Chicago’s Spectacular Growth Story

Chicago, on Lake Michigan in Illinois, is among the largest cities in the U.S. Famed for its bold architecture, it has a skyline punctuated by skyscrapers such as the iconic John Hancock Center, Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower) and the neo-Gothic Tribune Tower.

The city is also renowned for its museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago with its noted Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works. Chicago has played a central role in American economic, cultural and political history.

Since the 1870s it has been the largest and most dominant metropolis in the Midwestern United States.

Early History

The recorded history begins with the arrival of French explorers, missionaries and fur traders in the late 17th century and their interaction with the local Potawatomi Native Americans.

Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a black freeman, by 1790 was the first permanent non-indigenous settler in the area. The small settlement was defended by Fort Dearborn after its completion in 1804, but was abandoned as part of the War of 1812 In expectation of an attack by the Potawatomi, who caught up with the retreating soldiers and civilians.

The modern city was incorporated in 1837 by Northern businessmen and grew rapidly from real estate speculation and the realization that it had a commanding position in the emerging inland transportation network, based on lake traffic and railroads, controlling access from the Great Lakes and the eastern states into the Mississippi River basin.

Chicago: Transportation Hub

Yankee entrepreneurs saw the potential of Chicago as a transportation hub in the 1830s and engaged in land speculation to obtain the choicest lots. On August 12, 1833, the Town of Chicago was incorporated with a population of 350.The Chippewa, Odawa and Potawatomi indigenous tribes ceded land in Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan in the 1833 Treaty of Chicago and were forced to move west of the Mississippi River by 1838.

After 1830, the rich farmlands of northern Illinois attracted Yankee settlers. Yankee real estate operators created a city overnight in the 1830s.To open the surrounding farmlands to trade, roads were built roads south and west.

These enabled hundreds of wagons per day of farm produce to arrive and so the entrepreneurs built grain elevators and docks to load ships bound for points east through the Great Lakes. Produce was shipped through the Erie Canal and down the Hudson River to New York City; the growth of the Midwest farms expanded New York City as a port.

In 1848, the opening of the Illinois and Michigan Canal allowed shipping from the Great Lakes through Chicago to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. The first rail line to Chicago was completed the same year.

Chicago would go on to become the transportation hub of the United States, with its road, rail, water, and later air connections. Chicago also became home to national retailers offering catalog shopping such as Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck and Company, which used the transportation lines to ship all over the nation.

Chicago: Railroad City

By the 1850s, the construction of railroads made Chicago a major hub and over 30 lines entered the city. The main lines from the East ended in Chicago, and those oriented to the West began in Chicago and so by 1860, the city had become the nation’s trans-shipment and warehousing center. Factories were created, most famously the harvester factory that was opened in 1847 by Cyrus Hall McCormick. It was a processing center for natural resource commodities extracted in the West. The Wisconsin forests supported the millwork and lumber business; the Illinois hinterland provided the wheat.

Hundreds of thousands of hogs and cattle were shipped to Chicago for slaughter, preserved in salt, in giant meat packing plants and transported to eastern markets. By 1870, refrigerated cars allowed the shipping of fresh meat to cities in the East.

By 1860 traffic on Lake Michigan made Chicago one of the busiest ports in the Western Hemisphere. In the 1850s the Congress decided to promote railroads by giving them land grants. The Illinois Central Railroad was the first to be established. Banks loaned it the $27 million needed for construction and by 1860 it operated 705 miles of track criss-crossing Illinois from Chicago to Galena to Cairo.

It was the longest railway in the world. It set up a depot every ten miles, where ambitious men rushed in to start a town by buying plots from the land grant. In the decade of the 1850s, the national railway grid was expanding rapidly from 9,000 miles of track to 31,000. Outside the Midwest, rail mileage tripled, but inside the region it expanded by a factor of 7 from 1,300 to 9,000 miles.

Chicago thereby became the world’s greatest rail center. Much of the necessary iron and steel was imported from Pittsburgh, but new mills were Increasingly set up in Chicago.

Chicago: Immigrant City

The prairie bog nature of the area provided a fertile ground for disease-carrying insects. In springtime, Chicago was so muddy from the high water that horses could scarcely move.

Traveler’s reported Chicago was the filthiest city in America. The city created a massive sewer system. In the first phase, sewage pipes were laid across the city above ground and used gravity to move the waste. The city was built in a low-lying area subject to flooding. In 1856, the city council decided that the entire city should be elevated four to five feet by using a newly available jacking-up process.

Although originally settled by Yankees in the 1830s, the city in the 1840s had many Irish Catholics who came as a result of the Great Famine. Later in the century, the railroads, stockyards, and other heavy industry of the late 19th century attracted a variety of skilled workers from Europe, especially Germans, English, Swedes, Norwegians, and Dutch. A small African-American community formed, and established Chicago as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

In 1840, Chicago was the 92nd city in the United States by population. Its population grew so rapidly that 20 years later, it was the ninth city. In the pivotal year of 1848, Chicago saw the completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, its first steam locomotives, the introduction of steam-powered grain elevators, the arrival of the telegraph, and the founding of the Chicago Board of Trade.

By 1857, Chicago was the largest city in what was then called the Northwest. In 20 years, Chicago grew from 4,000 people to over 90,000. Chicago surpassed St. Louis and Cincinnati as the major city in the West and gained political notice as the home of Stephen Douglas, the 1860 presidential nominee of the Northern Democrats. The 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago nominated the home-state candidate Abraham Lincoln.

By 1870, Chicago had grown to become the nation’s second-largest city and one of the largest cities in the world. Between 1870 and 1900, Chicago grew from a city of 299,000 to nearly 1.7 million and was the fastest-growing city in world history. Chicago’s flourishing economy attracted huge numbers of new immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe, especially Jews, Poles, and Italians, along with many smaller groups. Many businesspeople and professionals arrived from the eastern states.

Chicago: Civil War City

The Civil War (1861–1865) was a crucial event in the development of Chicago. The city’s government, businesses, voluntary societies, and patriotic families gave massive support to the war effort, while the national government provided heavy funding.

By 1861 the city’s commercial infrastructure and water and rail links had advanced enough to support rapid industrialisation funded by the national war effort.

When the war broke out in 1861, Chicago’s main rivals Cincinnati and St Louis lost access to their primary markets to the South. Chicago replaced them as the hub for the national distribution of wheat and meat. Furthermore, Chicago became the supply base for the Western armies, as General Ulysses S Grant took his forces on the Illinois Central down to Cairo. It was his supply base as he marched south to seize control of Kentucky and Tennessee on his way to victories at Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga.

The opening of the Union Stock Yard clinched Chicago’s new dominant role for beef and pork as farmers across the hinterland shipped their cattle and hogs by rail.Hundreds of small factories opened in Chicago to provide Union forces with urgently needed supplies from uniforms to wagons. Between 1860 and 1870 factory employment exploded from 5,400 to 31,000, while the city’s population tripled from 112,000 people to 299,000.

All the new business necessitated expanded banking facilities. Thanks to new federal laws creating the national banking system, local financiers opened 13 national banks in the city in 1863 to 1865. Leadership came from the First National Bank of Chicago which not only served local business but also serviced accounts for 80 new national banks in 15 states. Chicago’s big banks dominated the west in the same way New York’s Wall Street dominated the rest of the nation’s finance.

Chicago sent 36,000 men to war. About four thousand Chicago soldiers died Pride in their heroism became memorialised in the tall statues standing guard over city parks named after Grant and Lincoln.

The Great Fire

Most of the city burned in the 1871 Great Chicago Fire. The damage from the fire was immense since 300 people died, 18,000 buildings were destroyed, and nearly 100,000 of the city’s 300,000 residents were left homeless. Several key factors exacerbated the spread of the fire. Most of Chicago’s buildings and sidewalks were then constructed of wood.

Developers and citizens began immediate reconstruction on the existing Jeffersonian grid. The building boom that followed saved the city’s status as the transportation and trade hub of the Midwest. Massive reconstruction using the newest materials and methods catapulted Chicago into its status as a city on par with New York and became the birthplace of modern architecture in the United States.The fire led to the incorporation of stringent fire-safety codes, which included a strong preference for masonry construction.

The Danish immigrant Jens Jensen arrived in 1886 and soon became a successful and celebrated landscape designer. Jensen’s work was characterised by a democratic approach to landscaping, which was informed by his interest in social justice and conservation, and a rejection of antidemocratic formalism. Among Jensen’s creations were four Chicago city parks, most famously Columbus Park. His work also included garden design for some of the region’s most influential millionaires.

Destination: Mid West