Tour makes stop to honor streetcar past

With their streetcar tickets newly punched and their minds set on the past, about a dozen residents boarded a bus Sunday in West Dundee for a trip down memory lane.

The focus of the journey was for riders to understand the important role streetcars played in connecting East Dundee, West Dundee and Carpentersville to Elgin.

"We've been on quite a few of these and we learn something new every time," said Roland Laurer of West Dundee, who went on Sunday's tour with his wife, Amy.

A total of 40 people went on the two tours, officials said.

The streetcar -- which was actually a rented school bus -- took travelers along pieces of what used to be the inter-urban line in Carpentersville, East Dundee and West Dundee.

Streetcars carried people to and from Elgin from 1896 through 1933 and some of the metal rails that they ran on are still visible outside of Great Lakes Clay in Carpentersville.

The early mode of transportation took residents to work at the Elgin National Watch Factory, the Spiess Department Store and the Selz-Schwab Shoe Factory.

Rush hour streetcars were to be avoided at all costs because they were packed with people going to and from work, said Colette McDonough, secretary of the Dundee Township Historical Society, the group that organized the trip to coincide with its streetcar exhibit.

Along the way, amateur actors playing frequent riders from yesteryear boarded the streetcar to tell their commuting stories.

For example, there was Violet Decker Rouley who rode the streetcar to and from her job at the Elgin shoe factory where she made 12.5 cents an hour.

While at work, she met Reuben Rouley, the man who would become her husband, and together they bought the Dundee Review newspaper in 1941.

She wrote a column for the paper and was also known for handing out bubble gum to local children as rewards. Marge Edwards, president of the historical society, played Rouley.

People also rode the streetcar to Elgin for shopping, amusement at Trout Park, or to catch a train into Chicago. But the service terminated after a violent tornado rocked the area and destroyed the existing streetcars, McDonough said.

Because it happened during the Great Depression, there wasn't enough money to fix the streetcars.

The closure of the watch factory and demise of Elgin as a shopping destination with the opening of Spring Hill Mall in West Dundee also led to the towns' disconnect to Elgin, McDonough said.

Resident Amy Laurer said she hadn't realized just how important the "City to Watch" once was to workers around the area, or how connected the towns once were to each other.

Today, highways, tollways and the bike trail have picked up where streetcar rails left off in linking the communities together, she said.