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When Silas, Harvey and Lyman Meacham claimed
this area in 1833, they came seeking a place to settle and raise
their families. The brothers, and those who followed them, formed
an agricultural community that eventually thrived as a result of
its strategic location on a major thoroughfare, the Chicago-Galena
Highway, now Lake Street.
By 1837 a Bloomingdale Post Office was
established, and the village became the third town to be platted
in DuPage County. The village's first permanent building, a
Baptist church, was built in 1849. Now the Bloomingdale Park
District Museum is housed there. Retailing was already important
in Bloomingdale by the time the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul
Railroad came through the northern part of Bloomingdale Township
in 1873. There were two boot and shoemakers, two carpenters, a
wagon maker/blacksmith, and a cheese factory. The men's clothier
and tailor shop started by Francis X. Neltnor still stands near
Lake Street and Bloomingdale Road, in the area of restored shops
kept as Old Town Bloomingdale.
The village of Roselle was platted along the
railroad right-of-way in 1875; the first separation of the
neighboring towns. In the early 1900s Bloomingdale and Roselle
shared library books, and a fire engine, alternating their
locations every six months. On June 16, 1923, the new village of
Bloomingdale, split off from Roselle, was incorporated.
Bloomingdale remained a small farming community
until the post World War II growth of the 1950s, when the
population almost quadrupled from 339 residents in 1950 to 1262 in
1960.
With a population of 19,992 in 1993,
Bloomingdale boasts a country-like environment integrated with
commercial, office and retail development. As an end result, the
community provides a wide variety of living, working, shopping and
recreational opportunities built around a carefully preserved
heritage. |
