Naperville: From the DuPage River Frontier to Illinois's Fourth City

Naperville's founding story begins with a schooner. In the summer of eighteen thirty-one, a sea captain named Joseph Naper set out from Ashtabula, Ohio, on Lake Erie with his family, his brother John, their wives, their mother, and thirteen other families. They sailed to Fort Dearborn at the southern tip of Lake Michigan, sold their boat, loaded ox carts, and headed thirty miles west along a well-traveled Native American trail. They stopped at a bend in the west branch of the DuPage River, read the landscape, and decided to stay.

Naper's Settlement, as it was first called, had several things going for it. The DuPage River offered fresh water and a site for a grist mill. Forests to the north provided timber. Prairies to the south provided rich farmland. And the old Sauk Trail, running from the Mississippi River to Lake Michigan, cut right through the area, making the new settlement a natural stopover for other migrants moving west.

By eighteen thirty-two, a hundred and eighty settlers had arrived and built sawmills, stores, a grist mill, and the Pre-Emption House hotel. Then came alarming news from the north: Black Hawk, a Sauk leader who rejected the treaties that had ceded his people's homeland, had led warriors back across the Mississippi to reclaim territory in northern Illinois. Panic swept through Naper's Settlement. The settlers built a fortified stockade called Fort Payne and waited. The attack never came. Black Hawk's campaign ended that summer with the massacre of his people at the Battle of Bad Axe, and the settlers returned to their mill and their fields.

When DuPage County was organized in eighteen thirty-nine, Naperville became its first county seat, a distinction it held until eighteen sixty-eight. The town incorporated as a village in eighteen fifty-seven, becoming a city in eighteen ninety. For most of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Naperville remained a quiet market town of a few thousand people, its downtown anchored by Kroehler Furniture's large manufacturing plant.

Then came suburbanization. Beginning in the nineteen sixties and accelerating through the eighties, Naperville exploded as corporate campuses and residential developments pushed out from Chicago along the Interstate Eighty-Eight corridor. Research and technology companies, financial firms, and pharmaceutical companies located their Midwest headquarters here. By the two thousand twenty census, Naperville's population had reached one hundred forty-nine thousand, making it the state's fourth-largest city. Joseph Naper, who arrived by ox cart on a trading trail, could not have imagined it.