The Village of Lemont, Illinois

THE VILLAGE OF LEMONT, IL T he Village of Lemont, a suburb located some 28 miles southwest of Chicago in Cook, DuPage, and Will Counties, is one of the oldest American communities in northeastern Illinois. Lemont’s first settlers arrived in 1833, when the town, then called Athens, began its development along the site of the Illinois & Michigan (I&M) Canal. The canal, begun in 1836 and completed in 1848, provided a continuous waterway stretching from New York, via the Erie Canal, Lake Erie, Lake Huron, and Lake Michigan, to Chicago, then through the I&M Canal for 97 miles, entering the Illinois River at LaSalle, Illinois, to the Mississippi River, to New Orleans, and finally to the Gulf of Mexico. Almost all the early town pioneers came to work on the canal, either as contract holders or laborers. The contractors were mostly from New England or the Ohio border towns; the unskilled laborers were the newly immigrated Irish, German, Scandinavians, and French and English Canadians. The canal workers settled along the corridor of the canal, and the farms and communities that sprang up nearby helped transform the northern region of the state from a sparsely settled frontier to a commercial, agricultural, and industrial region that supplied Chicago MADE OF MARBLE