Remember how we all hated to memorize historical dates during our school days? In fact, to all too many of us, that’s all history is – a succession of dry, confusing dates that mark, but fail to illuminate, the passage of time.

I’ll be the first to admit that memorizing dates is a boring way to learn about history. Knowing that 1066 was the date of the Norman conquest of England is very dry indeed. Knowing that an army of the descendants of Vikings carried off the last successful major invasion of England, and then went on to defeat the island’s native Saxons in a bloody battle at Hastings is a lot more interesting.

Being able to recite that Columbus discovered America in 1492 isn’t very exciting. But knowing that Columbus – and most educated people of his day – knew the Earth was round and that he could reach the East by sailing west is much more interesting, not to mention the fact that his math was so bad he underestimated the distance he had to travel by about half, thus mistaking the native Americans he found for East Indians when he finally arrived.

Yes, dates are dry, no doubt about it.

But dates, nevertheless, are important in history, if for no other reason than to give us some guideposts. For instance, it is useful to know the Revolutionary War came before the Civil War. And it is helpful to realize that the Revolutionary War was separated from the first settlement of North America by as many years as the Revolution is from our current century.

The important dates in Kendall County history are much more compressed than those discussed above, though. From the time the first pioneers arrived in what is now Kendall County until the area was completely settled, only about three decades elapsed. But during those relatively few years, important, often exciting, things happened here.

When Robert Beresford staked his claim in the timber at the southernmost point of Big Grove in 1826 or 1827 (accounts vary), there already were several permanent residents of Kendall County, consisting entirely of Indians and a few whites living with them. Beresford settled on land that had been ceded to the U.S. Government by various Indian tribes in the Treaty of 1816 that secured the route of the future Illinois and Michigan Canal. About the same year, Pierce Hawley moved north from Ottawa and settled at the north end of Holderman’s Grove, in Section 30 of Big Grove Township.

The winter of 1830-31 was known by those early settlers as the Winter of the Deep Snow, during which some of them nearly died.

The first birth was recorded inside the bounds of Kendall County on Dec. 1, 1831, when Mr. and Mrs. George Hollenback welcomed twins, George M. and Amelia Hollenback, into the world.

The next year, 1832, was remarkable for two events. The Black Hawk War broke in the spring and, a bit later, Edward Ament and Emily Ann Harris were married, the first such ceremony performed in the county.

The Black Hawk War of 1832 was the last Indian-white confrontation fought on Illinois soil, and also is remarkable because of the number of historically significant people who fought in it. Among them, Abraham Lincoln fought in the militia, while Jefferson Davis served as a U.S. Army officer in the conflict. The two would one day serve on opposite sides as presidents of warring nations – the United States and the Confederate States of America –during the Civil War.

The year after Black Hawk’s tribal group of Sauk men, women, and children were vanquished, 1833, was known as The Year of the Early Spring. Due to an unusually warm, dry spring, wagon travel was possible very early, and Kendall County’s population boomed.

John Schneider built the first mill in the county the next year, 1834, locating it at the mouth of Blackberry Creek, where the stream enters the Fox River in present-day Yorkville. After that, farmers no longer had to travel to either Ottawa or Plainfield to get their grain ground into flour.

With settlement on the increase, it was logical that settlements would tum into towns. Robert Beresford’s cabin had become the center of a tiny settlement and stagecoach stop known as Beresford’s, but no town grew in Big Grove near the site of Beresford’s cabin. Instead, the first town to be officially laid out was Oswego. Levi F. Arnold and Lewis B. Judson partnered to lay out the village’s streets and blocks in 1835, making Oswego the oldest officially platted municipality in Kendall County.

The years from the first settler’s arrival in Kendall County in 1826 or 1827 until the platting of the first municipality in 1835 saw more growth and significant development than any time before or since. In those years, population growth of 80 to 100 percent a year was not uncommon, a growth rate that would astonish today’s residents.

It was during that period that Kendall County went from an area of prairie, inhabited by a few hundred Native Americans, to a settled area, home to farmers, millers and storekeepers. Unlike areas farther to the east, settlement did not come gradually to Kendall County; rather it happened over a few dynamic years.

Outside of the panic caused by the Black Hawk War, settlement was peaceful in Kendall County as decidedly un-warlike farmers arrived in large numbers to quickly turn the prairies into prosperous fields and pastures.

By the early 1850s, Kendall County was almost fully settled, the prairies mostly tamed and the numerous swamps and sloughs already beginning to be drained and turned into cropland. It was an astonishingly rapid and dramatic transformation of more than 300 square miles of untilled native prairie into tame farmland.

Today, the only way we can gauge the impact of that transformation is to consider those early dates and marvel at the speed with which 30,000 years of prehistory went by the board and were forever changed in less than two decades.

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