Libertyville Illinois: Encyclopedia II - Libertyville Illinois - History

Libertyville Illinois - History

The land that is now Libertyville was the property of the Illinois River Potawatomi Indians until August 1829, when economic and resource pressures forced the tribe to sell much of their land in northern Illinois to the U.S. government for $12,000 plus an additional $12,000 in goods, plus an annual delivery of 50 barrels of salt. [2]

The treaty forced the Potawatomi to leave their lands by the mid-1830s [3], and by 1835 the future Libertyville had its first recorded non-indigenous resident, one George Vardin. Said to be a "well-educated" English immigrant with a wife and a young daughter, Vardin lived in a cabin located where the Cook Memorial Library stands today. Though he apparently moved on to the west that same year, the settlement that grew up around his cabin was initially known as Vardin's Grove. [4]

In 1836, during the celebrations that marked the 60th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the community voted to call itself Independence Grove. The next year the village got its first practicing physician, Dr. Jesse Foster, and its first lawyer, Horace Butler, after whom Butler Lake is named.[5] It also got a post office in that year, an event that forced another name change, because of an already existing Independence Grove elsewhere in the state. On April 16, 1837, the new post office (possibly located in Vardin's former cabin) was registered under the name Libertyville.

That was not the end of the town's shifting identities, however. When the Libertyville briefly became the county seat of Lake County in 1839, it changed its name to Burlington, only settling on its current name when the seat moved to Little Fort (now Waukegan, which is the Potawatomi word for "Little Fort").[6]

Libertyville's most prominent building, the Cook Mansion, was built in 1879 by Ansel Brainerd Cook, almost on the spot where Vardin's cabin had been built in the 1830s. Cook, a teacher and stone mason, became a prominent builder and politician in Chicago, providing flagstones for the city's sidewalks and taking part in the rebuilding after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The two-story Victorian mansion served as Cook's summer home as well as the center of his horse farm, which provided animals for Chicago's horsecar lines. The building was remodeled in 1921, when it became the town library, gaining a Colonial-style facade with a pillared portico.

The community expanded rapidly with a spur of the Milwaukee Road train line (now a Metra commuter line) reaching Libertyville in 1881, resulting in the incorporation of the Village of Libertyville in 1882, with John Locke as first village president. [7]

Libertyville's downtown area was largely destroyed by fire in 1895, and the village board mandated brick to be used for reconstruction--resulting in a village center whose architecture is substantially unified by both period and building material. [8] The National Trust for Historic Preservation called Libertyville's downtown "a place with its own sense of self, where people still stroll the streets on a Saturday night, and where the tailor, the hometown bakery, and the vacuum cleaner repair shop are shoulder to shoulder with gourmet coffee vendors and a microbrewery." [9]

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki