Up here in the northeast corner of Kendall County, the Oswego area has been celebrating a bunch of anniversaries throughout 2025.

The Oswegoland Park District was created in a March referendum 75 years ago. The landmark Little White School Museum was completed on its present site at Jackson and Polk streets 175 years ago last spring.

And the land on which the sprawling Boulder Hill subdivision is located was bought by developer Don L. Dise and the consortium of investors he’d put together 70 years ago this past summer.

And finally, the village of Oswego itself is marking the 190th year of its creation. It was sometime during the year 1835 that two early settlers and entrepreneurs laid out a new town they called Hudson on the east bank of the Fox River where it narrows.

Lewis Brinsmaid Judson had arrived in what became northern Kendall County in 1834 from his home in White Pigeon, Michigan. A businessman and mill owner, he’d volunteered for the Michigan militia regiment sent to Chicago to assist with the Black Hawk War of 1832. His unit saw no action, giving Judson time to inspect the land west of Chicago.

Deciding to come west after the war to settle, he first sent his brother-in-law, T.B. Mudgett to Illinois’ Fox River Valley in the spring of 1834 to claim land in his name. Judson brought his family west that fall.

There he met another former White Pigeon resident, Levi F. Arnold. Arnold came a few years earlier and was, along with Chester Ingersoll, instrumental in creating the new village of Plainfield from the former Walker’s Grove settlement along the DuPage River. Arnold built a frame inn, called the Halfway House, which still stands in Plainfield, where he also ran the village’s first post office. But Arnold and Ingersoll argued, Arnold leaving for greener pastures in the Fox Valley where he met Judson.

The two former Michiganders apparently hit it off and decided to create their own town on the riverbank, just upstream from where the creek named after local Potawatomi Chief Waubonsee flowed into the Fox.

Exactly who it was that physically drew the plan of the new town was not recorded, but it could well have been Lancelot Rood. Rood, a surveyor by profession, settled down in what’s now the Millington and Millbrook area in 1834. He was definitely available in 1835 when Judson and Arnold decided to create their new town. And, in fact, Rood was well enough known to be elected as a justice of the peace.

Whoever drew the plan, it was based on a town of 20 blocks, each containing 10 lots and bisected at right angles by alleys running perpendicular to each other.

As designed by Judson and Arnold, the new town was a rectangle, five blocks wide paralleling the river and four blocks deep.

It was designed with a Main Street, 80-feet wide, running the town’s five-block length, and situated on the new stagecoach road running southwest to Ottawa from Naperville and Chicago. Two streets (eventually named Madison and Monroe) paralleled Main Street to the east, while two more (afterwards named Adams and Harrison) paralleled it (and the river) to the west. Six streets made created the bounds of the town’s 20 blocks, running perpendicular to Main Street.

Local historians have suspected that either Judson and Arnold did not give the streets in their new town names or they did, but the original names were changed over time. East-west street namesakes Madison, Monroe, and Adams had all been presidents by 1835; William Henry Harrison had not, and would not be until 1841.

As for the town’s north-south streets, Jefferson, Jackson, and Washington had all been president by 1835, but Martin Van Buren and John Tyler had not. And Thomas Hart Benton was never president at all, but was a stalwart Democratic U.S. senator who was close to both presidents Jackson and Van Buren.

In any case, Hudson, the town Arnold and Judson laid out, looked fine on paper, but since the land had yet to be surveyed by the U.S. government, officially mapped, and put up for sale, it was all simply speculation. Government surveyors didn’t arrive in the Oswego area until the summer of 1838. By then, Oswego had been granted a post office—which the government for some reason called Lodi. Soon after getting the post office, the story goes, the town’s four legal voters—all male during that era—held a referendum to solve the name confusion.

As it turned out, neither Hudson nor Lodi got more than one vote. Instead, Oswego – like the other two names carried west from the settlers’ home area of New York – won the vote. And Oswego it’s been ever since.

After the land was surveyed, the government land office in St. Louis used the surveyors’ notes to create plat maps of every township in the state. And when those were issued, the land was finally, and legally, put up for sale. In the case of Oswego, that was in 1842, when all those informal, but serious, land claims had to be rectified with the actual, official land surveys, which, as you may gather, provided quite a bit of excitement.

So, although laid out and growing for seven years, it wasn’t until May 1842 that Oswego was officially surveyed and its plat was drawn and filed by Kendall County surveyor Archibald Sears. That date, by the way, strongly suggests some of Oswego’s original streets got their permanent names then and not in 1835.

That wasn’t the end for Oswego’s 19th century growth, of course. Just four years after Oswego’s official plat was filed, large landowners Walter Loucks and Judson created Loucks & Judson’s Addition, which added two blocks on an extensions of Main, Madison, and Monroe streets, notable because each of the blocks only featured a single north-south alley. Between then and 1860, eight more additions of varying sizes were added to the original village.

Today, Judson and Arnold would likely be justifiably astonished at the busy, sprawling, fast-growing suburban community their little 20-block village has become.

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