An affluent western suburb of Chicago, Glen Ellyn has steadily grown in population following a flurry of construction in the 1950s and 60s. The village hosts the main campus for the College of DuPage, the second-largest place of higher education in all of Illinois. The college is an asset for Glen Ellyn’s cultural scene, with …
Three mighty rivers meet near this historic town on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, about 20 miles north of downtown St. Louis. There are some fascinating characters in Alton’s past, like the fearless 19th-century abolitionist Elijah P. Lovejoy, and Robert Wadlow, the tallest man in recorded history. Hugging the Mississippi on the Illinois bank …
Sixty miles south of Chicago, Kankakee is a county seat and the main city in the Kankakee-Bourbonnais-Bradley metropolitan area. Home to around 28,000, the city is on the sparkling river of the same name, where French fur trappers plied their trade in the 18th century. Kankakee has some fabulous heritage, with striking buildings downtown and …
First settled by Europeans in 1832, this North Shore community straddles the North Branch of the Chicago River. That watercourse flows through a string of Cook County forest preserves, and can be accessed by hikers and bikers along the 20-mile North Branch Trail. Something handy about Niles is the free public bus service, connecting local …
On the Illinois bank of the Mississippi, Granite City is part of Greater St. Louis, and sits a short distance from The Gateway City’s most famous attractions. The city was founded in 1896 by a pair of German-American industrialist brothers who set up a steel factory producing enamel-coated kitchen supplies, known as Granite ware. In …
In the Northwest Suburbs, Elk Grove Village is a community of 35,000 along the prosperous Golden Corridor where several Fortune 500 companies are headquartered. The name of the village comes from the native elk that roamed the grassland and forests when this area was settled by German farmers in the first half of the 19th …
The seat of Vermilion County, next to the Illinois–Indiana state line, is a city that was powered by the coal industry for a century until WWII. In the mid-19th century Danville was where Abraham Lincoln rode the 8th Judicial Circuit, and historical sites and markers relating to Lincoln are strewn around the city. By the …
Dubbed the “Pride of the Fox”, St. Charles is a city on the Fox River, 35 miles west of downtown Chicago. After the Chicago Great Western Railway arrived in the late 19th century, St. Charles became a popular destination for people from Chicago, and the riverfront Hotel Baker is a reminder from those times. Downtown …
This village in the western Chicago suburbs sprouted up in the 1960s and grew quickly through the 70s and 80s. The name, Woodridge, comes from a wooded ridge on the east bank of the DuPage River, and was adopted by a historic public golf course that predated the village by decades. Now home to almost …
The history of this small town in west central Illinois is completely intertwined with the railroads. In the last decades of the 19th century Galesburg became a junction for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, and the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. This gave rise to one of the largest rail yard complexes in …