Looking at maps reveals a bit of Arlington Heights history

It's the Year of the Map. Around the city and suburbs, three dozen museums, institutions, and organizations are celebrating a Festival of Maps well into 2008. A local newspaper cites maps as powerful documents that show how the world is, could be, or will be.

I think how exciting it must have been for the founder of Arlington Heights to draw up the first map of the town in 1854. By the stroke of a pen, William Dunton outlined how the village he imagined would be in reality. Just as the 1830 map of Chicago created 1,000 miles of alleys, Dunton's map created Arlington Heights' rectangular grid.

Dunton named Euclid Street as the northernmost rim of his 80-acre town. It's also the southernmost rim of the block we live on and I can see how the "map" of our block determined its history. The interior of the block was a farm.

Ronald Bradley, a schoolboy 100 years ago, recalled an enormous threshing machine in the middle of State Road (now Arlington Heights Road) one day when he was on his way to North School. When all about were farms, the block's interior was a farm.

When farms were replaced with orchards in Arlington, our block's interior bloomed with cherry and apple blossoms in the spring and burgeoned with fruit in the fall. Almost every neighborhood in Arlington was into orchardry, including Scarsdale.

As the years rolled by and the trees grew old, Arlington Heights had a new crop -- children. In the 1950s young families flocked to town. The perimeter of our block filled up with houses and the acreage in the block's center became a glorious playground. Generous owners tolerated constant baseball and football practice. The copses around the edges of "the field" harbored young adventurers. Guinea pigs were brought out to graze.

A bent-over old mulberry provided delicious fruit. Random black raspberries of unknown ancestry were available for the picking. A sweet gum tree flooded the playground with heavenly aroma. Our local raccoons lived in a barn behind a house on Euclid. Gardeners planted their kale along the borders where the baseballs were unlikely to roll. Squash vines grew up and over clumps of old bushes. Possums lived under the clumps but they didn't favor the flavor of the squash.

Now instead of large families, the block center is accommodating large houses. Two manorial homes now dominate the acreage that was once farm. They have blocklong circular drives opening onto Arlington Heights Road.

But block history still holds its own. There are maybe five houses on the block that are 100 years old, or more. One of them belonged to Asa Dunton, William's father, who came in 1836 to file a claim on what would one day be Arlington Heights. His little home just north of Euclid on Arlington Heights Road is within a Frisbee toss of the two handsome newcomers.