| Mount Prospect,
part of Elk Grove Township and Wheeling Township, is
a village in Cook County, Illinois about 22 miles northwest
of downtown Chicago. Mount Prospect was incorporated
as a village in 1917. As of the 2000 census, the village
had a total population of 56,265. BusinessWeek named
it The Best Place to Raise Your Kids in 2009.
Cook County, 20 miles NW of the
Loop. Yankee farmers established homesteads in what
became the heart of downtown Mount Prospect after signing
a Potawatomi treaty in 1833. New Englanders cleared
and farmed the land until 1843. Many of these settlers,
however, moved west for larger claims, and were replaced
by German immigrants, who planted the roots of a small
rural community. By 1854, the Illinois & Wisconsin
Railroad (later renamed the Chicago & North Western)
ran through Mount Prospect, but it did not stop there
until 1886.
As a result, the remaining Yankee
families who wanted access to broader markets moved
to the neighboring railroad towns of Arlington Heights
and Des Plaines.
Meanwhile more German and Irish
immigrant families bought up the available homesteads.
In 1871, real-estate agent Ezra Carpenter Eggleston
built a four-block residential subdivision on farmland
south of the railroad. Eggleston named the area Mount
Prospect because the village sat on the highest point
in Cook County.
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