Downtown redevelopment frenzies seem to come and go. From Montgomery to Yorkville to Plano and Sandwich, towns keep looking for ways to revitalize their historic downtown business districts.

Back in 2005, Oswego wrapped up a multi-million-dollar downtown redevelopment project. Montgomery got into the act, too, with the end result being their wonderful new village hall, historic Settler’s Cottage, and extensive cleanup. Most recently was Yorkville’s attempt to preserve its downtown in the face of the widening Ill. Route 47 to five lanes right smack through the middle of their historic Bridge Street business district.

Each of these communities faces its own challenges because each town’s business district is so different from the others.

Talk to an economic historian about why communities develop the way they do, and you’ll likely get an eye-glazing lecture on, among other things, modern interpretations of S.H. Goodin’s central place theory and the definition of hinterlands.

Those things certainly have great effects on municipal development. But here in the Fox Valley area, the single most important aspect of why and how our communities evolved the way they have seems to have had more to do with transportation – in particular, transportation routes that existed in the middle two-thirds of the 19th century.

The results are interesting to contemplate. Plainfield, for instance, has a large downtown business district situated along what used to be U.S. Route 30, which ran through the middle of town until it was rerouted a few years ago. Oswego’s business district is bordered on two sides by U.S. Route 34, the main route through the village. Montgomery’s tiny downtown is flanked to the west by Ill. Route 31 and to the east by the Fox River. Yorkville, in a situation somewhat similar to Plainfield, has its respectable downtown business district bisected by busy Route 47.

Meanwhile, the tiny Kendall County community of Plattville has what once passed for a business district that stretched out along Plattville Road, which runs through the middle of the village. Likewise, the hamlet of Little Rock in northwestern Kendall County also rambles along the road through town, in this case Galena Road. Plano’s downtown was designed to be bisected by the main line of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, while Sandwich’s Main Street is perpendicular to the main line tracks.

In each case, transportation routes arguably had the largest influence on how and where these business districts located, while each community’s location in the hinterland of a nearby larger community had an important impact on the size and makeup of each downtown.

Although Montgomery has a Main Street, the business district is located to its east and stretches along Mill, River and Webster streets much like the layout of the hamlets of Galena and Plattville. Oswego’s main business district, a three-block section of Main Street, is located parallel to the Fox River while Yorkville’s, which is about the same size, is sited perpendicular to the river. How did it all happen?

Montgomery’s founder, Daniel Gray, actually laid the village out with a Main Street that, like Oswego’s, ran parallel to the Fox River. But economic realities changed Gray’s vision so that businesses gradually grew up along the streets that led to the modern bridge (located north of Gray’s 1830s bridge) across the river. Thus the gentle S route formed by Mill, River and Webster streets became the de facto business district.

Meanwhile, Oswego’s founders laid out Main Street along the economically vital Chicago to Ottawa Road and immediately adjacent to the Joliet to Dixon road that crossed the river at Oswego. Because the Ottawa Road was the more economically important connection in the 1830s and 1840s, the business district remained strong along Main Street. By the time the first bridge was built across the river in 1848, Main Street was established as the business district.

But in Yorkville, a different dynamic was at work. The Fox River Road from Ottawa to Geneva did not pass through Yorkville. Instead it ran through neighboring Bristol on the north bank of the Fox River. And the road from Ottawa to Chicago (now Ill. Route 71) bypassed Yorkville to the south.

Yorkville had been named the county seat by a state commission in 1841, but voters decided to move it to Oswego in 1845. As a result, Yorkville didn’t get a post office until 1864, when the county seat moved back from Oswego (Bristol’s post office was established in 1839). Because the post office used by Yorkville residents was on the north side of the river in Bristol, along with connection to the Fox River Trail, and the location of the Chicago to Ottawa Road was well south of the river, Yorkville’s business district grew in a north-south orientation. The main route through the business district is called Bridge Street, denoting the importance of the river crossing to the city’s economy. And that’s despite two Main Streets in Yorkville, on either side of the river, one in the old village of Bristol running parallel to the river and one in Yorkville proper, running perpendicular to the river.

Just as their orientation and layouts are different, so too are the sizes of the three communities’ business districts, growing in size the farther they are from Aurora.

Plainfield, on the other hand, is far enough from either Aurora or Joliet to have developed its own large independent business district, similar to Naperville’s. Plano and Sandwich, both fairly typical railroad towns, were mercantile centers in their own right early on with downtowns fueled by the passenger and economic traffic brought by rail lines. Compare them to Little Rock and Plattville, hamlets that owed their existence to the roads to Galena and Ottawa, respectively. The two villages declined precipitately when the rail lines extending west of Chicago missed both.

Today, 170 years after most of Kendall County’s town founding took place, transportation is still shaping the towns we live in. And as change occurs, it might be useful to recall that this isn’t the first time such major changes took place. Nor will it be the last.

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