Minooka, Illinois: Good Land at the Summit

Minooka, Illinois sits at the highest point on the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad line between Chicago and Ottawa, a gentle rise above the Illinois River valley that railroad workers called Summit. In eighteen fifty-two, surveyor Ransom Gardner laid out five hundred acres at that high point after the railroad chose the route through northeastern Grundy County. A woman named Mrs.

Smith, who knew the Potawatomi language, gave the settlement a better name: Minooka, which is variously translated as good land or maple forest. The Potawatomi had used this prairie hill as a hunting ground until the eighteen thirties, when American settlement pushed them west. The railroad tracks were eventually lowered in the nineteen twenties so trains could make the grade into town, changing the topography that had defined the place from the start.

Minooka incorporated as a village in eighteen sixty-nine. In more recent decades it has grown rapidly as a suburb of Joliet and Chicago.