Sigwalt Street honors one of village's early leaders

The new Arlington Heights village hall sits impressively at Arlington Heights Road and Sigwalt Street. The address is 33 S. Arlington Heights Road. But I think the Sigwalt part of the address is more significant historically.

Charles Sigwalt was an early and able mayor of Arlington Heights. During the 1890s, he put up some of his own money to buy the site for an earlier municipal building, which stood at Vail and Wing until the whole operation was moved to Arlington Heights Road in 1962.

He came to the United States as a teenager from Alsace-Lorraine where, his grandniece Ruth Sigwalt Ewert once told me, "the name Sigwalt was as common as Smith or Jones here."

He liked the United States. "His signature was barely dry on his naturalization papers when he was off to join Company E of the 88th Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry," Gerry Souter wrote in Chronicle of a Prairie Town.

His brother, on the other hand, was not happy here and decided to go home. His was a more romantic fate. According to Mrs. Ewert, he was shipwrecked, ended up in South America, bought a coffee plantation, and became very wealthy.

Even as a young soldier in the Civil War, Charles showed his literary ability, writing a diary that can be seen at the Arlington Heights Historical Society. Souter quotes from the diary and adds, "Charles Sigwalt was a brave man. … After seeing action in 16 major battles and losing his brother Jacob at Stone's River, Charley was mustered out in 1865." He was 24, at the beginning of successful business and political careers in the village he had chosen.

Charles Sigwalt came back from the Civil War to a town on the cusp of incorporation. When the first election was held in April 1887, Charles Sigwalt was elected the first village clerk of a town with a population near 1,200. Six trustees were also elected, but no mayor. Four years later, Sigwalt was elected mayor and served, off and on, until 1905.

He was responsible for instituting the first volunteer fire department. Their first purchase was a hand pumper for $650. While he was mayor, the village granted the first telephone franchise, and gas mains were installed in the village. There was the first street improvement. "Dunton Boulevard" was graded, filled, and graveled. The first drainage project began in 1902, the year the first water tower went up at Hawthorne and Chestnut, the highest point in the village.

Improvements were never popular with taxpayers. But Sigwalt used the skills he had honed on the battlefield, planning ahead, cooperating with his fellows, looking to future good, as an elected village official.

This handsome man with his luxuriant drooping moustache deserved to have a street named after him for all the good work he did. And it is altogether fitting and proper, to use a phrase from Abraham Lincoln (on whose birthday I write) that a street named after Charles Sigwalt, a substantial citizen, should run past our substantial new village hall.