Midlothian: The Golf Club That Became a Village

In eighteen ninety-eight a group of wealthy Chicago industrialists looking for weekend escape built the Midlothian Country Club south of the city and named it for an ancient region of Scotland. A railroad built a station stop at what had been called Rexford Crossing and renamed it Midlothian after the club. Houses followed, and the community that grew up around the golf course took on the station name as its own.

By nineteen twenty-seven the population had grown enough that residents voted to incorporate as the Village of Midlothian on March seventeenth of that year. The Scottish name, borrowed from a golf club, borrowed from a Scottish county, sat on a flat Cook County prairie where heather had never grown and probably never would. Midlothian today is a working-class south suburb with about fourteen thousand residents, the country club long since a footnote in its origin story.