| La Grange, a
suburb of Chicago, is a village in Cook County, in the
U.S. state of Illinois. The population was 15,608 at
the 2000 census. The name La Grange is French for "the
barn."
The area around La Grange was
first settled in the 1830s, when Chicago residents,
already fed up with the rapid population increase in
that city in the decade since its incorporation, moved
out to the west. The first settler, Robert Leitch, came
to what is now La Grange in 1830, a full seven years
before the city of Chicago was incorporated in March
1837.
La Grange's location, at approximately
thirteen miles from Chicago's Loop, is not considered
far at all from the city by today's standards, but in
that time the residents enjoyed the peace of rural life
without much communication with urban residents.
Incorporated on June 11, 1879,
the Village of La Grange was the dream of Franklin Dwight
Cossitt, born in Granby, Connecticut and raised in Tennessee,
who moved to Chicago in 1862 and built a successful
wholesale grocery business. In 1870, Cossitt purchased
several hundred acres of farmland in Lyons Township,
along the Chicago-Dixon Road, known today as Ogden Avenue
(U.S. Highway 34).
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