Coal City: Chicago's Black Gold Suburb

The coal under these fields was first noted in eighteen twenty by a Canadian settler named Peter Lansett, but serious mining did not begin until after the Civil War. In eighteen seventy-five the first deep mine shaft went down, followed by a second in eighteen seventy-nine. By eighteen seventy, when the village incorporated, it had nine hundred residents, a hotel, and a general store, and it had already taken its blunt, honest name from the resource that built it.

Output from Coal City mines fed Chicago's furnaces and heating stoves, with workers cutting more than two hundred thirty thousand tons in a single year by the early eighteen seventies from the broader Braidwood coalfield of which this village was part. The mines eventually played out through the twentieth century, but the cluster of small towns along this stretch of Grundy County, Coal City, Braidwood, and South Wilmington, remain as a record of the industrial belt that once kept the city of Chicago warm.