Oswego, Illinois

Website www.oswegoil.org

Oswego is a village within the Chicago Metropolitan Area located in Kendall and Will Counties, Illinois, United States. According to the 2020 census, the population was 34,485. Oswego is the largest municipality in Kendall County and is considered a suburb/exurb of Chicago, Illinois.

History of Oswego

The Little White School Museum in downtown Oswego was built in 1850

In 1833, William Smith Wilson, his wife Rebecca, and his brother-in-law Daniel Pearce moved to the area now known as Oswego. The land originally belonged to the local Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa tribes, but the United States government removed the Native Americans when it began surveying the land along the Fox River in Kendall County. In 1842, the federal government put the land up for sale at a price of $1.25 an acre.

After the land sale, Lewis Brinsmaid Judson and Levi F. Arnold from New York laid out the village and initially named it "Hudson". However, confusion arose when the post office was established, and its location was designated as "Lodi". In January 1837, the citizens gathered and voted to adopt "Oswego" as the permanent name of the village by a single vote. The village was named after Oswego, New York, an Iroquois word meaning "mouth of the stream". Oswego continued to thrive economically and as a town, eventually incorporating in 1852, with its village boundaries extending from Harrison Street to the northwest, Jefferson Street to the northeast, Monroe Street to the southeast, and Benton Street to the southwest.[10] With the advent of the automobile, Oswego continued to experience growth and became a hub for three different state highways (Illinois Route 25, Illinois Route 71, and Illinois Route 31).

Major community developments began when Caterpillar Inc. and Western Electric constructed industrial plants near Oswego in the mid-1950s. This led to the initial development of nearby Boulder Hill. The next significant development arrived in the mid-1980s during the suburban home building boom, which saw houses and buildings populate the village. The rapid growth of Oswego expanded its limits west of the Fox River to its current boundaries.

Oswego gained recognition among some Chicago-area residents for the town dragstrip on State Route 34, which operated from 1955 until 1979, attracting muscle car drivers from across the Midwest. Although the drag strip has been closed for decades, the drag days are still celebrated, and remnants of the track, including parts of it, can still be found, though the site itself is off-limits to the public.