History of Northfield

Northfield was a remote swamp when settlers first arrived in the 1850s to farm. Northfielders were often called the "river folks" by the residents of Winnetka and Wilmette because of their struggles to get to church or the beach in their wagons, crossing the Skokie Lagoons and the Middlefork of the north branch of the Chicago River. Early pioneer families included the Brachtendorf family (for whom Bracken Lane is named), who arrived in 1857 and whose family home still stands at 2264 Willow Road; Dennis Donovan, who lived just east of the Bachtendorfs, arriving with this family in a coal wagon in 1855; Charles Metz, who came in 1861, settling where Somerset Lane is today, land his family farmed through the 1950s; and John Happ (for whom Happ Road is named), a blacksmith who came with his nine sons and daughter in the late 1850s after the arrival of the railroad in shop and move to Northfield to farm. Happ's grandson John became Northfield's first village president in 1926.

During the last half of the nineteenth century, farm products included hay and grain, packing straw from the Skokie Swamps, mushrooms and horseradish.

In the early 1920s the community changed dramatically when Samuel Insull, a powerful Chicago entrepreneur who headed the electric firm later to be named Commonwealth Edison, built the Skokie Valley Line of the North Shore Railway. He held a contest to name the Village, which was incorporated in 1926, choosing the name Wau-Bun (an Indian word meaning "Dawn" which was also the name of a Wisconsin Indian Chief who camped in the area as part of the Potawatomi tribe in the late 1700s). Locals always disliked the name and in 1927, Wau Bun was formally dropped in favor of Northfield, referring to the community's location from Chicago.