power source for the industry and a 70-acre lake for fishing, swimming and boating.
But the bustling town lost its juice when the railroad veered off in another direction in the late 1800s. Barreville lost its post office in 1902, but the name “lingered on through the decades from sheer sentiment, mixed with humor,” read one account. The town was swallowed up by what would become Prairie Grove, and all that’s left of Barreville is a street sign at Nish and Barreville Roads and a former post office.
Snarltown (later Franklinville): It was a blessing for the residents of this bustling village that the prominence of Franklin Stringer rather than George Albrow prevailed. But the blessing proved short-lived.
In 1835, Albrow became one of the first settlers of this section of McHenry County, at Franklinville and Garden Valley Roads in Seneca Township, between what is now Woodstock and Marengo.
As the “1885 McHenry County History” recounts, this New Yorker “brought with him, besides his family and household goods, a crabbed disposition, and a very disagreeable habit of snarling at everyone with whom he happened to have any controversy. He was called by his neighbors `Snarl Albrow’ and this name was afterward given to the little village that grew up around him.”
The town shed its unfortunate name a few years later and became Franklinville in 1839. By 1843, Congressman John Wentworth secured a post office for the town, and Franklinville grew rapidly in the next few years. At its height, Franklinville had three stores, a cheese factory, a blacksmith shop, a school house and a Methodist church. The Smith brothers–George, James and Robert–arrived from Scotland and built a grist and saw mill on the outskirts of town.
After the Civil War, Franklinville withered because the rail line went through Woodstock. It appears in name only on the county map. But a few of its historic buildings remain: the Franklinville Methodist Church, a school, the blacksmith shop and a meeting house, now a historic showplace called Perkins Hall.
And there’s still a handful of families who live in what used to be Franklinville, who work together to recapture what made the town thrive 150 years ago.
“We’re coming together more as a community,” said Norbert Ziemer, a resident of Garden Valley Road since 1942. “We get this old-time feeling of working together and needing each other. It’s just like the old days.”
