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Local History Collection
Contemporary Oak Park Authors
Burroughs, Edgar Rice
Hemingway, Ernest
Shields, Carol
Wright, Frank Lloyd

Oak Park History
Oak Park is located on Chicago's western border seven miles from the city's center. It is four and one half square miles in size and has a population of approximately fifty thousand residents. Oak Park is a residential town. It has no major industries. Most of its residents earn their living in other towns or in the city of Chicago.

Oak Park has never viewed itself as an anonymous bedroom community however. From the beginning it took great pride in things that set it apart from other communities, especially the city of Chicago. "When the saloons stop and the church steeples begin" is the way one book describes entering Oak Park. Early Oak Park residents believed that theirs was a model community, a city on a hill, that served as a shinning example for other communities to follow.

This idea that Oak Park was a city on a hill has some basis in fact. Much of Chicago is built on land that was swamp for part of the year. Oak Park began to grow in the 1840s on a low sandy ridge west of Chicago. This ridge, the first dry land west of lake Michigan, greatly contributed to Oak Park's early appeal.

In 1848 Oak Park became one of the first towns to be linked to Chicago by rail. This connection transformed Oak Park from a distant town to a Chicago suburb and attracted those who could afford to move their families to its quiet streets and commute to work. As Chicago drained its land and grew into the mighty metropolis of the midwest, Oak Park prospered.

Oak Park residents, which included leaders of some of Chicago's major corporations, were supporters of the city's cultural institutions but they also took care to develop and support a wide range of educational and cultural institutions in their home town. They took pride in their schools and churches and in such local cultural offerings as a symphony orchestra, an art fair, an opera company, a lecture series, and a repertory theater. The Oak Park Public Library's own benefactor, James Wilmarth Scoville, was a Chicago business leader who built and furnished the first library as a gift to the town.

By the end of the nineteenth century Oak Park was no longer a suburban refuge, far from the city's core. The city had grown. In 1900, Chicago's western boundary reached Oak Park. Despite Chicago's proximity, Oak Park resisted being swallowed up by the city. The "World's Largest Village," as Oak Park described itself, remained stubbornly independent, socially, politically, and culturally.

Oak Park continued to see itself as a special community where new standards were set for other communities to follow. When Oak Park was tainted with the type of political corruption that was considered endemic in Chicago it adopted the village manager form of municipal government.

In the 1960s the black community on Chicago's west side expanded to the city's edge, and Oak Park's border. Racial change was imminent. In Chicago, racial change meant a pattern of block by block resegregation that transformed communities from all white to all black. The experts saw no reason for the pattern to be different in Oak Park.

The experts were wrong. Through a series of initiatives from the village's government and private groups, Oak Park encouraged blacks to move into all parts of town and it encouraged white residents to welcome their new neighbors. Oak Park became an integrated community and once again offered itself as a model for other communities.

This Oak Park tradition of setting new standards for others to follow was shared by some of its residents. Oak Park has had more than its share of innovators. Some were born here. Some adopted Oak Park as their hometown. These people had a significant impact on American culture and many brought revolutionary changes to their respective fields.

Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Carol Shields in literature, Bruce Barton in advertising, Percy Julian in chemistry, Doris Humphrey in dance, Carl Rogers in psychotherapy, Richard W. Sears in mail order and department store retail, Ray Kroc in fast food restaurants, are among the better known Oak Park innovators. Frank Lloyd Wright, the self described genius of American architecture, left the most visible legacy in Oak Park. The twenty five buildings he designed here bring thousands of tourist annually to Oak Park.

Read an account of Oak Park history provided by the Oak Park Tourist and the Historical Society of Oak Park and River Forest.

For more information contact William Jerousek, Local History Librarian, at or call 708-452-3480.