| Throughout most of the first half of the 1900s,
Buffalo Grove served as a primary dairy producer for the Chicago
area. The Weidner and Raupp families, along with other German Catholics,
farmed in the region surrounding Saint Mary's Roman Catholic Church,
just across the county line from the original development plat.
Buffalo Grove was incorporated as a village on March 7, 1958, with
a population of 164.[6] Buffalo Grove slowly began to build homes
and businesses.
In the 1950s, Al Frank, a developer, built hundreds of homes along
Buffalo Grove Road, west along Bernard Drive as far as the current
Park District headquarters, formerly Louisa May Alcott School. By
1961, houses west of Buffalo Creek and the school were added as
far west as Greenwood Courts North and South, north through neighborhoods
including Cherrywood and Cottonwood Roads and south through White
Pine Road. These earliest homes, in the Cook County section of the
village, are sometimes referred to as "Old Buffalo Grove".
Older housing stock is often surrounded by larger, newer houses,
apartments and condominiums due to pockets of formerly undeveloped
farmland being surrounded by housing. Over time, these so-called
"holdout parcels" were sold and developed. |
