Dietrich and Lena Friedrichs married in 1905 and a year later moved into a new two-story, white frame house on the corner of what are now Busse and Maple streets in Mount Prospect. It was only the thirteenth house built in the town, but the community already had an interesting history, says Mount Prospect Historical Society director Gavin Kleespies. Standing in their lace-curtained parlor almost a century later, Kleespies explains that the Friedrichses were transitional figures in that history–one foot planted in the community’s insular, Germanic past, the other stepping into its future.
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Germanic? Totally, says Kleespies. At one time Mount Prospect was an entirely German, and German-speaking, community. But that was already a third wave: before the Germans there were Yankees, and before the Yankees there were Native Americans. The first white settlers didn’t show up till the treaty of 1833 forced the Potawatomi out of the area, making it safe for loner farming families–land-hungry log-cabin Yankees who’d been crowded out of New England. These intense individualists, inspired by the do-it-yourself Christianity of the Second Great Awakening, were besotted with the ideal of freedom represented by the Wild West, which at the time extended all the way to Fort Dearborn. They built farms one at a time, dots on the landscape, not communities.
Enter Ezra Eggleston. A Chicago businessman burned out by the Great Fire, Eggleston bought ten square blocks in what is now downtown Mount Prospect and built a railroad station, reasoning that if he had a station the train would stop. He named the town (Mount because it’s on a glacial ridge, Prospect because of his hopes for it), laid out streets, and tried to sell lots, just as the financial panic of 1873 made its way to the midwest. He wound up in bankruptcy. After that, the train stopped only if someone flagged it down and the area grew at its own pace. In 1917, when the population was 299 with one pregnant woman, the whole town awaited the birth that gave it the 300 residents necessary for incorporation. It wasn’t until the years after World War II, when development skyrocketed, that Mount Prospect took on the suburban character it has now.
