Kate's Brief History

Highlighted in this atlas are three farms owned by families named “Stolp.” The name may be familiar to people who have been to the Paramount...

W.H. Wright’s farm looks tidy and prosperous, but who exactly was W.H. Wright?  Naperville’s history features a number of Wrights. One of th...

Clarissa Stewart Hobson was Naperville’s first female European settler. Joseph Naper’s wife, Almeda, long held that title, but as city ...

If you’ve ever walked or driven by the Barnes & Noble Bookstore on the corner of Washington Street and Chicago Avenue, no doubt you’v...

  1966 was also the year our Park District was born. Park districts weren’t a novel idea — Chicago launched it’s first incarnations in...

"Networking" is huge today in the business world and we're all hustling to keep our families fed. But "talking shop&q...

Throughout 2011 museums will be observing the anniversary of the Civil War. For some history buffs, that means re-evaluating the politics th...

While most folks have heard of the Lincoln-Douglas debates and some are familiar with “The Little Giant” nickname, that’s usually the extant...

On the twenty-sixth day of November in 1829 Pierce Hawley claimed a portion of Section 30 in Kendall County, Illinois. Since it included a...

Local history books from DuPage and Will Counties and even Chicago are great resources to learn more about Pierce and Aaron Hawley, but mu...

Illinois became a state in 1818, and a steady stream of settlers arrived due to land grants from the War of 1812 and the opening of the Eri...

While recently reading "Searching for Tamsen Donner" by Gabrielle Burton, Kate learned that two of the families of the doomed Or...

The governor of Illinois writes: "The internal improvement system, the banks, the great plenty of money, had made every one morally ...

The last of four re-designs of the Lincoln penny was unveiled last month in Springfield, ending a year-long recognition of the President'...

The Illinois State Museum and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library recently completed a two-year project that culminated in the Au...