Daily Herald opinion: Lucky discovery: Wheaton couple finds DuPage land records book in a basement

It took some luck and a Wheaton couple with an appreciation of the past, but a map book documenting what DuPage County was like in the late 1800s has been returned to the county recorder’s office. The scenario is another example of how we are finding missing pieces of our rich suburban history.

DuPage County Recorder Liz Chaplin recently hosted a “welcome home” celebration for historic Plat Book 2, which contains scale maps from 1868 to 1873 showing how the county was divided into subdivisions, lots, roads and railroad tracks.

The plat book had been missing from the recorder’s office for three decades, county officials said.

In a story published Aug. 22, our reporter Susan Sarkauskas described how Nancy and John Flannery of Wheaton discovered the book in the basement of an annex at Wheaton’s city hall.

After the Illinois attorney general filed a lawsuit against the Wheaton Historic Preservation Council in 2021, a DuPage County judge appointed Nancy Flannery as a receiver in the legal case. As part of her job, she was tasked with creating an inventory of thousands of items stored at the annex building and documenting their provenance.

Flannery said she was in the basement of the annex with her husband when he came across Plat Book 2, which measures roughly 2 feet wide by 2 feet long.

“We recognized right away that it was original, it was significant, and it needed to be preserved,” she said. “I knew this thing had to be rescued. It had to be taken out.”

Earlier this year, the judge in the legal case agreed and granted permission to return Plat Book 2 to the recorder’s office.

It’s not the first time that good fortune resulted in the return of an important piece of DuPage County history. Chaplin herself found a land patent that U.S. President James Polk signed in 1846 inside a large manila envelope on a stack of plastic containers while going through her office in Wheaton after becoming the county recorder.

That document had bestowed 40 acres of land in Winfield Township to a resident named George Cary.

And like the Flannerys, Chaplin recognized she had come across something meaningful connected to DuPage’s past. In both instances, someone was in the right place at the right time to find the item.

Sarkauskas reported that the Wheaton Historic Preservation Council had borrowed Plat Book 2 from the recorder’s office for an exhibit. It’s unclear why it was never returned over the course of three decades. Meanwhile, a man from Pennsylvania sent the historic land patent to the recorder’s office four years before Chaplin rediscovered it.

Fortunately, both Plat Book 2 and the historic land patent will now be preserved for future generations. Let’s hope that more folks stumble upon additional pieces of local history in basements and storage areas.