Monee: Named for a Fur Trader's Daughter

The village of Monee, Illinois, carries a name rooted in the Ottawa language and the life of a single woman. Marie LeFevre Bailly was the daughter of a French fur trader and an Ottawa woman, and she grew up in the Kankakee River country before the treaties that removed the Potawatomi from northern Illinois. The Ottawa, who had no sound for the letter R, called her Mah-nee rather than Mah-ree.

When the Illinois Central Railroad named its station here in the early eighteen fifties, clerks recorded the name as Monee, and the village kept that spelling. A clause in the eighteen thirty-three Treaty of Chicago, which displaced the Potawatomi westward, had set aside two sections of nearby land specifically for five daughters of Mo-nee, an acknowledgment that her family had earned some standing in the old fur-trade world the railroad was now replacing.