Long Grove is
an affluent village located in Lake County, Illinois,
approximately 35 miles (56 km) northwest of Chicago.
As of the 2005 census, the village had a total population
of 7,633. The village has strict building ordinances
to preserve its "country atmosphere." There
are no sidewalks, street lights or curbs throughout
the village's many communities.
Before 1840, a Yankee, John Gridley,
settled at a minor trail crossing deep in Long Grove,
a large grove of oaks standing in bluestem prairie along
the southern boundary of Lake County.
German immigrants to the area
in the mid-1840s discovered that the open prairie had
already been claimed and made their claims deep within
the grove. A post office established in 1847 under the
name Muttersholz (Mother's Woods) highlights the area's
strong German influence. By the early 1850s, immigrant
families who had split from the Roman Catholic parish
at Buffalo Grove founded their own St. Mary's parish
at Muttersholz. An Evangelical Lutheran congregation
formed at the same time. Most families had their origins
in the Rhineland and spoke in a Plattdeutsch dialect
until hostility to German culture during World War I
lead residents to make greater use of English. Muttersholz
became Long Grove once again. The cultural isolation
of the small community deepened as the area's major
roads, Routes 53 and 83, bypassed the still rural community..
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