10/19/2026
This is one of the panels in our current exhibit, The Founding Families of Oak Lawn. The exhibit will be up until January 2027, so please stop by if you haven't already. This panel is an old map of the Chicago region, with some interesting facts about that era:
Most Oak Lawn immigrants in the 1830s and 1840s were German farmers. Chicago and most of the river towns in northern Illinois settled in the early 1830s, almost 20 years before Oak Lawn. The major rivers in Northern Illinois -- the Fox, Des Plaines, Dupage and Calumet -- were the early “highways” which provided easy ways to travel and trade goods. Chicago’s population in 1833 was only about 350 people. Sixty years later in 1893, when Chicago hosted the World’s Fair (The Columbian Exposition) the population had grown to almost 1.5 million. In the 1800s, an Industrial/Manufacturing economy was replacing an Agrarian/Farming economy. While Oak Lawn was primarily a farming community, many Chicago immigrants worked in manufacturing. When German farmers settled in Oak Lawn, the United States was dealing with its own citizenship issues. Congress had just passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, which moved Native Americans off their ancestral land and west of the Mississippi River. In the Southern states slavery was becoming an important national issue.
ABOUT THE MAP:
Commenters have pointed out that this map is inaccurate and doesn't correctly represent the path of Illinois rivers and waterways. I used a map from this link:
https://curtiswrightmaps.com/product/chicagoland-before-1850/
Published by the Chicago Sunday Tribune on June 17, 1945. It may indeed be inaccurate, but rendered by an amateur cartographer in the 1800s. For the purpose of the exhibit, it still shows people that northern Illinois' rivers were the places settled because of trading and transport of goods.
