Harvey, Illinois: The Magic City That Mixed God and Industry

South of Chicago, the suburb of Harvey was born from an unusual combination of capitalism and Christian idealism. In eighteen eighty-nine, a wealthy Chicago lumberman named Turlington Harvey organized a real estate syndicate to build a planned industrial city on the prairie. His vision was a model community: factories on one side of the Illinois Central Railroad tracks, decent housing for working families on the other, with homeownership encouraged and saloons strictly prohibited.

Turlington Harvey would have preferred to name the place Turlington, but the postmaster suggested Harvey instead, and that name stuck. The town was one of the so-called Temperance Towns, meant as a model of Christian values. The Harvey Land Association advertised in religious newspapers across the country, drawing skilled workers and manufacturers alike.

The community grew fast, rising from empty prairie to more than five thousand people by nineteen hundred. Harvey became an incorporated village in the early eighteen nineties. The temperance experiment eventually gave way to ordinary city life, and the twentieth century brought the same arc of industrial growth and later deindustrialization that reshaped much of the south Chicago suburbs.

But the original grid of worker cottages laid out by Turlington Harvey's association still defines the city's bones today. Industry settled in early: the Whiting Corporation made furnaces, cranes, and locomotive repair equipment in Harvey from eighteen ninety-four until two thousand. The city's population peaked at thirty-five thousand eight hundred ten in nineteen eighty, and the twenty twenty census counted twenty thousand three hundred twenty-four.

The Dixie Highway still runs through the middle of town.