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Business View Magazine
The Village of Carol Stream
A great place to live and work
Carol Stream is a village in DuPage County, Illinois,
approximately 35 miles west of Chicago. It was incor-
porated in 1959, and although there are a few small
waterways that run through the town, there is, in fact,
no stream named Carol, there. Carol is actually the
name of the daughter of the community’s founder, Jay
Stream, and the village was named after her.
Jay Stream was a businessman who ran a local con-
struction company. The story goes that at one time he
became frustrated with the red tape involved while at-
tempting to negotiate a planned subdivision in nearby
Naperville and when a town clerk told him to “build
your own town,” he decided to do just that. In 1957, he
began buying up farmland outside Wheaton.
Jay Stream’s vision for Carol Stream included a com-
munity comprised of residential homes in the western
part of town and light industrial businesses in the east.
Today, Stream’s ideal village is home to approximately
41,000 residents and 900 businesses, including sev-
eral Fortune 500 companies, such as Mercedes Benz
of North America, Office Depot, UPS, Frito-Lay, and ITW-
Trans-Tech, among others. Thousands of Carol Stream
