Flossmoor: Dew on the Heather

Flossmoor, twenty-four miles south of downtown Chicago, started not as a town but as a golf course. In the late eighteen nineties a group of Hyde Park investors persuaded the Illinois Central Railroad to sell them one hundred sixty acres along the tracks. They built the Flossmoor Country Club and held a contest to name the station stop.

The winner was a Scottish phrase meaning dew on the heather and gentle rolling countryside, which fit a flat Illinois prairie approximately not at all, but sounded agreeable. The name stuck, a post office opened, and wealthy Chicagoans began building summer homes around the greens. Flossmoor hosted the nineteen twenty PGA Championship and two editions of the Western Open.

The village incorporated in nineteen twenty-four with about two hundred seventy residents. The post-World War Two housing boom doubled the population and turned the golf retreat into a permanent suburb. Flossmoor has kept its country-club character ever since.