After moving back to Dupage County in March of 2001, I became interested in the history of the area.  I had read a lot of Chicago history, but not a lot about Dupage County.  I gradually found books written about the history of Dupage and the individual communities within its borders.   I found most of the books I read out-of-date and a little boring.  I thought I might try to put together the information I had found in a more interesting format.  My idea here is to write about Dupage County in pictorial essay with clickable links.  This will enable the reader to go directly to the sections of interest and avoid the boring stuff. 

The local history I was interested in writing about wasn't what happened in the Ice Age.  I also wasn't interested in the Indians that I knew occupied Illinois for a long time.  I really just wanted to know what Dupage County was like when the first Europeans arrived.  I wanted to know where they came from, why they left where they were, and what life was like for them once in Dupage.  That's one reason I was a little bored with the books I read...they all started out talking about ancient history.

Well, it turns out that the ancient history plays such an important role in the current face of Dupage County that it really can't be ignored completely.  In fact, once I knew the link between what happened before the Europeans were here and the present, it became a lot more interesting.

For instance, the single most important thing that made Dupage County the success that it has been was here for thousands of years before we came.  That single thing is the prairie.  I've known since I was a kid that we lived in "The Prairie State", but thought that was only because we had to come up with some nickname and that one seemed as good as any.  In more recent years, we've seen a lot of efforts to bring back and preserve prairie sites in Illinois.  I thought this was mostly because some people like the look of the tall grasses, and I heard it helped the ecology in general.  I didn't really have a clue or care to.

That's the same attitude some of the Europeans had when they first saw the prairie too.  It's a lot of tall grass on flat land...so what??  It's understandable that the Europeans had this attitude.  After all, they had never seen land like this before.  The places they came from were wooded, hilly, and even mountainous, so a lot of them thought the  the prairie was a wasteland. What they didn't initially realize was that the deep roots of the prairie plants helped to build up rich organic soil over thousands of years.  It's this great soil that helped make Dupage County economically viable at all.

Here's an outline of Dupage County I drew.  It was easy to draw because most of the borders are straight lines.  There's a reason Dupage County looks like this which I'll go into later.  For now, the important feature to note is the squiggly border in the southeast corner.  That's the Des Plaines River.  It's also the part of today's Dupage County that was first explored by white men.