Hampshire's Relocated 1876 Village and Its Rural Building Stock
Hampshire Township was organized in 1845, decades before the village itself existed -- "Hampshire Center" wasn't platted until October 1874, by A.J. Willing and C.A. Fasseth, and the settlement then relocated in 1876 to sit directly along the Chicago-Pacific Railroad line. The village incorporated that October by a 73-2 vote with Samuel Rowell as its first village president, and by 1893 the surrounding farm community had grown into the second-largest milk-shipping station in Illinois.
From a Township Founded in 1845 to a Milk-Shipping Center
Because Hampshire developed later and stayed more rural than the Fox River mill towns closer to Elgin, its housing stock leans toward farmhouse and early-20th-century rural construction built around the 1874–1893 milk-shipping boom rather than the dense Victorian-era rowhouses found in Elgin's own historic districts. A Hampshire window-replacement project is more likely to involve older farmhouse-style openings and additions built over time than a single, uniform historic-district sash pattern.