CHICAGO HEIGHTS

city, southern suburb of Chicago, Cook county, northeastern Illinois, U.S. The elevation averages 95 ft (29 m) above the surrounding area, hence the name. The site was the intersection of the Hubbard Trail (from Vincennes, Ind., to Ft. Dearborn on the Chicago River) and the Sauk Trail (used by Indians going from their hunting grounds to the fur post at Detroit). Settled by Scots-Irish in the 1830s and known as Thorn Grove, it was renamed Bloom in 1849 by German immigrants to honour Robert Blum, a German patriot executed in 1848 in Vienna. It was given its present name at its incorporation in 1901, after the Chicago Heights Land Association had induced manufacturers to establish factories there. It was the earliest, and, for a time, the most important of the steel-making communities in the Chicago area. The city's manufactures are now highly diversified; in addition to steel, they include automobile-body stampings, chemicals, alloys, asphalt roofing, tile flooring, and paints. Prairie State College was established at Chicago Heights in 1957. Pop. (1990) 33,072. History Settlement and early activity In 1673 the French explorers Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette followed an Indian portage to the mudflats over which a Y-shaped river flowed. It emptied into Lake Michigan, while its arms reached nearly to the drainage basin of the Mississippi River system, thus virtually linking two great North American waterways. The meaning of the Indian name for the region remains disputed-among the possibilities are skunk, wild onion, or powerful. Trappers, traders, and adventurers used the area for portage and barter throughout the 18th century. The first known non-Indian settler was Jean Baptiste Point Sable (or Pointe du Sable), son of a wealthy French merchant who had moved to Haiti and married a black woman there. Sable settled in the Great Lakes area in the 1770s. In 1795 the United States obtained a six-mile-square area about the river mouth. Ft. Dearborn, built in 1803, was destroyed in 1812 and all but one of its military and civilian population were killed in an Indian raid. The fort was rebuilt in 1816 and was occupied until the 1830s. Outside its walls a cluster of traders' shacks and log cabins were built, but the settlement attracted little interest even after Illinois, with most of its population in the central and southern regions, became a state in 1818. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, joining the Atlantic states and the Great Lakes, shifted the main axis of westward movement northward from the Ohio River route. Soon afterward, Chicago became the principal western terminus. The county of Cook located its seat at the small community, and the regional federal land office opened there. Numerous retail stores opened to outfit newcomers to the West, and the volume of animal pelts and products for Eastern markets increased. In 1837, the year Chicago became incorporated as a city, its population was about 4,200. Chicago's geographic potentiality as a water gateway was fulfilled by completion in 1848 of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, linking the Great Lakes and Mississippi systems. A pair of railroad lines from the East tied into Chicago in 1852, and by 1856 it had become the nation's chief rail centre. A belt line connected the radiating trunk lines by 1856, and commuter service to outlying neighbourhoods and suburbs began. Growth and development Explosive economic growth Industry followed the rails. By the late 1850s lake vessels carried iron ore from the Upper Michigan ranges to the blast furnaces of Chicago. Chicago became the nation's major lumber-distributing centre by the 1880s. The railroads brought farm produce from west and south, and Chicago's Board of Trade became the nerve centre of the commodities market. The railroads also hauled cattle, hogs, and sheep to Chicago for slaughtering and packing. The consolidated Union Stock Yards, largely bankrolled by nine railroads and the owners of several other Chicago stockyards, opened on Christmas Day 1865. Chicago emerged as the major city of the Midwest. Its 1880 census reported more than 500,000 inhabitants, a 17-fold increase over 1850; by 1870 it had exceeded St. Louis, Mo., in population. It was the site of the 1860 Republican National Convention at which Illinoisan Abraham Lincoln won the presidential nomination. Both Americans and northern European immigrants, drawn by Chicago's factories and carried by the rail network that was anchored in Chicago, continued to pour into the city. Four square miles of Chicago, including the business district, were destroyed by fire on October 8-10, 1871. Starting in the southwest, fed by wooden buildings and pavements and favoured by a long dry spell, flames spread northeastward, leaping the Chicago River and dying out only when they reached Lake Michigan. About 250 lives were lost, some 90,000 people were made homeless, and almost $200,000,000 in property was destroyed.