New Lenox, Illinois

This pretty little village is situated on the banks of Hickory Creek, and on the Rock Island & Pacific Railroad, thirty-three miles from Chicago, and about six miles from Joliet. It is surrounded by a beautiful grove of timber, and grand old forest-trees shade it in Summer and protect it against the storms of Winter. The village of New Lenox was laid out in 1858 by George Gaylord, of Lockport, and surveyed by A. J. Mathewson, County Surveyor. The village is known on the original plat by the name of Tracy, and was given in honor of the General Superintendent of the railroad at the time of the layingout of the village. But with a modesty rarely met with in tne present day, he shrank from such notoriety, and at his urgent request, the name was changed to New Lenox, to correspond with the name of the township. A man of the name of Robinson built the first residence in the village, and Van Horne put up the next one. Both of these were built before .the village was laid out.

Passage source: History of Will County Illinois, published 1878.

The village of Spencer is situated on the cut-off division of the Michigan Central Railroad, about nine miles from Joliet, and is two miles from New Lenox village. It was surveyed by A. J. Mathewson, County Surveyor, for Frank Goodspeed and Albert Mudge, who owned the land on which it is loca- ted. It was laid out in 1856, about the time the railroad was built through this section. The first storehouse erected in the place was the one occupied by Russell Kennedy in 1856, the same year the village was laid out. The post office was established in 1857, and James Holmes was appointed Postmaster, an office he still holds. The first grain elevator was built in 1857 by the railroad company, and, on its completion, was dedicated by a rousing ball, in which the boys and girls of the surrounding country participated to their entire satisfaction. In 1875, H. S. Carpenter built another large elevator, and this, likewise, was similarly dedicated. Indeed, this seems to be the usual mode of opening elevators in this section of the country. It is now operated by W. M. Dudley, who, also, has the other elevator rented, in order to keep other parties out of the business at this point. He handles annually something like 800 carloads of grain - principally corn and oats. The general business of Spencer is two stores, by N. P. Holmes and Knapp Brothers; one saloon, a post office, a blacksmith-shop, a shoe-shop, two grain elevators and one grain dealer. There is neither a church or schoolhouse within the limits of the village. A considable amount of business is transacted in this little and apparently unimportant village - far more than a stranger would imagine at first sight; but it is in the midst of a rich and fertile region, and immense quantities of grain and stock are annually shipped from this little station.

Passage source: History of Will County Illinois, published 1878.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

Read the whole chapter on New Lenox Township.