The small village of Wasco, Illinois, located in the heart of Kane County, has a fascinating and rich history which until now has never been published. This thoroughly-researched volume, at over 460-pages in length, offers more than one hundred never-before-published images gathered from both private and public records, in addition to a decade-by-decade history of the village, starting with its initial settlement in the 1880s, and continuing forward through the present decade. More than a thousand issues of local newspapers dating between 1885 and 2018 (such as the St. Charles Chronicle, Elburn Herald, Elgin Advocate, Geneva Republican, Kane County Chronicle, and more) were carefully read by the author in order to compile this work, which covers every early family known in Wasco, as well as every historic structure, both past and present, in the village.
Brief histories of dozens of businesses spanning Wasco's past and present are included here, including the Bergland/Hummel Lumberyard and store, Erickson's blacksmith shop, King's Mill, the Wasco Blacksmith Shop, Mather's store and service station, the Wanzer Dairy, the Wasco Inn, the Wasco Garage, The Farm Restaurant, White Brothers Trucking, Country Gas, the Wasco Nursery, and more. Daily life in the village has not been neglected, and several interviews with long-time Wasco residents has helped paint an accurate and compelling picture of how the region has changed over the past eighty or more years. Sports in Wasco (particularly baseball and softball) are covered in this work, and there is extensive material related to both the Wasco Baptist Church and Wasco School. Hundreds of deeds and several family archives were also used in the compilation of this book, which should prove to be of interest to anyone with a link to Campton Township, Campton Hills, Kane County, or early "railroad towns."
Major social organizations important to Wasco's past and present are covered in this publication as well. Some of the most influential and interesting of these include the Wasco Ladies Aid, the Pure Milk Association (Wasco local), the Wasco American Legion, the Wasco Glad Game Club, the Wasco Home Bureau, the Pollyanna Club, the Christian Endeavor Society, Modern Woodmen of America, the Wasco Mothers' Club, the Shrinking Matrons, and the U-Go-I-Go Club. A full surname index, bibliography, and complete table of contents offers researchers an aide to finding information about their Wasco friends relatives.
Some of the families covered in this work include: the Austin family, the Edward Swanson family, the Bergland family, the Gustaf Swanson family, the John Swanson family, the Higgins family, the Hawkins family, the Peterson family, the Charles Anderson family, the Bell family, the Rice family, the Whitney family, the Leonard White family, the Millen family, the Bert Brown family, the Waterhouse family, the Carpenter family, the Fischer family, the Isaac Johnson family, the George Brown family, the Stevens family, the Mather family, the Erickson family, the Denker family, the Bowgren family, the Ekstrom family, the Jay family, the Langrill family, the Vanderhoof family, the Lathrop family, the Hagaman family, the Anderson/Barber family, the Chrystal family, the Harold Anderson family, the Ross family, the Theodore Johnson family, and the two Olson families.
Adam D. Gibbons is a native of Erie County, New York, and has been a genealogist for more than thirty years. He is a graduate of Northwestern University (Bachelor of Arts, History) and Wake Forest University (Master of Arts, History), and is currently [2018] the Board President of Preservation Partners of the Fox Valley. Adam is a former fact-checker and researcher for McDougal Littell, an educational publisher, and is a former Princeton Review tutor. He is a local historian, an author, and a private tutor (ACT, SAT, GRE, math, English, reading, and history) based in Geneva, Kane County, Illinois.
