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Bolingbrook Real Estate and Community Information
History
The modern Village of Bolingbrook got its start in the first half of the 1960s when the first builder laid out the first housing tract in the farm fields just north of old U.S. 66 and beside Illinois Route 53.
Those first families, as they moved in, had never heard or seen the name "Bolingbrook". Where they were moving was known as "Westbury" they thought, which, as it turned out, was just the first west side unit of what was "Bolingbrook Subdivision", as recorded by Dover Construction Company at the county.
The young families, for the most part, were lured out to model homes by advertisements that featured a handsome and distinguished British butler named Mr. Dover. They come via the Stevenson Expressway, as the new and improved Rout 66 had been renamed. It was the long umbilical cord that stretched out from the city of Chicago to the far west farmlands. The first model homes went up on Rocklyn Court, off Route 53, just north of the current Pheasant Hill shopping center.
Homes were priced at $10,000 with as little as $200 down. The first homes ready for families to move into were on Avondale Court, just west of Route 53 and north of Briarcliff Road. Lesson #1 learned the hard way through teary eyes: everything you see in the model home isn't in your finished house, necessarily. In the case of Dover homes that meant no carpeting or even floor tile in some area unless you paid extra. And there certainly were no trees or lawns. And not always paved streets.
Dover Construction Company also designed two other areas to follow Westbury, the two subsequent areas both east of Route 53, but still centered around the Dover-built Briarcliff Road. While Westbury had the first homes, the east side's Colonial Village became the site of the first churches, parks, fire station and, eventually, Village Hall and jail.
The three original home tracts - sold from 1961 to 1965 under the names of Westbury, Colonial Village and King's Park were all part of the original "Bolingbrook Subdivision".
It was these homes, and the families in them that officially formed the Village of Bolingbrook in 1965 with incorporation.
Indian Boundary
In the early 1800s, the need for improved land and water transportation prompted the Congress to consider internal improvements. Traders wanted to be able to travel unmolested between Chicago and the navigation headwaters of the Illinois River at Ottawa. In 1807, the Senate instructed Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin to report on the subject of roads and canals. The Gallatin Report mentioned the Chicago Portage, a low divide between the waters of Lake Michigan and the Des Plaines River that the Indians used as a carrying passage. The marshy nature of this passage had been recorded by the French explorers Joliet and Marquette in 1673. A canal to connect Lake Michigan to the Illinois River via this passage was urged for the consideration of Congress. But the War of 1812 postponed questions of internal improvements until some years later.
As of 1816, the United States had acquired from the Indians the greater part of what is now Illinois but not the lands adjacent to Lake Michigan including the Chicago Portage. The Indian Commissioners were instructed to negotiate for a tract of land which would connect the shores of Lake Michigan with the Illinois Purchase. On August 24, 1816, the United States concluded a treaty with the United Tribes of the Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi. The tribes ceded to the United States a twenty mile wide tract of land through which white men were supposed to be able to travel safely. The "safe passage" runs diagonally from the southern extremity of Lake Michigan westward to the Mississippi. The southern of the two boundary lines begins at the mouth of the Calumet River and goes straight southwest to the Kankakee River. The northern boundary line begins in the center of Rogers Avenue in Chicago at Lake Michigan and angles southwest. This northern Indian Boundary Line runs through Bolingbrook.
In 1819, an inspection of the proposed canal route was made by Richard Graham and Joseph Philips, who had been Judge and Secretary, respectively, of the Illinois Territory. Their report pointed out the supposed case and relative inexpense of a canal connection between the Illinois and Chicago Rivers. The land between the two parallel Indian boundary lines was surveyed from 1821 - 1822 for canal purposes. At the time of the first survey, the parties who did the work had to go all the way to Peoria (then Fort Clark) to get supplies. The Illinois and Michigan Canal was built by the State of Illinois from 1836 to 1848.
