“Has this always been Kendall County?” a youngster asked me several years ago.
I explained that the area in which we live has not always been part of Kendall County. In fact, we have not always been part of Illinois, or even of the United States.
When the Revolutionary War began in 1775, the Fox Valley was considered part of and was administered from Quebec Province under British rule. The British had gained control of the vast area of Canada and much of North America south of the Great Lakes after defeating France in the Seven Years war of the 1760s.
Then thanks to George Rogers Clark and his band of hardy frontiersmen, however, Illinois was established as a county of the state of Virginia in 1778. And that control proved very important. Because a few years later, the lands drained by the Fox River were won by the United States as part of the peace settlement at the end of the war.
Realizing it could not govern an area so far away, however, Virginia surrendered Illinois to the U.S. government in 1784. Three years later, we became part of the Northwest Territory—a huge area comprising the current states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio—under terms of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.
Arthur St. Clair, a mediocre Revolutionary War general with good political connections, was appointed Northwest Territory governor, promptly naming the territory’s first county after himself in April of 1790. On June 20, however, St. Clair created another county, Knox, and that’s when Kendall County’s story really begins, for our small county was a portion of that new giant political division.
Old Knox County included about half of the current state of Illinois plus the whole of Indiana, a good deal of what became Ohio, most of modern Michigan, and a huge chunk of Wisconsin. The county was named for Secretary of War Henry Knox, another former Revolutionary War general. But to give St. Clair a little credit, Knox, a former bookstore owner and self-taught military genius, had been a true hero of the Revolution.
Then in 1800 the territory of Indiana was carved off the original Northwest Territory and in 1801 the Fox Valley was included in a redesigned St. Clair County of that new territory. We remained Hoosiers and part of Indiana until the brand new Illinois Territory was itself established in 1809.
A cycle was begun in 1812 that would soon become familiar. As population grew in the southern part of the territory, new counties were formed to provide more accessible local government. Although the nation went to war again with England in 1812, political reorganization and population growth did not stop. In September of that year, the Fox Valley became part of Madison County, named for President James Madison. The county was huge, extending all the way from southern Illinois where the Embarrass River joins the Ohio in modern Lawrence County north all the way to the current state line.
On Nov. 20, 1814, the territorial legislature established Edwards County, and included the Fox Valley in its bounds. The new county was named for Illinois’ first territorial governor, Ninian Edwards.
The War of 1812 ended in 1816, and Illinois just kept growing. Crawford County (named for Sen. William Crawford of Georgia, a prominent politician) was established in December and included today’s Kendall County.
And then in 1818, thanks to quite a bit of chicanery and diddling with population figures to make sure the population minimum was met, Illinois finally became a state in its own right. A year later, on March 22, 1819, Clark County, including the Fox Valley, was established, named for Gen. George Rogers Clark.
As settlement moved north, county boundaries kept changing. It must have been confusing in those days trying to figure out exactly in which county you were living in any given year. In 1821 we became part of Pike County (named for Zebulon Pike, the famed explorer and general during the War of 1812); and in 1824, part of Fulton County (named for Robert Fulton of steamboat fame). In 1825, we were included in the bounds of the new Putnam County (named for Revolutionary War general and all around interesting character Rufus Putnam) where we remained until 1831.
Then on Jan. 15, 1831, the General Assembly formed LaSalle County, which ran from the center of present-day Livingston County all the way north to Wisconsin, including today’s Kendall County. We remained part of LaSalle (named for the 17th Century French explorer, Robert Cavalier de LaSalle) until 1836 when Kane County was formed.
It was during this period that settlers began flooding into northern Illinois directly from the northeastern states instead of coming up from the south.
The formation of Kane County (named for Elias Kent Kane, Illinois’ first secretary of state and a U.S. Senator) absorbed three of Kendall County’s current nine townships – Oswego, Bristol, and Little Rock. The other nine townships – Kendall, NaAuSay, Fox, Big Grove, Lisbon, and Seward – remained part of LaSalle County, At least for a few years.
Spurred by the heavy traffic on New York’s Erie Canal and the creation of a safe Lake Michigan harbor at Chicago, population was growing too fast in Northern Illinois for things to remain stable.
On Feb. 19, 1841, Kendall County was finally formed by act of the state legislature. The county was named for Amos Kendall, postmaster general of the United States, political crony of Andrew Jackson, journalist, and partner with Samuel F.B. Morse in the development of the telegraph.
Ironically, a county that voted solidly Republican from the time the party was formed in 1854 until the early 21st Century was named for a prominent 19th century Democrat.
It’s been a long road since the 1770s when we were part of Quebec and, I suppose, we would all have spoken French had we been here at the time. After that dangerous swerve towards becoming Hoosiers, we at last settled for being regular Illinois Suckers. It’s all probably turned out for the best, even if we do speak broken French at best these days.
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