Editorial: Seek out our suburbs' history right under your nose
Imagine the place you call home before there was a Walgreens on every corner, before a McDonald's was never more than a brief hunger pang away.
When Indians camped along our riverbanks. When mastodons slurped from our swamps. It really is difficult to imagine that we live in an area that was rich with history before even the first white settlers claimed their stakes on this land just two centuries ago.
Most of Chicago's suburbs didn't pop up until 50 or 60 years ago on what then was farmland. But Batavia, Glen Ellyn, Geneva and St. Charles were all incorporated in the 1830s, long before the Civil War. Back when water powered everything, such settlements arose along the Fox River, the Des Plaines, the DuPage.
Before that, the Illini and Ho-Chunk tribes thrived here.
In Monday's paper, Staff Writer Erin Hegarty wrote about a group of people trying to bring back to life some of that history by sifting through Cook County forest preserves.
How quaint, you might say.
A 10-member crew of archaeologists and interns has been looking at land along the Des Plaines River for artifacts in conjunction with The Prairie Research Institute's State Archaeological Survey, the Illinois State Water Survey and the Forest Preserves of Cook County. Having had luck in the South suburbs, they've turned their attention to the north. All told, researchers have identified about 550 archaeological sites in the Cook County Forest Preserve District.
Many of the artifacts they've found come from the Woodland Period, which began about 3,000 years ago. It marked the period in which tribes began settling along the river year round.
But it's not just the pottery and arrowheads that the humans who preceded us here left behind that is so fascinating.
In 1963, a man who was using a drag line to empty a pond on the edge of the DuPage River watershed in Glen Ellyn scooped up a bone - a very big bone. Buried there, under 10-20 feet of clay deposited during the Ice Age that ended 10,000 years ago was a mastodon.
The Perry Mastodon, named for the judge who owned the land, has been meticulously reassembled and now can be found at Wheaton College's science center.
You might be surprised to find out just how much history exists in local museums across the suburbs. Some of it is quaint, relics of a few generations ago.
Some of it reminds us of very different beginnings of our towns that were once thriving industrial centers, such as Elgin, which was the world's leading maker of wrist watches and which pioneered milk processing. Or Batavia, which had the most windmill factories per capita.
Next time you're looking for something to do, take the kids - or the closest forest preserve - and do a little scavenger hunt. There is no telling what treasures you might find.
Some day in a few hundred years, people will poke around the Mallard Lake Forest Preserve in DuPage County or the Settler's Hill Forest Preserve in Kane County - both longtime landfills - dig up some of the garbage we buried and learn a little about us.