Highway

             Jetting off to a tropical isle in the dead of an Illinois winter, if you’ve the time and money, is more than the stuff of dreams.  Hundreds of people leave every day on trips of one, two, or many thousands of miles.  It’s no miracle that is, unless you think about it from a little different prospective.

           Imagine that you are a sophisticated Easterner.  The year is 1840 and you’re headed to “The West."  You’re really planning on going all the way to Illinois.  It will truly be an adventure worth writing home about------because travel through any part of “the West," was an adventure in itself.  Traveling beyond Chicago, at that time, was even more of a challenge.

           Illinois was still a trackless prairie for the most part.  According to the Gurler House Chronicles, interior access to Illinois was the first problem, confronting both the traveler and the settlers in that day.  We read where early settlers to southern and central Illinois, came primarily by boat, down the Ohio and up the Wabash and Mississippi Rivers and their tributaries.  Away from the river, settlers came by foot, horseback, wagon or prairie schooner.  Progress was extremely slow and laborious.    Just because travel was difficult, it didn’t mean that people lost their desire to go from one community to another.  After all, people traveled all the time in the East and lived to tell about it.  They wanted to do the same in Illinois.

             Travelers, as distinct from settlers, were the equivalent of present day tourists.  They usually traveled by stagecoach.  Early routes were laid out from Chicago along river valleys or across country to Galena, however they rarely passed through DeKalb County.  Other trails were made into the area, and some of them became crude roads.  A few survived and later became the modern highways that we now enjoy. 

             In 1837 the Territory known as Kane County was divided and the Westerly portion became DeKalb County.  Two years later, Washington officials sent a surveyor here to make the first official map of the County.  The current road, known as Chicago Road, was surveyed at this time, pretty much where it is today.  This probably makes it the oldest road that was continuous across the County at that time, and still exists today.  This survey map indicated several roads in the county that covered a few miles here and there, but few were inter-connected.  Most of these early thoroughfares did not survive.

In 1834 a mail route was established from Chicago to the Rock River, crossing the southern end of DeKalb County.  In 1837 a stagecoach route was established from St. Charles to Oregon, which traveled across the northern part of the county.  In 1840, 24 Road Districts were formed in the County.  The State Road from Ottawa to Beloit Wisconsin was laid out in 1841 running through DeKalb County.

  Heavy rains and serious flooding in the County, swept away nearly all the bridges in 1844, making travel even more difficult.  In 1851 a wooden plank road was built from St. Charles to Sycamore to try and improve the traveled surface.  It was built as a toll road, but lasted only about a year.  It’s failure again due to washouts, and the extreme difficulty in holding the planks in place.

In 1914 the County Highway System was established and a segment of the first experimental cement highway was laid near Malta.   DeKalb County got its first really beneficial paved road with the finishing of Lincoln highway across the county in 1920. The first highway signs were installed in 1929.   In 1937 Annie Glidden Road was paved for 12 miles at a cost of $125,792.98.  I was amused to read that even that low sounding figure, was in excess of the estimated cost.  As early as 1923 the idea of building the Chicago-Iowa Trail was discussed.  In September of 1937 this Trunk Road, renamed State Route 64, was opened to traffic from Chicago to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, passing through Sycamore.

Continued......