Markham: Named for a Railroad President

Markham was incorporated in nineteen twenty-five with fewer than three hundred residents. It was named for Charles H. Markham, president of the Illinois Central Railroad from nineteen eleven to nineteen eighteen and again from nineteen nineteen to nineteen twenty-six.

The railroad shaped the suburb; it shaped the name too. A German immigrant named Lawrence Roesner had settled here in eighteen sixty, planting six seedlings from the Black Forest of Germany along the old Indian Boundary Line. Those trees survived longer than anyone expected.

In the mid-nineteen thirties a large subdivision more than quadrupled the population. By nineteen fifty, Markham had nearly three thousand people, a bedroom community that wanted homes more than industry, and mostly got them.