Tinley Park: From New Bremen to the Suburbs

German settlers arrived in southwest Cook County in the eighteen forties and named their township and new village Bremen, after the German port city many of them had sailed from. When the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad came through in eighteen fifty-two, a formal plat went in the following year and the place became New Bremen. It stayed that way for decades.

In eighteen ninety, Postmaster Henry Vogt asked the postal service to change the name to Tinley Park, honoring Samuel Tinley Senior, who had served the community as stationmaster and railroad ticket agent for more than twenty-five years. The village incorporated formally at the train depot on June twenty-seventh, eighteen ninety-two. Today Tinley Park is a Chicago suburb of about fifty-six thousand people, its German frontier-village past almost entirely invisible beneath the subdivisions.