Matteson: The Governor's Railroad Junction

Matteson was platted in eighteen fifty-five at the junction of the Illinois Central and Michigan Central Railroads, where German immigrants from the East had begun settling a few years before. The first homeowner, merchant, and postmaster was a single man, Charles Ohlendorf, which gives you a sense of how small the community started. By eighteen eighty-nine, when it incorporated as a village, it had nearly five hundred residents.

The town was named for Joel Aldrich Matteson, who served as Illinois' tenth governor from eighteen fifty-three to eighteen fifty-seven. His legacy elsewhere is complicated; his final years were marred by charges of corruption in the Canal Scrip fraud case. But out here on the prairie, his name survived on the railroad map and stayed.