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Libertyville is a suburb of Chicago in Lake County, Illinois, United States. The population was 20,742 at the 2000 census, and estimated to be 21,760 as of 2005. (There is also a township of Libertyville, which includes the village and some surrounding areas.) Located in northeastern Illinois to the southwest of Waukegan and the northwest of Lake Forest, its immediate neighbors are Mundelein to the west and Vernon Hills to the south.

Geography

Libertyville is located at 42°17′3″N, 87°57′38″W (42.284222, -87.960673)^GR1.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the village has a total area of 23.5 km˛ (9.1 mi˛). 22.7 km˛ (8.8 mi˛) of it is land and 0.8 km˛ (0.3 mi˛) of it is water. The total area of Libertyville is 3.20% water.

The Des Plaines River forms much of the eastern boundary of the village. Other bodies of water include Lake Minear, Butler Lake and Liberty Lake--all man-made.

Libertyville's main street is Milwaukee Avenue. The main route to Chicago is Interstate 94; Chicago's Loop is approximately 45 miles away.

Demographics

As of the census^GR2 of 2000, there were 20,742 people, 7,298 households, and 5,451 families residing in the village. The population density was 913.2/km˛ (2,364.5/mi˛). There were 7,458 housing units at an average density of 328.3/km˛ (850.2/mi˛). The racial makeup of the village was 92% White, 5% Asian and 1% African American. 0.1% is Native American. About 1% each are classified as belonging to other races or to two or more races. 3% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.

While still largely homogenous compared to the country as a whole, Libertyville has become far more integrated than it once was; the 1960 census, for example, found a total of seven non-white residents, making the town 99.9% white. [1]

There were 7,298 households out of which 40% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 66% were married couples living together, 7% had a female householder with no husband present, and 25% were non-families. 22% of all households were made up of individuals and 8% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.7 and the average family size was 3.2.

28% of the village's population is under the age of 18, 5% from 18 to 24, 27% from 25 to 44, 28% from 45 to 64, and 12% 65 years of age or older. The median age is 39 years. For every 100 females there were 92.9 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 86.9 males.

The median income for a household in the village was $88,828, and the median income for a family was $103,573. Males had a median income of $72,320 versus $39,455 for females. The per capita income for the village was $40,426. About 1.9% of families and 3.5% of the population were below the poverty line, including 4.2% of those under age 18 and 4.9% of those age 65 or over.

History

The land that is now Libertyville was the property of the Illinois River Potawatomi Indians until August 1829, when economic and resource pressures forced the tribe to sell much of their land in northern Illinois to the U.S. government for $12,000 plus an additional $12,000 in goods, plus an annual delivery of 50 barrels of salt. [2]

The treaty forced the Potawatomi to leave their lands by the mid-1830s [3], and by 1835 the future Libertyville had its first recorded non-indigenous resident, one George Vardin. Said to be a "well-educated" English immigrant with a wife and a young daughter, Vardin lived in a cabin located where the Cook Park branch of the Cook Memorial Public Library District [4] stands today. Though he apparently moved on to the west that same year, the settlement that grew up around his cabin was initially known as Vardin's Grove. [5]

In 1836, during the celebrations that marked the 60th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the community voted to call itself Independence Grove. The next year the village got its first practicing physician, Dr. Jesse Foster, and its first lawyer, Horace Butler, after whom Butler Lake is named.[6] It also got a post office in that year, an event that forced another name change, because of an already existing Independence Grove elsewhere in the state. On April 16, 1837, the new post office (possibly located in Vardin's former cabin) was registered under the name Libertyville.

That was not the end of the town's shifting identities, however. When the Libertyville briefly became the county seat of Lake County in 1839, it changed its name to Burlington, only settling on its current name when the seat moved to Little Fort (now Waukegan, which is the Potawatomi word for "Little Fort").[7]

Libertyville's most prominent building, the Cook Mansion, was built in 1879 by Ansel Brainerd Cook, almost on the spot where Vardin's cabin had been built in the 1830s. Cook, a teacher and stone mason, became a prominent builder and politician in Chicago, providing flagstones for the city's sidewalks and taking part in the rebuilding after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The two-story Victorian mansion served as Cook's summer home as well as the center of his horse farm, which provided animals for Chicago's horsecar lines. The building was remodeled in 1921, when it became the town library, gaining a Colonial-style facade with a pillared portico. [8]

The community expanded rapidly with a spur of the Milwaukee Road train line (now a Metra commuter line) reaching Libertyville in 1881, resulting in the incorporation of the Village of Libertyville in 1882, with John Locke as first village president. [9]

Libertyville's downtown area was largely destroyed by fire in 1895, and the village board mandated brick to be used for reconstruction--resulting in a village center whose architecture is substantially unified by both period and building material. [10] The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which gave Libertyville a Great American Main Street Award, called the downtown "a place with its own sense of self, where people still stroll the streets on a Saturday night, and where the tailor, the hometown bakery, and the vacuum cleaner repair shop are shoulder to shoulder with gourmet coffee vendors and a microbrewery." [11]

Samuel Insull, founder of Commonwealth Edison, began purchasing land south of Libertyville in 1906. His eventually acquired 4,445 acres, a holding that he named Hawthorne-Mellody Farms. He also bought the Chicago & Milwaukee Electric line (later the Chicago, North Shore & Milwaukee), which had built a spur from Lake Bluff to Libertyville in 1903. When Insull was ruined by the Great Depression, parts of his estate were bought by prominent Chicagoans Adlai Stevenson and John F. Cuneo.[12]