Chapter 1: Our History

In the darkness the ship from across the lake missed Chicago. There was a passenger aboard who had come from England to try his fortunes in the windy city. The captain landed him up the wooded north shore and he struck out westward. So came the first paleface to the soil of Skokie in 1834.

The entire Skokie story is unique. True, every town differs from every other in its origin and development; just as individuals differ in their life histories. Thus it could be said by citizens everywhere that their own community is different.

Nevertheless, Skokie has followed a pattern unusual not only in America but also among its neighboring villages.

In the history of many places white man and red shared the area together for a time. Here the Indian had been divested of his ancestral lands and driven farther west before the earliest settlers came.

Many midwest localities received their first white population from states back east. Illinois, except for Chicago, was largely settled from Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and the middle seaboard states.

But those who migrated to Niles Center, the old name for Skokie, had come directly from central Europe or had paused only briefly on the way. They built the characteristic American village with its own sawmill, markets, stores school and churches, but they stamped it with their own Germanic traditions and energy.

While the greater part of Illinois was becoming a vast cornfield, Niles Center and its adjacent towns, especially old Bowmanville, were cultivating truck gardens to supply the markets of rapidly growing Chicago.

Within the memory of many living Skokians, public transportation to the city was only by the Milwaukee Railroad from Morton Grove, and the village was basically rural, showing little of the influence of its big neighbor. Modern utilities came slowly to Niles Center, brought only gradually by Chicago's northward expansion.

Not until after 1910 did electricity, water and telephone reach us, whereas other towns much more remote from metropolitan centers had these conveniences before the turn of the century.

In the middle twenties came a change: The sudden tide of migration surging out from Chicago. A real estate scheme caused the extension of the "L" from Howard Street and that in turn brought a boom in speculation and speeded the movement, giving Niles Center overnight a suburban aspect to replace the rural.

Then came the Depression, ending growth for a decade, followed by the war, with building at a standstill for another ten years. But these were only an intermission, a pause for shifting the stage scenery.

When priorities on building materials were eventually loosened the curtain rose on such activity as scarcely another town in our land has seen.

The tide from the City became a flood, and census figures bounded from five thousand to seventeen thousand, to twenty, thirty, forty thousand, making Skokie the most rapidly expanding community in Illinois, perhaps in the United States. Industrial plants mushroomed in the area, treading one upon the heels of the other.

Forests, fields, market village, residential suburb, industrial town - all these in succession in little more than a hundred years; this in brief is the history of Skokie.

- Originally published in The Villager, Thursday, May 15, 1958, pp. 16-17

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