Interior Painting in Oswego, IL

In 1833, William Smith Wilson, his wife Rebecca, and his brother-in-law Daniel Pearce moved to the area now known as Oswego. The land belonged to the local Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa tribes, but the United States government removed the Native Americans when the government started surveying the land along the Fox River in Kendall County. In 1842, the federal government placed the land for sale at an established price of $1.25 an acre.

After the sale of the land, Lewis Brinsmaid Judson and Levi F. Arnold from New York laid out the village and named it “Hudson”. However, when a post office was established, its location was given as “Lodi”. Confusion over the official name of the area led to a decision in January 1837, when the citizens gathered and voted “Oswego” as the permanent name of the village by a single vote. The village was named after Oswego, New York, “Oswego” being an Iroquois word meaning “mouth of the stream”. The ford across the Fox River in the town allowed Oswego to grow economically and as a town, eventually incorporated in 1852 with its village boundaries at the time being Harrison Street to the northwest, Jefferson Street to the northeast, Monroe Street to the southeast, and Benton Street to the southwest. At the advent of the automobile, Oswego continued to see growth as it became a hub for three different state highways (Illinois Route 25, Illinois Route 71, and Illinois Route 31).

Major community developments began when Caterpillar Inc. and Western Electric built industrial plants near Oswego in the mid-1950s. This initially allowed nearby Boulder Hill to develop. The next major development arrived in the mid-1980s during the suburban homebuilding boom, which allowed houses and buildings to populate the village. The rapid growth of the village allowed its limits to expand west of the Fox River into today’s boundaries.