Everyone believes in community spirit but what about spirit communities?
Ghost towns?
The Wild West is full of them. Famous for them even. The images of those dusty, driedup places dotted with dilapidated buildings, deserted save for a couple of prairie dogs, a coyote and some tumbleweed, add drama to yarns about the Old West. Tales tell of fortune hunters who descended like dewy-eyed locusts and built boom towns out of nothing. Then, no sooner than hopes for gold or silver riches dried up, these members of the mine-of-the-month club up and abandoned the towns in pursuit of richer mineral veins. They left only the skeletal remains of vacant buildings as testament to their greed.
Well, it should come as no surprise that booming DuPage County has also been home to its share of fortune hunters. Gold diggers and, yes, even scoundrels built and abandoned towns here in pursuit of their own share of wealth.
Truth be told, there are more ghost towns in DuPage’s back yard than you can shake a stick at. They may not be the rotted-wood, tumbleweed-infested apparitions of the American West, but the specter of their presence looms just as large.
To the trained eye and devoted historian, evidence of ghost towns is everywhere. Sometimes all that remains is a name. Residents of Naperville’s Brush Hill subdivision might be interested to know that Brush Hill was at one time a bona fide community with a post office all its own. According to the “History of DuPage County,” written in 1857 by C.W. Richmond and H.F. Vallette, Brush Hill was “quite a smart little huddle” located in the northeast corner of Downers Grove Township. The account notes that Brush Hill was alternately known as Fullersburg. It’s now a part of Hinsdale.
Also, according to Richmond and Vallette, a town known as Cass once flourished around no less than three churches–one Methodist, one Baptist and one Catholic–in the southern part of Downers Grove Township. It, too, had its own post office. Although the 1857 book describes these two as prospering communities, the exact course of their demise is unknown. The site of Cass today is marked by the intersection of I-55 and Cass Avenue.
Another extinct community, immortalized by a street name, is High Lake. At one time a highly touted resort community along the shores of Spring Lake just east of West Chicago, the town was abandoned when the lake’s water level dropped sharply. Several houses still exist at the site, and people using the Illinois Prairie Path go through what once was the town.
Sometimes towns just seem to vanish despite whatever political storm preceded their fall. Additionally, not all community ghost stories have roots more than a century old. One withdrew fewer than 30 years ago. According to local newspaper accounts, the place was known as Weston. Located along the western edge of DuPage County, Weston was slated for extinction by no less than the state of Illinois in the late 1960s.
Exercising its governmental right of eminent domain, the state condemned what land and buildings populated the tiny burg, which at one time had a population of more than 500 before dwindling to fewer than 50. Over resident protests, the state purchased the entire town, displacing the home owners, then turned the property over to the federal government, which built the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory on the site. Today, some of the remaining houses are used by Fermi scientists.
As recently as the 1950s, one remnant of a community known as Cloverdale lingered in the form of a general store located on Army Trail Road near Gary Road and owned by the late Earl Tedrahn. Although the post office is gone and Steph McGrath, senior curator of the DuPage County Historical Museum, shies away from calling Cloverdale a town, lacking evidence that it ever incorporated, this tiny burg once bustled with activity from the railroad station, creamery, post office and homesteads. Most of the land has been parceled out and bears the postal addresses of communities such as Bartlett or Carol Stream. Today, the general store houses a photo studio.
During the 19th Century, Illinois cities and towns would emerge when houses clustered around a local industry or an institution such as a church. Often a stagecoach stop would lure settlers. Add enough residents who needed goods and services and one would see schools, blacksmiths and general stores quickly sprout.
When the local industry failed, however, or the church burned down, or when the stagecoach got replaced by the steam engine, whole cities went belly up. According to local historians, such was the case for Gretna, located in what is now the southeast corner of Carol Stream. St. Stephen’s Roman Catholic Missionary Church served as the nucleus around which Gretna developed. Alas, when the church burned down, the town disappeared. St. Stephen’s Cemetery, along North Avenue in Carol Stream, is all that remains.
Another community, Wayne Centre, is an example of a town driven to extinction when progress passed it by. Throughout the 1830s and ’40s the town thrived as visitors stopped by its log cabin inn on Army Trail Road near the west branch of the DuPage River, en route to Chicago.
Wayne Centre had its own blacksmith shop, general store, post office and broom factory. The “History of DuPage County” describes Wayne Centre as “peaceable and healthful, being cursed by neither lawyers nor doctors.” When travelers abandoned stagecoach travel in favor of the brand new railroads–and because there was no station stop in Wayne Centre–the town withered and died. The only remnant now is a cemetery on Smith Road.
A Kane County counterpart was the town of Fayville. Said to be located on 400 acres north of St. Charles at a bend in the Fox River, Fayville was established as a stagecoach stop by Rev. D.W. Elmore in 1836. According to “Kane County History” by Richard Lambert, Fayville consisted primarily of a church, a blacksmith shop and an inn that doubled as the Elmore homestead.
When Elmore died, however, the inn became a groggery that was reputed to be the home of horse thieves and bandits. What’s more, Lambert recounts that boys from nearby Valley View School would attend the most scandalous orgies there on weekends. He reports the place’s reputation was so bad that a Catholic priest passing through placed a curse upon the premises.
When the newly formed railroad supplanted the stagecoach and Fayville had no station stop, its fate was sealed. Whether it was the work of the curse or not, the community and its lawless saloon were doomed.
Wayne Centre and Fayville are typical of growth patterns for towns on the Illinois prairie, according to local historian J.M. Lamb, professor of history at Lewis University in Lockport. They emerged as a result of developing transportation systems. In the case of those two towns, it was stagecoach lines. However, Lamb noted in a 1984 symposium on Illinois & Michigan Canal history and technology that the developing canal also had a potent influence on emerging communities along its route.
Lamb pointed out that because the canal benefited from federal land grants and manufacturers were allowed to build on the canal banks, the prospects profits from shipping and manufacturing attracted entrepreneur and settler alike. In 1837 the Canal Commission built a road from Chicago to Lockport in hopes of luring investors. Although its success was fated to be something less than that of its lakeside neighbor, Lockport survived. Other cities along the canal were not so lucky.
One such city, though far from the DuPage County borders by 19th Century standards, was called DuPage. The Canal Commission created the city next to Channahon in Will County, according to Lamb, at the junction of the DuPage River and the canal. Despite uncommonly good water power, the community never flourished, and today nothing remains to mark the site.
It seems the 19th Century had its share of swindlers. Some, specifically unscrupulous land speculators, were blamed for the death of at least one DuPage town. The “History of DuPage County” describes these “land sharks” as a “class of men (who) merely claimed the land for the purpose of selling it to subsequent settlers.” Apparently they scammed settlers by selling land, then shifting the boundary markers. They repeatedly divided the same land and sold it to several buyers.
When a buyer showed up to stake his claim, the land could not be identified and the speculators were long gone. That, according to the historical account, was the fate of a town called Big Woods, located at the intersection of Eola Road and Illinois Highway 56. With the boundaries obscured, homesteaders lost their claims and were dispossessed of their land. To settle the claims and protect themselves from other land sharks, those who remained formed The Claim Protecting Society, but Big Woods apparently never regrouped.
The list of ghost towns can go on and on. The LaSalle County Historical Society claims no fewer than 112 vanished villages, towns and cities. The DuPage Historical Society found more than 60 pages of DuPage County ghost towns in a book by James N. Adams called “Illinois Place Names.”
Unlike their human counterparts who are said to walk the Earth only on Halloween, ghosts of towns long gone can be seen every day. Next time you see an unusual name for a street, country road, subdivision or shopping mall, it may be all that remains of a town that someone once called home.
