WCG-052418

the history of wilmette
The village is named for Archange Ouilmette, a woman of French
and Potawatomi heritage. With her husband, Antoine, she and
her family moved north from the first settlement in Chicago
to take up residence in a cabin by Lake Michigan on 1280 acres that
were granted to her under the Treaty of Prairie du Chien of 1829.
Long after the Ouilmettes had left for Iowa to join their Potawatomie
kin in 1838, the area remained sparsely settled, save for a few hardy
pioneers near the lake and the first families who had begun to farm
the area west of the ridge along which Ridge Road runs today. From
these early settlements sprang two very different communities: the
Village of Wilmette, incorporated in 1872, and the Village of Gross
Point, incorporated in 1874. The first was founded by mostly Anglo-
Protestant settlers from the East who hoped to develop the village
as a commuter suburb, while the second, to the west of Ridge Road,
was comprised of mostly Roman Catholic, German-speaking farmers,
craftsmen, and shop-owners. Their histories formally merged in the 1920s when Gross Point was annexed by Wilmette, but each of the
two areas has long retained a distinctive character.
As you explore Wilmette, you will find many places whose colorful and intriguing histories are intertwined with the larger history of the
village itself: the 1873 depot, rescued and moved in the early 1970s and now a restaurant; Roemer Park, the local Little League’s 1950s
ballpark; the amazing Baha’i Temple, which took decades to build; Wilmette Harbor and Gillson Park, both by-products of a remarkable
engineering project undertaken over 100 years ago; Plaza del Lago, in what was once the controversial area known as No Man’s Land; the
brick streets of Wilmette, laid down around 1900 and restored during the Great Depression. The details of all of these histories, and of a
great many others, can be found and explored at the Wilmette Historical Museum, which is itself in a storied place, the former Gross Point
Village Hall, 609 Ridge Road.
the history of wilmette
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