Naperville, Illinois: Potawatomi Village to Silicon Prairie

Downtown Naperville sits on the site of a Potawatomi village, part of a network of at least fifty major villages that stretched across northern Illinois by eighteen hundred. The Potawatomi had themselves displaced the earlier Illiniwek, and they managed the DuPage River corridor for generations until the forced removals of the eighteen thirties sent them west on what became known as the Trail of Death.

In eighteen thirty-one, a New Yorker named Joseph Naper arrived with his family and friends at the DuPage River and staked Naper's Settlement, the oldest town in DuPage County. Within a year, more than a hundred settlers had followed. During the Black Hawk War of eighteen thirty-two, residents briefly retreated to Fort Dearborn before returning to build Fort Payne right here.

For most of the twentieth century, Naperville was a quiet farm town. Then Bell Labs opened a research campus in nineteen sixty-six, followed by Argonne National Laboratory nearby, and the suburban tech corridor known as the Illinois Technology and Research Corridor drew corporations and workers who turned a town of twelve thousand into a city of more than one hundred fifty thousand in under forty years.