Wayne HistoryDuPage Roots Then and Now - a snapshot of Wayne history
Late in July 1832, a contingent of General Winfield Scott's army crossed the Wayne area on their way to reinforce the Illinois militia that was fighting Chief Black Hawk and his Sauk braves. They camped along the west branch of the DuPage River, about a mile and a half north of future Wayne Center. The present Army Trail Road commemorates their passage, although this road was not the actual route.
The permanent white settlers arrived in Wayne Township in 1834, when John Laughlin, a 27 year- old bachelor, reached the area on May 8th. He was the first to establish a claim in the area. The next settlers were Robert Y. and Nancy Benjamin, with the first four of their eight children, together with Robert's father Daniel and brother John, came from Warren County, Indiana. They claim their land on May 12th, and built a log cabin within three days. Both companies located in a grove of sheltering trees on a rise of ground that overlooked the newly emerging prairie grasses and flowers. The Benjamins' homestead was located just east of the west branch of the DuPage River in Section 26, while Laughlin's claim lay four and a half miles to the west, in Section 19 The following year Edmund Bartlett and Solomon Dunham emigrated from New York State and "took up land" north and south of the present junction of Dunham and Army Trail Roads. During the next quarter century there was a multiplying of new settlers including: Luther Bartlett, John Glos, Elijah L. Guild, John and Abraham Kershaw, Joseph McMillen, Peter Pratt, Theodore Schramer and John Smith. By 1861 all the land in the area had been claimed, settled, and divided between cultivation and pasture. As DuPage County was divided into nine voting precincts in 1839, the Orange region included Wayne Township, as well as parts of present Bloomingdale and Winfield townships. When Bloomingdale Precinct was formed in 1841, the original precinct decreased in size. Three years later, the County Commissioners' Court directed that elections be held at Joseph McMillen's farm house, on the northwest corner of present day Route 59 and Army Trail Road. The first concentrated settlement was the small community at Wayne Center, north of the Benjamins' land, straddling the west branch of DuPage River. Henry B. and Eunice Hemenway and her brother, Elijah Lyman Guild, were the first to stake claims in Wayne Center, about 1836. In 1837, the Reverend William Kimball, a Methodist preacher, arrived in the area with his family and held worship services in his log cabin for the few pioneer settlers. The following year he and his neighbors built a log house which served as a week day school and a Sabbath day church. Abner Guild and James Nind opened a general store in 1844, and people flocked to it in order to exchange their produce and coins for "store boughten" goods. These amenities were the first of their kind in the township. The Township Organization law went into effect in January 1850. It is traditionally believed that the Township was named in honor of Major General Anthony Wayne. It was he who had won the Northwest Territory for the United States by defeating a confederation of Indian tribes near Toledo, Ohio, in 1794. A provision of the law called for the proceeds from land sales in Section 16 of each township to be used for a school fund. A direct result of this specification was the construction of several new school houses. These schools were, most probably, the Benjamin, Dunham's Depot (Wayne), Hammond (near the junction of Smith Road and Route 64), Orangeville, Wayne Center, and the Red School (corner of Smith Road and Route 59). The first annual township meeting was held April 2, 1850, at the home of Joseph McMillen, who was also serving as the first postmaster. The Wayne Elementary School of the modern day dates from 1850. Before this meeting took place, high-soaring hawks along the eastern horizon could have seen movement which foretold the coming of the railroad. Slowly, but steadily, the Galena and Chicago Union's strap rails advanced. From the sixteen-year-old city of Chicago, they made their way across the prairie grasses and bridged their way across the prairie streams and sloughs. By January 1850 "The Pioneer," a small bell funneled engine, was pulling its log filled tender and one car over the right-of-way donated by Solomon Dunham, Edward Brewster, and other farmers. Dunham fully appreciated the potential of the railroad, and he took four actions that made him the founder of the second settlement, Wayne Station. The first step was a petition to the road commissioners of St. Charles and Wayne townships to build a road from the door yard of his red brick farmhouse to the state road (now Route 59). When this was granted, he proceeded to construct an inn, a general store, and a house, all just east of the tracks. He also secured appointments as the community's first station agent and postmaster. Both offices were in the depot. By 1864 the business district had grown considerably. The Illinois Gazeteer for that year listed the following enterprises: Adams, Hiram: Boot and Shoemaker Adams, J. Q.: General Store Arndt, John: Wagonmaker Campbell & Bros: General Store Carswell, Robert: Carpenter Fren, Lars: Mason Garron, Geo.: Blacksmith Hartz, Michael: Blacksmith Wolcott, Morgan: Carpenter Meanwhile, Wayne Center was also thriving. The post office had been moved from the McMillen farm to Abner Guild's store in 1851. Henry Sherman had opened a blacksmith shop. Guild's brother, William K., was operating a broom factory on his farm. A Congregational church had been organized in the mid-1840s. By 1851 its parishioners had acquired sufficient funds to buy a third of an acre on the north side of Army Trail Road, between Gerber and Fair Oaks roads, and to build their first house of worship. In 1871 five of its members withdrew to join thirteen others in becoming charter members of the new church at Wayne Station. The older congregation began to decline. Compounding its misfortune was the fact that none of the railroads opted to build through the settlement; thus it slowly ceased to exist. The one reminder of its former presence is the small cemetery on a hill to the west, which was started in the 1840s. Another pioneer graveyard is the Little Woods Cemetery, once located on Luther Pierce’s farm in the northwest corner of the township. The earliest grave marker was that of a Lucy Hammond born December 1801, died April 1838. Mark Wentworth Dunham, Solomon's youngest son, inherited his father's 300 acre farm when the senior Dunham died in 1865. Ten years later he bought the Percheron horse "Success" for $3,300 and launched the Oak Lawn Farm Importing and Breeding business, specializing in the breeding of Percheron horses. By 1883 he had prospered to such an extent that a west wing was added to the farmhouse to serve as an office, Dunham built new home during 1878-82, Dunham Castle, an imposing stone structure with turret was patterned after the Normandy chateaux Dunham had seen while on stock buying trips in France. During this same period houses were being built along Main Street by retired farmers, successful merchants, and men who worked in various capacities on the Dunham farm and for the Chicago and North Western Railroad. Three additional railroads were constructed across the township between 1873 and 1888, the Chicago & Pacific (Milwaukee), the Chicago & Great Western, and the Illinois Central. The hopeful settlements that sprang up in their wake --Ontarioville, Ingalton, Schick, Granger, and Munger-- were short lived, with the exception of Ontarioville. Its station was subsequently renamed Hanover Park. Chicago, Aurora & Elgin Railway, an electric interurban line, was completed in 1907. It furnished additional train service for the township, and provided a source of electricity for street lights. Dr. William L. Guild came to Wayne in 1884 and served both the settlement and the township. He had been born at Wayne Center on December 5, 1859, a grandson of Massachusetts pioneers Israel and Rachel Guild. William's parents were Dr. Elias and Alice Guild, who had given sanctuary to runaway slaves prior to the Civil War. Among William's first patients was a workman who had caught his foot in machinery. The young doctor performed an amputation by the light of a lantern held by a hired girl. When his father, who had moved to Wheaton, died in 1908, Dr. Guild took over his practice, dividing his time between Wayne and that city, until his death in 1936. In 1910 Elwood and Louise Powis Brown, she a granddaughter of Solomon Dunham's eldest son, Daniel, were sent to Manila by the YMCA. While there, Mrs. Brown became impressed by the beautiful embroidery done by the native women. As an experiment, she designed a nightgown and commissioned one of the Filipinos to embroider it. The result so pleased her that she sent several samples to her mother, Mrs. Julia Dunham Powis, in Wayne. Eventually, the production of this attire developed into a million dollar business, and moved its headquarters from the family home, "Grove Place," to New York City. The mother-daughter team sold their interest in the company after Mr. Brown's death in 1929. The International Harvester Company began testing and improving farm machinery on the 200-acre Daniel Dunham farm in 1916. They completed their experiments in 1921, and Wirth Dunham bought the property. He built a hemp mill and raised this crop for processing. At its peak the plant employed thirty men and produced 350,000 pounds of fiber. The mill was sold and moved to China in 1931. The Reverend Orlando S. Grinnell accepted a call to the Wayne Congregational Church in the fall of 1918. For that congregation's fiftieth anniversary, in 1921, Grinnell composed a hymn which he entitled "The Little Home Church by the Wayside." This was adopted as its official name in 1940. Another event of post-war year 1921 was the founding of the Women's Club of Wayne. While its nucleus was comprised of the wives of farmers and merchants in and close to the settlement, several women from the township-dc at-large were also members. Miss Hattie Glos was the first president. Among the club's many accomplishments was the operation of the street lights, until 1951. Another important club founded in the 1920s was the Wayne-DuPage Hunt, founded in the 1920s to conduct fox hunts. When founded the club engaged foxes, but as sporting values changed the hunt employed a dragged bag to chase. In 1926 Michael J. Bloze established the Illinois Pet Cemetery close to the eastern boundary of the township. In its grounds, located on Jefferson Street, just north of Schick Road, thousands of pets were buried there in the decades after its founding. Also in 1926, Mark Morton of the Morton Salt Company family bought the 400 acre W. S. Lee farm and started the Morton Sand and Gravel Company. It was operated through the 1940s; then it was sold to private owners. The lake, formed by the excavating, became an important feature of Pratts Wayne Woods, a forest preserve purchased by the county in 1965. About 1927 Wirth Dunham and his sister Bernice Dunham West formed a partnership and began to subdivide the nearly 2,000 acres they had inherited from their father, Mark. The partnership was dissolved after Wirth's death in an automobile accident in 1931; it was restructured as Dunham's Incorporated. Solomon Dunham's red brick farm house, just two years short of its hundredth birthday, was leased to a group of residents in 1934. They organized the Dunham Woods Riding Club and used the building as their headquarters. Almost from its beginning, the six-mile square township designated "Wayne" had the smallest population in the county. The census of 1850 listed 856 residents, the vast majority of whom were farmers. Eighty years later there were 1,166, a gain of only 310 people, while the other townships had doubled and tripled their numbers. Growth had been slow because it had remained predominantly agricultural, with only a small part of Ontarioville and the little settlement of Wayne serving as population clusters. There was no major industry until the 1920s, and most of it was confined to North Avenue, and to the south along Powis Road. Among the first such enterprises was a private airport. A group of aviation enthusiasts bought farmland from Colonel E. J. Baker on the south side of Route 64. They called themselves Air Associates; they had built their first hangar by 1929. George G. Ball purchased the airport in 1939. With the advent of World War II, the flying field became important to the Federal Government, which paid for the first paved runways and lent a large sum of money to have the Howard Aircraft Company plant built. After the war that building was sold; it became the Owens-Illinois Glass Works' Plastic Division in 1947, while the airfield became DuPage Airport. The prize-winning author Marguerite Henry came in 1940 to Wayne where most of her widely read children's books were written. Among them were Justin Morgan Had a Horse (1945), Misty of Chincoteague (1947), and King of the Wind (1949). She and her husband moved in 1971 to California. The Wayne Community Association, a private organization, formed to administer the Wayne community, held its first meeting at the school on September 5, 1945. President Corwith Hamill explained that the former Wayne Carnival Committee, whose annual fund-raising event supplemented school funds, had decided to incorporate in order to serve the community more effectively. As early as 1943 subdivisions began to appear in the township. Hugh M. Cornell developed Waynewood, just east of the angle formed by the junction of routes 64 and 59. Lakewood, to the north, was subdivided in 1946. Noting these basic changes to the landscape, the Community Association appointed a five-person Planning Committee in November 1948 to work with county zoning officials on a long-range area plan. Its purpose was to preserve and protect as much of the remaining open lands as possible. After a century of service the Chicago and North Western intercity passenger trains were discontinued in the spring of 1950. The line, however, continued with its commuter service into Chicago. The Chicago, Aurora & Elgin discontinued its service in 1957, and on its roadbed the Prairie Path, a hiking and bicycle trail, was created in sections over the next decade. When Wayne Township and Wayne Station's first century rolled around, in 1950, 79year-old Miss Hattie Glos co-authored a little booklet, Wayne Township: A Commemorative History. In 1953 it was revised and expanded to become the Wayne Community and Township History. An old Dunham Coach House owned by the Dunham Woods Riding Club burned down in 1950, but with the insurance proceeds the club purchased other old Dunham facilities—the Inn, Lower Barn, tennis courts, a swimming pool, and surrounding land. In 1953, Dunham Castle was converted into an apartment complex of four roomy apartments. Two years later, an immense Spanish-style structure, Christ the King Seminary, was built on the northwest corner of routes 59 and 64. It was founded by the Franciscan Fathers. The land purchased for this endeavor was once part of Theodore Schramer's farm. He had been born in Prussia in 1839, and immigrated to the United States in 1857. He farmed near Wheaton for a number of years. Then Schramer married Mary Lies in 1863, and in the early 1870s bought the land that encompassed the four corners of this intersection. With the single exception of this sale, the remainder of the farm continued to be owned by the family until the early 1970s. Approximately twenty years after purchasing the property, the Franciscan Fathers sold it to a private partnership which converted the building into a convalescent center. By 1958, the Wayne Community Association had become alarmed by the expansion of subdivisions. A committee was appointed to study the advisability of incorporating as a village. This option was opposed by those residents who believed it would drastically change the character of the community. A referendum was held on September 1 and the proposal passed by the narrow margin of 95 to 87. The first village board was sworn into office that November. An early measure voted by the board were the adoption of subdivision regulations and a zoning ordinance. The Community Association continued to serve as the financial unit by collecting voluntary dues of $60 a year from each family. This money supplied funds for street lighting and, in the beginning, a one-man police department. In the early 1960s, William and Theresa Heinz Warner razed their 120-year-old farm house built by Joseph McMillen, the township's first postmaster. A few years later they sold the western ten acres of their farm to the Diocese of Joliet, which organized a new parish, Resurrection Catholic Church, in 1968, erecting the church on the former Heinz Warner land. Resurrection joined the historic Little Home Church by the Wayside (a member of the United Church of Christ) as the second house of worship in Wayne. In the same year Dunham's Incorporated sold the 1,100 acres which comprised the North and South Farms, on either side of Army Trail Road west of the village, to the Oliver Hoffmann Corporation. In 1970, the population of the village numbered 572 residents. The Little Home Church by the Wayside celebrated its 100th Anniversary in 1971. Descendants of four charter members were present as were the fourth and fifth generations of John Laughlin's family. The planning committee wrote a booklet entitled The Plow and The Cross, which traced the church's service to village and township through the years. The Pheasant Run resort complex was opened in 1963. Located just west of DuPage Airport, it was described by The St Charles Chronicle as "The million dollar development of the late Colonel E. J. Baker's 175-acre Airport Farm." In 1979 a fifteen-story tower, the tallest in the township, was completed for offices and other functions. The Forest Preserve District of DuPage County's first acquisition in the township was Wayne Grove, purchased in 1923. It was the only local preserve until 1956, when Mallard Lake was acquired. The district's first purchase for what became Pratt's Wayne Woods took place in 1965. George R Pratt was the guiding hand behind this achievement. In 1974 he elected to sell his Maple Spring Farm, which had been owned by his family for four generations, to the Forest Preserve District. The year 1974 was also when the DuPage Airport was purchased and placed under the management of the Fox Valley Community Airport Authority. The referendum passed by a vote of 4,217 to 1,737 with the communities of Batavia, Geneva, St Charles, Wayne, and West Chicago participating. Money needs, a recurring problem for the Village of Wayne, became acute in 1977. The voluntary dues had been gradually raised to $225 a year. For the first time the concept of taxes was no longer considered an anathema. The annual township meeting was held on April 5, 1977. There were eight Republican and eight Democratic candidates on the ballots. The Republicans won, as they had in every election since the party was formed in 1854. In 1975, the Dunham Woods Riding Club purchased additional land from the old Dunham properties, adding outdoor riding rings, an indoor riding ring, outside cross-country course, and tenant house, and new pole barn, The Dunham Woods Riding Club building was the original Dunham residence), and was located at the intersection of Army Trail Road and Dunham Road,. During 1978, a committee was formed in the Village of Wayne to investigate the possibility of its attaining historic district status. The purpose was to protect and preserve the community's nineteenth-century quality. The Wayne Village Historic District application was approved and received its official designation on December 19 of that year. As early as the 1940s Village residents realized that they would need to deal with pressures of growth while wanting to preserve and protect as much of the remaining open land as possible. The threat of high-density development in the 1980s threatened the rural and equestrian character that was so unique to the Village and important to its residents. Several new subdivisions were cropping up on the outskirts of the original Village. Concerned that large tracts of land would annex to contiguous towns with different zoning that would negatively affect the rural roots of Wayne, the Village annexed many of the bordering properties. Wayne subsequently negotiated boundary agreements with St. Charles, West Chicago, South Elgin and Bartlett. The Village of Wayne was changing so quickly that maps of the area were unavailable. During this time, the Wayne Area Conservancy Foundation was created to preserve the heritage of equestrian activities, the lifestyle the residents of Wayne had come to cherish, and to partner with the Village in curbing unrestrained growth. Under the Foundation’s steadfast involvement and financial support, the DuPage Forest Preserve purchased 374 acres of land on the south side of Army Trail Rd., creating the Dunham Forest Preserve and ending forever the controversy of commercial development along Wayne’s Historic main road and thoroughfare. Due to traffic congestion created with the widening of Rt. 59 to the east and the extension of Kirk Rd. connecting to Dunham Rd., the County installed the first and only traffic light at the intersection of Army Trail and Dunham Roads in 1995. Wayne argued for the preservation of the Historic District that encompassed two of the four corners of the intersection to no avail, receiving a small concession to the riding community of a stirrup high crossing button for riders to get from one side of Dunham Rd to the other. Preservation was the main focus of Wayne’s Comprehensive Plan, and historic preservation was always included as an important tool by those who hoped to keep Wayne the way it was. Under the guidance of a newly hired Intergovernmental Liaison, the Village of Wayne became a Certified Local Government in 1996. With this designation from the State of Illinois, the Village was able to qualify for several grants that were used to strengthen the significance of the two Historic Districts. The historical significance of the area was used to acquire Army Trail Road from the County, ending fears and rumors that the road would be widened to accommodate heavy traffic from surrounding communities. When the road was returned to its original owner, its name was restored to Old Wayne Road. To thwart threats of a bridge at Red Gate that would bring more traffic through the Village, residents along Army Trail Rd. between Rt. 25 and Rt. 59 deeded a portion of their road-front property as easements to the Village through the grass roots Historic and Rural Preservation program (HARP). Wayne was using all means available to retain its rural character and small-town charm. The death of Mark Dunham’s granddaughter, Jane, in 1996 marked the end of an era, though Wayne’s history continued to be recorded and preserved through the 1990s by long time Wayne resident, teacher and historian, Tannisse Blatchford. In 2000 the Wayne Historical Preservation Society (WHPS) was created to “preserve, record and display historical records of the Village of Wayne and foster a sense of community and permanence in the Fox River Valley”. WHPS took over the management of the historic Old Town Hall, accessioned the archives and historic artifacts from the Dunham Hunt Museum, resurrected the annual Wayne Day picnic, and in 2007 moved the historic Wayne train depot back to its original location next to the Chicago and Northwestern tracks. WHPS’s proudest accomplishment of 2019 was the signing of the declaration of Sister Cities with Nogent-le-Rotrou. Wayne’s mayor and representatives of WHPS traveled to the Perche region in France to formalize and celebrate the memory of Mark Dunham’s trips to that area in the 1800s where he purchased his prize winning Percherons and helped create a Society for the French breeders to protect the pure line of their exceptional horses. In 2014, for the second time in Village history, the Dunham-established property covenants regarding zoning and lot size were upheld when a developer attempted to convert the Dunham castle into a commercial venue. By 2020, the population of Wayne had almost doubled that of the 1980s but was still considered a rural oasis in the midst of a rapidly developing area, remaining a quiet place to live and breathe amid its equestrian heritage. |
