Why is there a cemetery on Downers Grove’s Main Street, right smack in the middle of the commercial district? The story, oddly enough, begins with the erection of a lighthouse. A lighthouse in land-locked Downers Grove? No, a lighthouse at the mouth of the Chicago River.
When the decision was made that the north end of the then proposed Illinois & Michigan Canal would be at the mouth of the Chicago
River, it presupposed that the river mouth would be a harbor, with a commensurate need for navigational assistance for arriving ship captains. In 1831, the U.S. Congress appropriated $5,000 for the desired lighthouse, with construction to begin at once.
Stephen Downer, a restless twenty-something young man living near Watertown, New York, moved west to the newly established settlement at Chicago to work as a stonemason on the new lighthouse. Downer took note of the rich prairie lands west of Chicago, that could be claimed and bought at a modest price, namely $1.25 per acre. Stephen wrote to his father, Pierce Downer, back in Watertown of the opportunity.
Other reports filtering back to Watertown were equally rhapsodic. Morris Birkbeck wrote "the location was ideal, with its abundant supply of lumber for fences and buildings, was surrounded by fertile prairie as far as the eye could see. Nothing but fencing and providing water for stock is wanted to reduce a prairie into the condition of useful grass land; and from that state...the transition to arable is through a simple process, easy to perform and profitable as it goes on.” George Flowers wrote "A beautiful prairie opened to our view. All of its distinctive features were revealed, lying in profound repose under the warm light of an afternoon's summer sun. Its indented and irregular outline of wood; its varied surface interspersed with clumps of oaks of centuries' growth; its tall grass, with seed stalks from six to ten feet high, like tall and slender reeds waving in a gentle breeze; the whole resenting a magnificence of park-scenery, complete from the hand of nature."
Pierce Downer came out to see for himself. Arriving in Chicago in May 1832, Downer started west on horseback along the primitive Southwest Trail (present day Ogden Avenue), and found the mostly treeless prairie punctuated by groves of oak, hickory and maple trees. Thirty miles west of Lake Michigan, Downer paused for the night in one such grove, at a junction of Indian trails. Finding the grove setting very much to his liking, Downer returned to Chicago and filed a claim for 160 acres at that grove.
Downer built a log cabin at the site and was joined by his family a year or so later. Other settlers claimed land in the vicinity. Israel Blodgett, who had first homesteaded along the bank of the DuPage River in present day Lisle, bought out a claim in Downer’s Grove as the place had come to be known. In 1836, Samuel Curtiss took over some of Israel Blodgett’s claim. Businesses appeared. Blodgett opened a blacksmith shop. Curtiss opened a tavern and stable. By 1836 Downer’s Grove and its environs had four taverns. In 1845, Henry Carpenter opened a general store. The nucleus of Downer’s Grove was forming.
Blodgett and Curtiss, both having opened businesses dependent on passing wagon traffic, sought to improve the roadway that passed through the Downer’s Grove settlement. In 1838, they hitched six-yoke of oxen to the felled trunk of a large tree and dragged in back-and-forth along the roadway to even out its rutted surface. They planted sugar maple trees along the roadway edges. The presence of those trees gave the roadway its present-day name, Maple Avenue.
In 1839, Reverend Orange Lyman, built a frame, Greek-Revival style house on Maple Avenue, and in subsequent years, Downer, Blodgett, Curtiss, and other pioneering settlers replaced their log cabins with frame houses. Thus the first era of “tear downs” began.
The community grew. The 1850s brought schools, churches, and more businesses. Downer’s Grove’s commercial activity at that time clustered around the intersection of Maple Avenue and Union Street (present day Main Street). In 1856, Samuel Curtiss donated part of his sheep pasture for the cemetery along Union Street, north of the commercial center. The cemetery became the resting place for nearly 100 members of Downers Grove’s early families, including Israel Blackburn, a black freedman.
Ironically, Pierce Downer and his wife Lucy, were not interred in the Main Street Cemetery. The couple died one day apart in March, 1863. There had been heavy rains early that spring, and flooding of St. Joseph’s Creek impeded access from the Downer homestead, one-and-one half miles northwest of the Main Street burial ground. Pierce and Lucy Downer, as a consequence, were buried in a tiny plot along present day Linscott Avenue. The Downer burial site is even more improbably situated than the Main Street site. It is accessible to the public, but only by walking up a pathway in the midst of a residential neighborhood.
The CB&Q Railroad opened its train line past the Downer’s Grove settlement in May, 1864, transforming the community from a frontier outpost to a waystation on a major transportation artery. Population had grown to 350 in the early 1870s, when Downer’s Grove (with an apostrophe in the name) was incorporated as Downers Grove (without an apostrophe). Pierce Downer’s descendants occupied the family homestead and dairy farm until 1924, when the remaining 83 acres were sold to a developer. Downers Grove has blossomed into a major Chicagoland suburb. The village of Downers Grove boasts a population exceeding 50,000 on fourteen square miles of land.
The Chicago harbor lighthouse that had attracted Stephen Downer to the Midwest was replaced in 1857. And the cemetery? The last interment took place in 1939, when Emma Foster Miller was laid to rest in Samuel Curtiss' former sheep pasture. The cemetery continues as a restful setting in the midst of Downers Grove’s bustling commercial center.
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