The large majority of Minooka residents have moved here since about 2000, as my family once did. Having grown up in Minooka and now having a hand on the wheel, so to speak, when it comes to development, I’ve noticed that people who don’t know the community’s history sometimes have a hard time putting today’s growth and change in context. If you’re one of the folks who moved into Minooka or nearby since about 2000, you may find this an interesting high-level look at our community’s history of growth. If you’ve been around for a while, forgive me for sharing information you already know, but hopefully you can soak in a little nostalgia along the way.

Next year will mark America’s 250th birthday. About 90 years after America was born, the Village of Minooka and many of our neighboring municipalities were formally incorporated. Believe it or not, a good bit of change has taken place in our community in the century and a half since the founding of our small town. And we still have a lot of growth ahead of us.

As best I can tell, the population of Minooka was about 500 people in the 1860s when the village was organized. About one hundred years later, we had grown to a total of about 539 residents, according to the 1960 census. By and large, Minooka in the 1960s was much the same as it had been a century earlier, a rural farming community founded and sustained by the railroad.

A notable exception, of course, is that, unlike 1860, you can be walking through the grocery store or having dinner in one of Minooka’s fine restaurants and rub shoulders with people who clearly remember 1960. Maybe you’re reading this now and you fit that bill, or maybe your parents, coworker or neighbor can remember a time before stoplights. If you know enough people, you might even talk to someone who remembers when the grain bins downtown didn’t yet dominate the Minooka skyline.

Just after 1990, Minooka officially became a one-stoplight town, up from zero. That single stoplight in 1990 served about 2,500 residents. By the year 2000, we had passed 4,000 residents and saw the beginning of our main commercial and industrial districts. If you’re keeping track, that lands us squarely in what I’d call “recent memory.”

Between the turn of the century and now, our small farming community expanded from about 4,000 residents to just under the 13,000 we have today. This growth isn’t unique to Minooka; it’s a trend shared by most of our neighboring towns and by hundreds of communities stretching between us and the epicenter of growth to our northeast. In fact, odds are most people reading this have experienced this period of change firsthand, because they are part of the growth itself. Their reasons for buying a home or starting a business in the Grundy County region are the story of all of us, a story often centered on family, opportunity and a quiet pace of life that we still identify with and appreciate.

If you remember the first hotel being built in Minooka, you might have had the same thought I did: Who’s going to stay there? Of course, now we have another hotel and a third on the way. Small businesses continue to fill retail spaces, houses are going up again, commercial development along Ridge Road is common, and nearly every year brings an industrial project of note.

What we all have to ask ourselves is how growth can happen in a way that lets us continue appreciating the things that brought most of us here in the last 25 years. As mentioned earlier, Minooka remained largely the same during the hundred years between the 1860s and 1960s. Despite continued growth, I believe that proper planning and action today will ensure that, in the next 100 years, residents will still see Minooka – just as we do now – as a great place to live, work, raise a family, enjoy the parks, visit the creamery or simply do whatever else they enjoy about our town.