Reflections: Kendall County’s old prairie routes are long gone but we still follow them to this day

A few weeks ago, I told the stories of the impact the area’s road system had on the settlement and development of communities up and down the Fox River Valley. In fact, in the 1830s, the road system – such as it was –was the major engine driving settlement.

The story of how the decisions of where to locate roads all those years ago might not seem very interesting, but in fact those decisions still have major effects on 21st century traffic patterns.

In the 1830s, overland transportation was, if anything, even more important than today, not to mention sometimes making the difference between life and death.

The northern Illinois of the early 1830s boasted three major towns: Galena, Chicago and Ottawa. Galena, with its lead mines, was by far the largest and richest of the three, although Chicago was beginning to grow thanks to increasing freight and passenger traffic on the Great Lakes.

Ottawa, too, located near the rapids marking the Illinois River’s head of navigation, and adjacent Peru, were the region’s major transshipment points. During high water, steamboats could dock at Ottawa. Otherwise, Peru was the port where cargoes from St. Louis and New Orleans were broken down and freighted by team and wagon overland to Chicago. In return, cargoes from the Eastern Seaboard arriving on Chicago’s wharves were loaded aboard those same wagons and sent back south, where they were loaded aboard riverboats for the voyage south, sometimes all the way to New Orleans.

Early on, Chicago, Ottawa and Galena were isolated from each other, but soon after settlement began north of Peoria in the early 1830s, government-marked roads were improved linking the three towns.

First, the Chicago to Ottawa road became an important economic route, followed soon after by the first state road linking Galena and its surrounding lead mining region to Chicago.

Reflecting its importance, the Chicago to Ottawa road had three distinct branches, two of which passed through Kendall County. The main, most direct route was the “High Prairie Trail,” which began on Chicago’s lakefront and went directly to the Des Plaines River ford and ferry at what is today Riverside. From there it mostly ran southwesterly through Plainfield, Plattville, and Lisbon before reaching Ottawa. As its name suggested, the road hugged high prairie ridges along its route, doing its best to stay away from the numerous wetlands that dotted the region.

The northern route to Ottawa followed the High Prairie Trail as far as Riverside. There it headed more westerly to cross the DuPage River at Joseph Naper’s settlement. From there the road crossed the rolling prairie to Oswego, roughly following todays Route 34, where it turned south closely following modern Route 71, bypassing Yorkville to the south, and on to Newark. It joined the High Prairie Trail just northeast of Ottawa.

The third route, which did not touch Kendall County, closely followed the course of the Chicago, Des Plaines, and Illinois rivers to Joliet and then on to Ottawa.

The first road to Galena was officially laid out in 1833, but the route had first been used in 1829 when a Galena businessman named J.G. Stoddard decided to try shipping lead from his mine to Chicago. Stoddard’s party blazed what would become the Chicago to Galena Trail, heading south from Galena to Dixon’s Ferry on the Rock River and then heading southeast across the prairie to the Methodists’ Fox River Mission at the northernmost tip of modern La Salle County. Crossing the Fox, the party then headed northeast across the prairie to Chicago. Roughly the same route was followed by Juliette Kinzie, her husband, and their traveling companions in 1831 during a business trip from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin to Chicago.

By 1833, it was decided to lay out an official Chicago to Galena road. The survey party started at Chicago’s Lake and West Water streets, and ran their line along the familiar road to Bernard Laughton’s ferry and inn at Riverside on the Des Plaines. From there the route continued to Naper’s settlement. From there, it headed along what is now Montgomery Road to Daniel Gray’s Fox River ford. According to early survey maps of the area, the ford was on a nearly straight line from Montgomery Road and Third Street across the river, accounting for the kink in Montgomery’s Jefferson Street on the west bank.

Then, although it might seem strange, the road headed southwest from Montgomery, through Oswego and Bristol townships to the ford across Blackberry Creek. Early surveyors described the creek as deep and slow-moving, and good fords were apparently scarce. How scarce? Modern-day Galena Road still dips south to cross the creek at the ford marked by surveyors 189 years ago.

From the Blackberry Ford, the road continued west to what soon became the hamlet of Little Rock and its stagecoach stop, and from there northwesterly across the prairies to Dixon’s Ferry and eventually Galena. As surveyed, the route was 102 miles long. The surveyors contended necessary improvements would cost only about $500.

The road didn’t stay in that location for long, however. In 1836, Joseph and Samuel McCarty lured the road’s stagecoach traffic north by improving a new road across the wet prairie from Naperville to their new town of Aurora and then west through Sugar Grove before it headed southwest to Little Rock, then northwest to Galena.

Today, whether drivers know it or not, this transportation history is still very much with us. The old prairie routes are today heavily traveled Route 34, Route 71 and parts of Orchard and Galena roads in Kendall County and the various Naperville, Plainfield, and Oswego roads in DuPage and Cook counties.

The interesting thing about those old routes is not that they were heavily used in the 19th century but that they continue to be some of the region’s most heaviest-traveled arterial routes now, contributing, for better or worse, to the area’s transportation network nearly two centuries later.

• Looking for more local history? Visit http://historyonthefox.wordpress.com.