Carpentersville's 1837 Flood Layover That Became a Town
Carpentersville traces to 1837, when Julius Angelo Carpenter's family camped on the east bank of the Fox River to wait out spring floods during an oxcart journey toward the Rock River, and ended up staying to found what was first called Carpenters' Grove. Carpenter -- who built the settlement's first store, bridge, and factory and later served two terms in the Illinois House of Representatives -- saw the name made official as Carpentersville in 1851, but the town grew more slowly than its Fox River neighbors for its first half-century because it lacked direct rail access to Chicago.
How the 1896 Interurban Changed Its Building Pace
That changed only in 1896, when the Carpentersville, Elgin and Aurora Railway brought electric interurban rail four miles to the Illinois Iron and Bolt foundry on Main Street, and most of the town's earlier building growth followed from that point rather than from the 1837-1851 founding era. A Carpentersville window-replacement project should treat the small original founding-era core differently from the larger stock of early-1900s interurban-era construction that followed it, since the two were built roughly sixty years apart under different lumber and framing standards.