Hinsdale Before it was Hinsdale

Hinsdale was there long before it was Hinsdale.  The Hinsdale that we know by that name was founded in 1866, shortly after the CB&Q railroad was built through the vicinity.  Long before Hinsdale’s founding, however, the thriving village of Fullersburg (and before that Brush Hill) had clustered around the present-day intersection of York Road and Ogden Avenue.

Thousands of years ago, glaciers covered what is now Chicagoland.  The last glacier pushed up dirt, leaving moraines.  Water run-off from the receding glacier created rivers and creeks.  Salt Creek was one of them. 

Generations of  Potawatomi indigenous people lived in a village – Sauganakka -- alongside Salt Creek in present day Fullersburg Woods.  A nearby Native American trail connecting Lake Michigan and the Fox River evolved into the Southwest Trail (largely present-day Ogden Avenue west of Lyons).   Early settlers’ wagons traversed the Southwest Trail in the early 1830s as emigrants travelled west to establish homesteads.

Indigenous North American people and European Americans contested the right to occupy Northern Illinois early in the 19th century, culminating in the Black Hawk War, following which the Potawatomi surrendered their lands east of the Mississippi River—including the village of Sauganakka-- opening up the territory for white settlement. U.S. Army soldiers marching west on the Southwest Trail encountered a hill – the first hill since they’d left Fort Dearborn on the Lake Michigan shore – covered with hazelnut bushes.  The soldiers informally named it Brush Hill.  The name stuck.

.  In 1833, Orente and David Grant, recognizing the value of the site, near to the waters of Salt Creek and alongside the major roadway leading west from Chicago, filed a homestead claim.  Stagecoach service along the trail was inaugurated in 1834, and the Grant brothers established a tavern, which they named the Castle Inn, to serve stagecoach passengers and other travelers.   Stage coach service was established in 1834, and lasted until the opening of the nearby railroad in the 1860s.

Castle Inn as it appeared in the 1930s

Lieutenant Sherman King was reportedly dispatched to the vicinity by the army to observe activity at the nearby Potawatomi village and took a liking to the area. In 1837, King settled there and teamed up with Nicholas Torode to establish a sawmill alongside Salt Creek, within shouting distance of the Grant brothers’ tavern.   The sawmill provided cut lumber for construction of homes and businesses in the vicinity.   The Torode mill burned in 1848, but four years later Frederick Graue, one of the Torode employees, opened a gristmill on the site.  The Graue Mill is still standing, and serves an historical interpretive site.

Brush Hill in 1851 - 15 years before Hinsdale was founded

In 1848, a plank road – a road paved with wood planks – opened from Chicago’s West Side, and ultimately extended out to the Fox River, seemingly establishing the village as a major place along the well-travelled Southwest Trail.

Fullersburg Plat

During the 1830s, Benjamin Fuller and family arrived at Brush Hill.  Fuller bought the Grant brothers’ land – 800 acres, and took over operation of the Castle Inn along the Southwest Trail.  Fuller acquired most of the land in Brush Hill, and in 1851 filed a plat (legal document establishing streets and lots) for the village of Fullersburg.   In 1843, Fuller established a “grocery” (in those days primarily meaning a liquor store) on present day York Road north of the village.   That business continues in operation to the present, in the form of the York Tavern – the oldest tavern in DuPage County.

The little village grew and prospered.  By the mid-1850s, the village hosted 15-20 houses, three taverns, two hotels, a general store (Fox’s store being among them), a blacksmith shop, two shoemakers, a physician, a lawyer, a post office, a church, a school and a cemetery. The town was a significant stop on the Southwest Trail leading west from Chicago.  Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, among others, stopped for the night at Fullersburg.  Abraham Lincoln is reported to have delivered a speech from a hotel porch while on his way west from Chicago to Ottawa in 1858.   Later in the decade a slaughter house and meat market were opened.   In the late 1850s, the expectation of a still-brighter future was created with the expected opening of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy railroad through the vicinity.

Benjamin Fuller, in cooperation with civic leaders from Lyons, Downer’s Grove, and Naperville, petitioned the railroad to locate its proposed route between Aurora and Chicago through the four communities.

Fullersburg’s hopes were dashed, however, when the railroad surveyed a more level and direct route that passed one mile to the south of the village.   The railroad opened in 1864, and in 1866, real-estate developer William Robbins, platted the new village of Hinsdale along the train line.

The 1848 plank road deteriorated, returning the Southwest Trail to a sea of mud.  One by one, Fullersburg businesses relocated to Hinsdale or elsewhere along the new railroad.  No longer along the busy corridor of commerce, the village faded into obscurity.   Even the post office closed early in the 20th century.   

The coming of automobiles and the 1922 paving of Ogden Avenue (the new name for the Southwest Trail and Plank Road) began a revival of the settlement, but too late for it to retain its independence.  On April 10, 1923, Fullersburg residents voted by a margin of 247 to 16 to annex to nearby Hinsdale. 

As the newly paved Ogden Avenue grew in importance, businesses returned to the Fullersburg village.  In 1946, Lloyd “Bob” Fuller, a descendent of the Fullers who settled in the community in the 1830s, opened a service station and car wash at York Road and Ogden Avenue.  That business has expanded to include fifteen full-service car washes in Chicago’s western suburbs, perpetuating the Fuller family name.

Nearly two centuries have passed since the first homesteaders and soldiers walked and hoisted wagons up the hazelnut brush covered hill, eighteen miles west of Chicago. Only two landmarks that remain from those early years are the historic Graue Mill and the York Tavern.

Traffic rushes by the intersection of York Road and Ogden Avenue, but few travelers know that the intersection was once the center of Brush Hill and then Fullersburg, and that Hinsdale existed for more than three decades before it was Hinsdale as we know it today.